The Spy and the Traitor: The Precariousness of Democracy

 

 

THE SPY AND THE TRAITOR: THE GREATEST ESPIONAGE STORY OF THE COLD WAR (2019)

By Ben Macintyre

Broadways Books, 312 pages+

★★★★

 

 

Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor made a splash when it first came out. It has been updated and is a must-read. It is a thrilling book, but not idle amusement. In telling the story of KGB double agent/defector Col. Oleg Gordievsky, Macintyre paints a portrait of dangerous brinksmanship during the Cold War.

 

Would that it were the case that there has been little threat of nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis. What has happened since 1962 is that threats receded from direct public scrutiny. Gordievsky is a big reason we’ve made it this far. He underwent an ideological crisis when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968. As a British MI6 asset from 1974-85, he revealed the structure of the KGB and passed on invaluable documents that allowed the West to stay a step ahead of Russia. MI6 took care never to reveal his identity to the CIA, which was a good thing as his analyses deflected American fools such as Brzezinski, Kissinger, and Kirkpatrick from convincing their masters that a nuclear war was “winnable.” I seldom credit Ronald Reagan with keen geopolitical insight, but kudos to him for keeping a truly dangerous man on a long leash: William Casey. It drove Casey crazy that MI6’s contact was a secret. Guess who he relied upon to unearth Gordievsky’s identity? None other than Aldrich Ames, the “traitor” of the book’s title. (Ames is now serving a life sentence in a maximum-security prison.) Gordievsky only survived because Ames hadn’t yet delivered incontrovertible proof that he was a mole. Beat-the-clock scenarios are common is spy novels, but Gordievsky had just hours to disappear. To put his danger in perspective, when Oleg Penkovsky was exposed–he the real-life subject of the film The Courier–the Soviets cremated him alive.  

 

Gordievsky was exceedingly lucky to make it out. In a sprint of great courage aided by KGB incompetence, low-level screwups, and a series of fortuitous flukes, Gordievsky’s British handlers accomplished what was thought to be impossible: a land exfiltration across the Finnish border and on to Norway. (If he had been discovered in Finland, he would have been turned over to Russia under a treaty foisted upon the Finns.) This section of Macintyre’s book is a heart-thumping read that’s better than any James Bond adventure because it actually happened and there wasn’t a bloody thing glamorous about it.

 

Oleg Gordievsky is a brave man who deserves to be hailed as a savior of millions of lives. It’s not liberal propaganda to view the CIA and certain corners of MI6 as just as thuggish and reckless as the KGB. We see a portrait of a boys-with-deadly-toys games played with acronyms (SUNBEAM, PIMLICO, NOCTON, OVATION, TICKLE), egoism, fanaticism, and disregard of potential fallout. It certainly cost Gordievsky a lot: two marriages, access to his family, alienation from his daughters, an in-absentia death sentence, the animus of Britain’s Labour Party, and a near assassination. (In 2007, he was poisoned, survived, and now lives in an undisclosed location in the UK under an assumed identity. He remains in great danger; he is on the radar screen of a former low-level KGB agent: Vladimir Putin.

 

It is comfortable to sermonize that socialism is inherently bankrupt. It’s more accurate to say that within Russia, it was betrayed by Stalin and the grey apparatchiks that succeeded him. That list includes Mikhail Gorbachev, who was never as respected in Russia as in the West. The flaw wasn’t within socialism; it lay in the grim life the betrayed masses were forced to live so a handful of kleptocrats could live in comfort. Gordievsky was posted in Denmark in 1966 and realized that the only way the Communist hierarchy could maintain the fiction of a worker’s paradise was to seal its borders. Yet, to play spy-versus-spy required sending agents to the West. In the end, many KGB agents defected for a better life, whereas most Westerners did so for money. That was not Gordievsky’s motive.

 

Tradecraft is not white hats against black ones. You would be wise to keep an eye on your own leaders as well. Civilian government has been the West’s best weapon of freedom. Imagine what could have happened if Reagan had caved to Casey or if Obama has listened to Hillary Clinton’s war drumbeat. Imagine it, because if you learned nothing else from January 6, 2021, you know what happens when democracy is compromised.

 

Rob Weir