The Spy and the Traitor

I finished The Spy and the Traitor. And it's really a very well-written book...a real page-turner. I highly recommend it. You might learn some history – at least I did.

With the level of knowledge here of spying and the Soviet Union, I doubt whether I can offer any spoilers. But what I found interesting is that as the end of this story beckoned, I thought less and less of Oleg Gordievsky.

And not because he was a traitor. Any traitor to the Soviet Union and KGB, whatever their motive, is more than welcome. But the guy just seemed to be a little full of himself.

Yes, he took great risks. Yes, he was highly useful to the West. But there was one incident at the end of this that really nailed home what one could only call his personal recklessness and narcissism. And this is where a spoiler could come in if you don't know how the attempt at his escape turned out.

Anyway, near the very end of a long chain of events required to try to get him out of Russia, instead of sitting tight (as was the plan) at a turnout near the Finnish border and waiting to make contact with British agents, Oleg hitchhikes to a nearby town and sits in a restaurant and has a meal. He then realizes at some point that – oops – it's getting near the time when he is supposed to meet the British agents at the agreed-upon meeting place. He is 15 miles from the meeting place and has only an hour and twenty minutes to get there. So he starts jogging back.

He does make it back (he hitched another ride, further increasing his chances of being captured). And when he gets back, instead of sticking to the plan and hanging tight at the meeting place, he starts walking down the main highway with the thought of meeting the British agents when they came in their car. (They were driving from Moscow.) He then finally gets it into his head that the KGB could be on this highway with cars (as is usual...he was, after all, a top official in the KGB) placed fore and aft the British cars. (The Brits had a caravan of two cars, ostensibly to get a serious ill member of the consulate to a hospital in Helsinki.)

This was a yugely risky plan, and not just for Oleg. M16 in coordination with Mi5, Danish intelligence, and (to a basic extent) even Finish intelligence had this plan laid out and it required an enormous amount of effort to have it ready through the years in case it was needed.

There's a sense that this guy left a swath of destruction behind him. And, no, we care not at all that many of these people harmed were KGB agents or people who had ties with the KGB. But this was a guy who, despite the accolades laid on him, was probably not a guy you would ever want to depend on. But he was extremely useful for the West in understanding the mindset of the Soviets and to understanding (as never before) the inner workings of the KGB. He's a heroic icon in that regard. But there was probably a good reason that Oleg's first handler didn't trust the man and was somewhat surprised and underwhelmed when he heard that Oleg had defected. He was never convinced of this guy's loyalty in the first place.