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Mars Bars and Mozart
Dec. 13th, 2024 12:26 pmThe November installment of my end-of-2024 Ben MacIntyre marathon was The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War, about the double agent Olev Gordievsky.
Oleg Gordievsy was the son of a KGB officer, and his older brother was also a KGB officer. His first wife was a KGB officer, and his second wife was also from a KGB family. The KGB employed quite a lot of people.
Gordievsky had a couple of serious political experiences that eventually pushed him toward double-agenting on behalf of the West, such as witnessing the construction of the Berlin Wall, but largely he was just also a cultural dissident who like such decadent bourgeois illegal stuff like listening to classical music, which was apparently not allowed in the USSR, which for some reason I find particularly illustrative of how badly they had lost the plot.
Gordievsky and his first wife got posted to the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen, Denmark. From what I understand, if you’re trying to make the capitalist West look like a great option, the Scandinavian social democracies are the place to do it. While he was in Copenhagen, his marriage fell apart, he started having an affair with a nice young secretary, and the Prague Spring happened, which further convinced him that the Soviet Union was not where it was at and he should throw in his lot with the folks that at least let you listen to whatever music you wanted. This is about when he started working with MI6.
Gordievsky’s career with M16 had approximately four phases. The first was his posting in Denmark, which was pretty fruitful for M16 in terms of learning about the inner workings of the Soviet embassy and the KGB. The second phase was a period of a few years when Gordievsky basically went dark–his posting over, he went back to Russia, where due to his divorce his career stalled out for a few years. He kept his head down, tried to have as normal-looking a family as possible with his second wife, learned English, and started very slowly working his way into consideration for a posting to London. When he finally got it, he read all of the files he could find on KGB operations in Great Britain, purely for the purposes of being better prepared for his job, of course. The third phase was his London posting, where he gave M16 truly enormous amounts of information collected during the years he was in Russia and what he was learning in the embassy in London. In return for this service, M16 gave him “contacts” and information he could bring back to the embassy to make it look like he was doing his day job without actually giving the Soviets any information it was too dangerous for them to know.
Then Rick Ames happened, which catapulted Oleg into phase 4.
Rick Ames was also a double agent although not from any motives as noble as wanting to listen to classical music all day. Ames, in an extremely American capitalist sort of way, was simply running out of money. He was a middlingly paid, middlingly talented CIA agent with a bit of a drinking problem who was not rising in the bureaucratic ranks as fast as he felt entitled to, although he did end up as an officer in Soviet counterintelligence. He also had an expensive wife. So he made the very American decision to fuck up anyone he needed to fuck up to get more money. In this case, it meant approaching the KGB via the Soviet embassy in DC and offering to pass on the identities of American and allied spies. This list included Olev Gordievsky, whose identity M16 had not in fact revealed to the CIA at any point. But Ames’ boss, in a fit of typically American entitlement to know everything, had at one point assigned Ames to trawl through a bajillion pages of data and figure out who the Brits’ most prized spy could possibly be, simply because it was vaguely intolerable to him to not know something. This feeling is one I have much sympathy for, but the unfortunate result is that Ames did the assignment correctly, and then told his new friends about in exchange for several thousand dollars.
Gordievsky, having maneuvered his bosses out of the way and gotten himself appointed head of the London embassy, was now recalled to Moscow on a quick work trip and told he’d be back in a few weeks. Instead he was entered into a labyrinthine bunch of bureaucratic wrangling where his bosses were unwilling to actually execute him until they caught him red-handed doing something double-agenty, so he was instead interrogated and spied on and generally dicked around for several weeks while he went slowly insane. Eventually, Gordievsky took the risk of sending the signal to activate the highly improbably and elaborate escape plan he had put in place with M16, and the last third or so of the book is a minute-by-minute recounting of this brazenly insane exfiltration scheme that basically nobody thought was going to really work. Fortunately for Gordievsky, it did, and while the diplomatic fallout was pretty nasty because the KGB was, quite understandably, absolutely infuriated that they had been made fools of, and after being so restrained and modern as to not just shoot Gordievsky the minute they had suspicions about him, like they used to do in Stalin’s time, too.
The exfiltration is absolutely riveting thriller stuff and I stayed up too late reading it. Overall I don’t think this is MacIntyre’s strongest book, and while I feel like I understand exactly why Gordievsky did what he did and do not think it was wrong, at the end of the day I simply cannot get that stoked about any take as un-nuanced as “Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were On The Side of Freedom And Democracy,” even if this is really secondary to the main storyline. Most of the book does deal in much more interesting, concrete details, that paint a picture that is interestingly nuanced even if MacIntyre’s occasional pronouncements that the Soviet Union was Bad and Britain was Good are not. But it is still squarely within the realm of Fun And Exciting Real-Life Spy Shenanigans, which is after all what I read MacIntyre for.
Oleg Gordievsy was the son of a KGB officer, and his older brother was also a KGB officer. His first wife was a KGB officer, and his second wife was also from a KGB family. The KGB employed quite a lot of people.
Gordievsky had a couple of serious political experiences that eventually pushed him toward double-agenting on behalf of the West, such as witnessing the construction of the Berlin Wall, but largely he was just also a cultural dissident who like such decadent bourgeois illegal stuff like listening to classical music, which was apparently not allowed in the USSR, which for some reason I find particularly illustrative of how badly they had lost the plot.
Gordievsky and his first wife got posted to the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen, Denmark. From what I understand, if you’re trying to make the capitalist West look like a great option, the Scandinavian social democracies are the place to do it. While he was in Copenhagen, his marriage fell apart, he started having an affair with a nice young secretary, and the Prague Spring happened, which further convinced him that the Soviet Union was not where it was at and he should throw in his lot with the folks that at least let you listen to whatever music you wanted. This is about when he started working with MI6.
Gordievsky’s career with M16 had approximately four phases. The first was his posting in Denmark, which was pretty fruitful for M16 in terms of learning about the inner workings of the Soviet embassy and the KGB. The second phase was a period of a few years when Gordievsky basically went dark–his posting over, he went back to Russia, where due to his divorce his career stalled out for a few years. He kept his head down, tried to have as normal-looking a family as possible with his second wife, learned English, and started very slowly working his way into consideration for a posting to London. When he finally got it, he read all of the files he could find on KGB operations in Great Britain, purely for the purposes of being better prepared for his job, of course. The third phase was his London posting, where he gave M16 truly enormous amounts of information collected during the years he was in Russia and what he was learning in the embassy in London. In return for this service, M16 gave him “contacts” and information he could bring back to the embassy to make it look like he was doing his day job without actually giving the Soviets any information it was too dangerous for them to know.
Then Rick Ames happened, which catapulted Oleg into phase 4.
Rick Ames was also a double agent although not from any motives as noble as wanting to listen to classical music all day. Ames, in an extremely American capitalist sort of way, was simply running out of money. He was a middlingly paid, middlingly talented CIA agent with a bit of a drinking problem who was not rising in the bureaucratic ranks as fast as he felt entitled to, although he did end up as an officer in Soviet counterintelligence. He also had an expensive wife. So he made the very American decision to fuck up anyone he needed to fuck up to get more money. In this case, it meant approaching the KGB via the Soviet embassy in DC and offering to pass on the identities of American and allied spies. This list included Olev Gordievsky, whose identity M16 had not in fact revealed to the CIA at any point. But Ames’ boss, in a fit of typically American entitlement to know everything, had at one point assigned Ames to trawl through a bajillion pages of data and figure out who the Brits’ most prized spy could possibly be, simply because it was vaguely intolerable to him to not know something. This feeling is one I have much sympathy for, but the unfortunate result is that Ames did the assignment correctly, and then told his new friends about in exchange for several thousand dollars.
Gordievsky, having maneuvered his bosses out of the way and gotten himself appointed head of the London embassy, was now recalled to Moscow on a quick work trip and told he’d be back in a few weeks. Instead he was entered into a labyrinthine bunch of bureaucratic wrangling where his bosses were unwilling to actually execute him until they caught him red-handed doing something double-agenty, so he was instead interrogated and spied on and generally dicked around for several weeks while he went slowly insane. Eventually, Gordievsky took the risk of sending the signal to activate the highly improbably and elaborate escape plan he had put in place with M16, and the last third or so of the book is a minute-by-minute recounting of this brazenly insane exfiltration scheme that basically nobody thought was going to really work. Fortunately for Gordievsky, it did, and while the diplomatic fallout was pretty nasty because the KGB was, quite understandably, absolutely infuriated that they had been made fools of, and after being so restrained and modern as to not just shoot Gordievsky the minute they had suspicions about him, like they used to do in Stalin’s time, too.
The exfiltration is absolutely riveting thriller stuff and I stayed up too late reading it. Overall I don’t think this is MacIntyre’s strongest book, and while I feel like I understand exactly why Gordievsky did what he did and do not think it was wrong, at the end of the day I simply cannot get that stoked about any take as un-nuanced as “Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were On The Side of Freedom And Democracy,” even if this is really secondary to the main storyline. Most of the book does deal in much more interesting, concrete details, that paint a picture that is interestingly nuanced even if MacIntyre’s occasional pronouncements that the Soviet Union was Bad and Britain was Good are not. But it is still squarely within the realm of Fun And Exciting Real-Life Spy Shenanigans, which is after all what I read MacIntyre for.