Colonel of the First Main Directorate of the KGB of the USSR Oleg Gordievsky was the pride of Soviet intelligence. Flawless performer, ideological, athletically built, reliable, and absolutely loyal to the system. He also had an ideal family background—his father was an NKVD officer. He served in Scandinavia, Moscow, and Britain, and he was genuinely trusted. And he was trusted completely in vain.
For more than ten years, from 1974 to 1985, he worked for Britain’s secret foreign intelligence service, the legendary MI-6. For Britain, he was a double agent—one of the most successful spies in the history of the Cold War, whose reports went straight into the offices of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. For the USSR, Gordievsky was a traitor, and as a traitor, if he were discovered, there could be only one fate: torture and interrogations in KGB detention cells, followed by an inevitable execution.
The stakes in this spy game are higher than ever.