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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The celebrated writer of Double Cross and Rogue Heroes returns along with his largest undercover agent tale but, an exciting Americans-generation tale of Oleg Gordievsky, the Russian whose mystery paintings helped hasten the top of the Chilly Conflict.

“The most efficient actual undercover agent tale I’ve ever learn.”—JOHN LE CARRÉ

If any person may well be thought to be a Russian counterpart to the notorious British double-agent Kim Philby, it used to be Oleg Gordievsky. The son of 2 KGB sellers and the made from The most efficient Soviet establishments, the savvy, refined Gordievsky grew to look his country’s communism as each prison and philistine. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and sooner or later become the Soviet Union’s most sensible guy in London, however from 1973 on he used to be secretly operating for MI6. For just about a decade, because the Chilly Conflict reached its twilight, Gordievsky helped the West flip the tables at the KGB, exposing Russian spies and serving to to foil numerous intelligence plots, because the Soviet management grew more and more paranoid at america’s nuclear first-strike features and taken the arena nearer to the threshold of Conflict. Determined to stay the circle of accept as true with shut, MI6 by no means found out Gordievsky’s title to its opposite numbers within the CIA, which in flip grew obsessive about working out the id of Britain’s clearly most sensible-stage supply. Their obsession in the long run doomed Gordievsky: the CIA officer assigned to spot him used to be none instead of Aldrich Ames, the person who could develop into notorious for secretly spying for the Soviets. 

Unfolding the scrumptious 3-approach gamesmanship among The usa, Britain, and the Soviet Union, and culminating within the gripping cinematic beat-through-beat of Gordievsky’s nail-biting break out from Moscow in 1985, Ben Macintyre’s recent is also his easiest but. Like the best novels of John le Carré, it brings readers deep into an international of treachery and betrayal, the place the strains bleed among the non-public and the pro, and one guy’s hatred of communism had the facility to switch the way forward for international locations.