About The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War
In The Spy and the Traitor, Ben Macintyre tells the astonishing story of Oleg Gordievsky, the most famous spy of the Cold War era and one of the few men ever to have betrayed the Soviet Union from within.
Gordievsky was a senior KGB officer who, in 1982, was secretly recruited by MI6. Over the next seven years he supplied Britain with crucial intelligence on Moscow's dealings with Eastern Europe and its plans for nuclear war. In 1990, when Gordievsky was arrested by the KGB in Moscow, he was hailed as a hero by Western intelligence services and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.