The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War by Ben MacintyreMy rating: 0 of 5 stars
This book was a bit spoiled for me (through no fault of its own) because about halfway through the first chapter I realized I knew what was going to happen--2 nights before I had watched the first episode of Spy Wars on the Smithsonian channel. The entire episode is about the same man as this book is. *sigh* The timing couldn't have been worse.
That said, the book is well-written, and exhaustively detailed without being exhausting. If you enjoy tales of moral grey-areas, espionage, Britain, Scandinavia, Russia, the USSR...this is right up your alley. For myself, while I love a good action-packed Bond flick as much as the next person, my preference has always been shows like Sandbaggers (the British series about a small unit in MI6, the first episode of which I think was very much influenced by this real-life story) and Spooks/MI-5: this book is so deep in that version of spycraft that I had trouble putting it down. I recommend this edition (2019) over first publication because the afterword addresses the responses the author received from MI6, CIA, and KGB officers to claims of fact and conclusions in the first edition.
As an aside, I think Spy Wars is a pleasant little TV docuseries. It isn't histrionic, but doesn't avoid the inherent drama of its subject matter. It's clearly biased in favor of Western intelligence agencies, but I suspect it had to be to be able to get access to people (and sometimes that bias is a bit annoying). Still, in all, it's a nice diversion, if you're into that sort of thing.
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