The Spy

June 7, 2021

Who reads works of non-fiction twice? Well, some do. I do. Who has read The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre twice?  I have. I hope others have, and will. It takes at least two reads to grasp fully its profound impact.

Macintyre tells the chillingly true, but both tragic and heroic story of Oleg Gordievsky, who grew to maturity inside the Soviet Union’s spy agency, the KGB. In 1974 Gordievsky, while still a KGB agent in Copenhagen and later in London, became a deep-cover source for MI6, Great Britain’s spy service. Until 1985 he passed Soviet secrets to the Brits. After the KGB learned that he was a double agent but before he could be executed, MI6, in a brilliant operation, “exfiltrated” him from Moscow through Finland. He still lives near London under an assumed name.

As much as Western governments valued his service, given at the risk of his life through those 11 years, the question persists: apart from his evolving political beliefs, was he fundamentally a traitor? To escape he abandoned his wife and two daughters, who knew nothing of his second life, leaving them to hostility, deprivation, and misery in Moscow. Six years later they were reunited, but had become strangers, and he and his wife quickly divorced.

Gordievsky’s defenders point to his motive: although groomed as a spy nearly from childhood (his father was a Stalin-era agent and hatchet man, his brother also KGB), after the Berlin Wall was erected he became disgusted with the Soviet system: its cruelty, its moral poverty, its hostility to the human spirit. They point by contrast to the American suspected of betraying him, CIA official Aldrich Ames, who said bluntly, “I did it for the money.” Ames now is doing life without parole in a federal penitentiary.

Yet Gordievsky also acknowledged that when he first posted to Copenhagen he fell in love with the personal freedom, the vibrant cultural scene, the rich standard of living that so starkly set off the grubbiness of Soviet life.

Macintyre and others argue that the secrets Gordievsky delivered helped NATO to counter Soviet military plans and eventually win the Cold War. He was celebrated and decorated by Western governments. Meanwhile, even Russians who despised the Soviet system considered Gordievsky a duplicitous conniver who used friends and family in his betrayal and escape.

We know Gordievsky and Ames both lied in their own conscious, deliberate ways. Right now, we see lies everywhere. Trump and his subalterns lied about the election and still are lying. We know that, based on dozens of investigations and court rulings. Theirs are calculated, cold-blooded lies. We know of pathetic, shameful lies, like those of Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who said two weeks ago that wearing masks to avoid covid is the equivalent of Nazis forcing Jews to wear yellow stars. But then, Trump’s and Greene’s audience have their own notions of truth and falsehood.

In these examples, lying is aimed at a larger end. For Trump and Greene, the larger end is a twisted perception of American political values. In the espionage world, Macintyre writes, the lying is aimed at helping one political system gain advantage over another.

Many spies anesthetize their duplicity. Macintyre calls attention, again and again, to alcohol abuse by intelligence officials, both Soviet and Western. Heavy drinking was a way of life in the KGB. Gordievsky’s KGB brother drank himself to death at 39. The British traitor Kim Philby, who defected to the USSR in 1963 regularly “drank himself into a stupor,” says Macintyre. Ames drank. The booze, in his and other cases precipitated treason and helped reveal it. The spies who were drunks drank to blot out the pressures of life distorted by falsehood and pretense.

Gordievsky deceived his KGB superiors, his colleagues, his friends, his family, day after day, year after year. For all his skills at duplicity, he lived a private hell. He confronted the agonizing question: what is truth? He built his career on lies, persevering in the conviction that he was battling a regime that enslaved and murdered its own citizens. He knew from the moment he crossed over that a careless step or word would mean a bullet in the back of the head.

Puttering in my suburban South Carolina backyard, I wonder about these things. We ourselves all have said things that we know are not true, sometimes when we see a higher purpose—sometimes not. Again, the question: what is truth? As Gordievsky defined it in the 1970s and 1980s, truth was the recognition of the nobility of democracy standing against the bleakness of Soviet totalitarianism, that is, truth versus falsehood. The political leadership of the West stood up and defended him.

Today in the U.S., we are challenged to recognize and defend truth or surrender to lies. Our choice, compared to Gordievsky’s, may seem mundane and obscure. But we can see that truth now, today, is defined by some as doing and saying anything necessary to reclaim political office, to elevate political party over country and Constitution. The country now endures a blizzard of lies wrapped in platitudes that conceal ignorance, bigotry, greed. We may not grasp the essence of Gordievsky’s struggle. But we can understand that truth, his and ours, emerges when forged in sacrifice and courage. Only then it endures.