RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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TEHRAN – The Persian translation of the book “The Spy and the Traitor” written by Ben Macintyre, about the most significant British agent of the Cold War, has been released in bookstores across the country.
Translated by Amir Mirhaj, the book has been brought out by Vazn-e Donya Publishing House in 376 pages, IRNA reported.
If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation’s communism as both criminal and philistine.
He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union’s top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6. For nearly a decade, as the Cold War reached its twilight, Gordievsky helped the West turn the tables on the KGB, exposing Russian spies and helping to foil countless intelligence plots, as the Soviet leadership grew increasingly paranoid at the United States’s nuclear first-strike capabilities and brought the world closer to the brink of war.
Desperate to keep the circle of trust close, MI6 never revealed Gordievsky’s name to its counterparts in the CIA, which in turn grew obsessed with figuring out the identity of Britain’s obviously top-level source. Their obsession ultimately doomed Gordievsky: the CIA officer assigned to identify him was none other than Aldrich Ames, the man who would become infamous for secretly spying for the Soviets.
Unfolding the delicious three-way gamesmanship between America, Britain, and the Soviet Union, and culminating in the gripping cinematic beat-by-beat of Gordievsky’s nail-biting escape from Moscow in 1985, Ben Macintyre has crafted an electrifying account of an international hero. Like the greatest novels of John le Carré, “The Spy and the Traitor” brings readers deep into a world of treachery and betrayal, where the lines bleed between the personal and the professional, and one man’s hatred of communism had the power to change the future of nations.
Gordievsky has told the story of his own improbable survival in a gripping 1995 memoir, “Next Stop Execution”. It charts his recruitment by the KGB, where his older brother Vasili served as a deep-cover “illegal”, and Gordievsky’s growing disillusionment with the grey totalitarian world of 1960s Moscow. There were stages in his journey. At an early age he learned German. He began reading Western newspapers. Then, as a KGB trainee, he spent six months in East Berlin. He arrived just as the Berlin Wall went up, and woke one morning to the sound of tanks rumbling past the Soviet embassy. But it was the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that propelled Gordievsky towards the west and, as he put it, determined “the course of my own life”.
Ben Macintyre’s wonderful “The Spy and the Traitor” complements and enhances Gordievsky’s first-person account. It reveals the dramatic role played by MI6 in recruiting and cultivating a serving KGB insider – and keeping him alive against the odds. Gordievsky’s British contacts were a colorful bunch. Some were upper-class Cold War adventurers. Others were gifted working-class linguists recruited from Oxbridge. Women played a crucial part.
Macintyre had no access to MI6’s archives, which remain secret. But he has interviewed all of the former officers involved in the case, who tell their stories for the first time. He spoke extensively to Gordievsky, who died in 2025 at 86 – a remarkable figure, “proud, shrewd and irascible”. The result is a dazzling non-fiction thriller and an intimate portrait of high-stakes espionage.
Ben Macintyre is a writer-at-large for The Times and the bestselling author of “A Spy Among Friends,” “Double Cross,” “Operation Mincemeat,” “Agent Zigzag,” and “Rogue Heroes,” among other books.
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