The spy and the traitor The greatest espionage story of the Cold War

Ben Macintyre, 1963-

Book - 2018

"Oleg Gordievsky was a spy like no other. The product of a KGB family and the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Russian eventually saw the lies and terror of the regime for what they were, a realization that turned him irretrievably toward the West. His KGB career took flight in Copenhagen in 1966 and eventually brought him to the highest post in the KGB's London station--but throughout that time he was secretly working for MI6, the British intelligence service. Gordievsky was a spy of tremendous consequence. As the Cold War heated up in the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, he provided critical information that foiled Soviet plots, exposed spies in the West, and ultimately avoided catastrophic nuclear e...scalation between the great powers. When Thatcher declared in 1984 that Mikhail Gorbachev was "a man one could do business with," it was largely because of information provided by Gordievsky. No Western country had ever run a spy so high up in Russian intelligence, which is why M16 fiercely guarded Gordievsky's identity, even from the CIA. But the American spy agency was bent on discovering the British source, unaware that their head of counterintelligence--Aldrich Ames--was secretly spying for the Soviets. A riveting story of intrigue set in the Cold War's twilight, [this book] sounds frightening echoes of today, when Russian spies are once again front-page headlines and superpower conflict dominates the globe. Writing with deep access to all of the key players in a drama that has never before been fully revealed, Ben Macintyre has produced a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, a thrilling tale of impossibly high stakes and one man's brave gamble on his belief in democracy and freedom."--Jacket.

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Subjects
Genres
Biographies
Published
New York : Crown [2018]
Language
English
Main Author
Ben Macintyre, 1963- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
viii, 358 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color), map ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9781101904190
9781101904213
  • Introduction: 19 May 1985
  • The KGB
  • Uncle Gormsson
  • SUNBEAM
  • Green ink and microfilm
  • A plastic bag and a Mars bar
  • Agent BOOT
  • The safe house
  • Operation RYAN
  • Koba
  • Mr. Collins and Mrs. Thatcher
  • Russian roulette
  • Cat and mouse
  • The dry cleaner
  • The runner
  • Finlandia
  • Epilogue: Passport for Pimlico
  • Codenames and aliases.
Review by New York Times Review

ON may 16, 1985, Oleg Gordievsky, the K.G.B.'s top spy in London, opened a telegram from his bosses in Moscow. He read it with growing apprehension. For more than a decade, Gordievsky had been a double agent, turning Soviet secrets over to the British. Now he was being ordered to return home at once. Was this a routine summons? Or had Moscow finally found him out? "The Spy and the Traitor" is the latest of Ben Macintyre's nonfiction narratives about spies of the last century, operating in wars hot and cold. The spy of Macintyre's title is Gordievsky, the traitor is the American C.I.A. agent Aldrich Ames, although, in fact, both men were spies for, and traitors to, the country they served. Gordievsky was born in Moscow in 1938, fraught times, even by Soviet standards. But Gordievsky actually had little to complain of. As the son of a K.G.B. agent and loyal party member, he led a privileged life - nice apartment, enough food, no members of his immediate family executed in the basement of the Lubyanka, or sent to a Siberian gulag. In time, his father's status and his own obvious intelligence ensured his admission to Moscow's most prestigious university. By the early 1960s, he had been recruited by the K.G.B. and embarked on a career he had reason to hope would give him access to foreign places. So it happened that Gordlevsky's first cultural shock took place in East Berlin in 1961. The Wall was going up, and he was amazed to realize, as he later wrote, that "only a physical barrier, reinforced by armed guards in their watchtowers, could keep the East Germans in their socialist paradise." A few years later he was assigned to Copenhagen, where the shock lay in the plenitude of the West, its material riches and cultural openness. The Soviet Union began to seem to him a "vast, sterile concentration camp... a form of hell." And finally, in 1968, when Russian tanks rolled into Prague to crush Czechoslovakia's attempts at liberalization, Gordievsky arrived at his "Kronstadt" moment - sonamed for the crisis of faith that came to the Russian anarchist Alexander Berkman in 1921 when the infant Bolshevik Army brutally suppressed a rebellion by sailors in the port of Kronstadt, and later, to the American journalist and Soviet sympathizer Louis Fischer in 1939, with the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. "Kronstadt" has entered history as a term for the moment when the ideological scales fall from the eyes of a believer, and the true nature of the Soviet regime is revealed. The crackdown following the Prague Spring was that moment for Gordievsky. Now completely alienated from the Soviet system, he was vulnerable to an approach by the proper stranger. British intelligence sources had been keeping an eye on him. In 1974 he offered his allegiance to the British, and gave over his life to the constant threat of exposure. Enter Aldrich Ames. "Deep inside Rick Ames was a canker of cynicism, hard and inflamed," Macintyre writes, a metaphor that is, perhaps, itself a little inflamed. Nevertheless, it's possible to view Ames as Gordlevsky's evil twin. The men were close in age; Ames, too, had followed in his father's footsteps, in his case into the C.I.A. And, at the very moment that Gordievsky experienced his Kronstadt crisis, Ames, then working in Ankara, was assigned to paper the city with hundreds of posters bearing the slogan Remember '68 - "to give the impression that the Hirkish population was outraged by the Soviet invasion. He dumped the posters in a bin and went for a drink." Ames was a dissatisfied man, a heavy drinker whose career was going nowhere. He felt underpaid and unappreciated. He had a wife whose extravagance was far beyond his means to gratify. He was desperate for money. On May 15,1985, he met with a K.G.B. officer at the Soviet Embassy in Washington. In return he received a shopping bag containing $50,000, the first of many payments. It is still unclear whether Ames revealed Gordlevsky's name at that initial meeting, but over the course of nine years, he turned over reams of confidential material to the K.G.B., including the names of 25 C.I.A. assets whom he considered a threat to his personal safety. Gordlevsky's name was very likely among them. Most were executed by the Russians. Ames was arrested in 1994, and will remain in prison for the rest of his life. Gordievsky, who was indeed under suspicion by Moscow, was able to escape from the Soviet Union by means of an elaborate plan worked out by British intelligence. He currently lives under an assumed name in an undisclosed location in England. Macintyre has terrific material to work with, and in general he keeps a firm grip on it. But in recounting every aspect of espionage tradecraft, in addition to each problem that arises in the courtship of Gordievsky by British intelligence and the histories of all of the many MI6 agents who ran him, not to mention the ever-so-complicated details of Gordlevsky's "exfiltration" from the Soviet Union, Macintyre's story sometimes bogs down. On the other hand, God is in the details, and it's hard to imagine that there could ever be too many of those when the full account of our current engagement with Russian espionage and the Americans who have enabled it is finally written. DOROTHY GALLAGHER'S latest book is "Lillian Heilman: An Imperious Life." She is working on a collection of personal essays. 'Deep inside Rick Ames was a canker of cynicism, hard and inflamed.'

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Pick up any current true-crime spy book and you'll probably see a version of this phrase on the cover: The Greatest Spy Story Ever Told. Most of them don't live up to the billing, but the latest by Ben Macintyre, author of several nonfiction spy tales (Double Cross, 2012), comes close. This is the biography of Colonel Oleg Gordievsky, who served both as a KGB career operative, rising to an elite position in London, and as a spy for Britain's intelligence agency, MI6. What makes this read propulsive is the way Macintyre tells the story almost as a character-driven novel, showing Gordievsky's disillusionment when, as a young KGB agent, he witnessed the building of the Berlin Wall and his subsequent psychological shake-up when he was posted to Copenhagen and fell in love with freedom, making him ripe for recruitment as a British spy (and leading to his foiling of Soviet plots against the West). Macintyre's way with details, as when he explains exactly how the KGB bugged apartments, or when he delves into KGB training, is utterly absorbing. The action is punctuated with plenty of heart-stopping near-discoveries, betrayals, and escapes. Fascinating, especially now.--Connie Fletcher Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Macintyre (Rogue Heroes) recounts the exploits of Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB agent turned British spy responsible for "the single largest 'operational download' in MI6 history," in this captivating espionage tale. Building on in-depth interviews and other supplementary research, Macintyre shows Gordievsky expertly navigating the "wilderness of mirrors" that made up the daily existence of a Cold War spy-passing microfilm, worrying that his wife will turn him in to the KGB, battling an unexpected dosage of truth serum. In Macintyre's telling, Aldrich Ames, the CIA agent turned KGB operative who gave up Gordievsky's cover, functions as a foil and a vehicle for moral comparison between the KGB and MI6. In a feat of real authorial dexterity, Macintyre accurately portrays the long-game banality of spycraft-the lead time and persistence in planning-with such clarity and propulsive verve that the book often feels like a thriller. The book has a startling relevancy to the news of the day, from examples of fake news to the 1984 British elections in which "Moscow was prepared to use dirty tricks and hidden interference to swing a democratic election in favor of its chosen candidate." Macintyre has produced a timely and insightful page-turner. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Veteran nonfiction writer Macintyre (writer at large, The Times of London; A Spy Among Friends) tells the story of Oleg Gordievsky (b. 1938), a spy for the Soviet Union beginning in the 1960s, later becoming the chief spy in the KGB's London office. Over time, Gordievsky developed leanings toward the West and spied for England's MI6 secret service. The CIA, meanwhile, wanted desperately to find out the name of this important double agent. Little did the CIA or MI6 know, however, that Aldrich Ames, the man leading the CIA's counterintelligence, was actually working for the Soviet Union. Gordievesky's actions helped the West win the Cold War as they contributed to the hindrance of Soviet plots and exposed agents working in both Great Britain and the United States. Macintyre's many interviews with Gordievsky and other officials in the intelligence community related to this time period add to the story. It concludes with a list of codenames, aliases, references, and an index. VERDICT Fans of narrative nonfiction, the Cold War, spy stories, foreign relations among the United States, England, and Russia, and Macintyre's previous works will greatly enjoy this incredible true account.-Jason L. Steagall, formerly with Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Swift-moving tale of true espionage in the most desperate years of the Cold War.Oleg Gordievsky (b. 1938) seemed to be a true believer in communism, a man who had emerged from secondary school, writes Macintyre (Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit that Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War, 2016, etc.), as "a competent, intelligent, athletic, unquestioning and unremarkable product of the Soviet system." Yet, after being admitted to the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations and groomed for service, Gordievsky revealed radical leanings toward democracy. Recruited as a KGB officer all the same, he was an appalled witness to the building of the Berlin Wall, but it "did not prevent him faithfully carrying out the orders of the KGB." Then came the invasion of Czechoslovakia and a home visit to a country that seemed to be increasingly poor and shabby in what he called a "totalitarian cacophony." At this point, Gordievsky was ripe for the turning. He became a valued asset of MI6, identifying Soviet spies and fellow travelers. So important was Gordievsky's role, and so difficult for the spymasters to manage, that MI6 tried to conceal his identity from their CIA allies, which gave the Americans fitsuntil, in 1985, a disgruntled, shabby CIA officer named Aldrich Ames "chose to sell out America to the KGB in order to buy the American Dream he felt he deserved." One of those he revealed was Gordievsky, who, for all his "knack for detecting loyalty, suspicion, conviction and faith," was caught in the KGB's net and returned to Moscow. The closing pages of Macintyre's fluent yarn find Gordievsky attempting to escape captivity and flee to the West in a scenario worthy of John le Carr, even as another net tightens around the American spy whom Gordievsky scorns as a "greedy bastard."Oddly timely, given the return of Russian spying to the front pages, and a first-rate study of the mechanics and psychology of espionage. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Chapter 1 The KGB Oleg Gordievsky was born into the KGB: shaped by it, loved by it, twisted, damaged, and very nearly destroyed by it. The Soviet spy service was in his heart and in his blood. His father worked for the intelligence service all his life, and wore his KGB uniform every day, including weekends. The Gordievskys lived amid the spy fraternity in a designated apartment block, ate special food reserved for officers, and spent their free time socializing with other spy families. Gordievsky was a child of the KGB. The KGB--the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or committee of state security--was the most complex and far-reaching intelligence agency ever created. The direct successor of Stalin's spy network, it combined the roles of foreign- and domestic-intelligence gathering, internal security enforcement, and state police. Oppressive, mysterious, and ubiquitous, the KGB penetrated and controlled every aspect of Soviet life. It rooted out internal dissent, guarded the Communist leadership, mounted espionage and counterintelligence operations against enemy powers, and cowed the peoples of the USSR into abject obedience. It recruited agents and planted spies worldwide, gathering, buying, and stealing military, political, and scientific secrets from anywhere and everywhere. At the height of its power, with more than one million officers, agents, and informants, the KGB shaped Soviet society more profoundly than any other institution. To the West, the initials were a byword for internal terror and external aggression and subversion, shorthand for all the cruelty of a totalitarian regime run by a faceless official mafia. But the KGB was not regarded that way by those who lived under its stern rule. Certainly it inspired fear and obedience, but the KGB was also admired as a Praetorian guard, a bulwark against Western imperialist and capitalist aggression, and the guardian of Communism. Membership in this elite and privileged force was a source of admiration and pride. Those who joined the service did so for life. "There is no such thing as a former KGB man," the former KGB officer Vladimir Putin once said. This was an exclusive club to join--and an impossible one to leave. Entering the ranks of the KGB was an honor and a duty to those with sufficient talent and ambition to do so. Oleg Gordievsky never seriously contemplated doing anything else. His father, Anton Lavrentyevich Gordievsky, the son of a railway worker, had been a teacher before the revolution of 1917 transformed him into a dedicated, unquestioning Communist, a rigid enforcer of ideological orthodoxy. "The Party was God," his son later wrote, and the older Gordievsky never wavered in his devotion, even when his faith demanded that he take part in unspeakable crimes. In 1932, he helped enforce the "Sovietization" of Kazakhstan, organizing the expropriation of food from peasants to feed the Soviet armies and cities. Around 1.5 million people perished in the resulting famine. Anton saw state-induced starvation at close quarters. That year, he joined the office of state security, and then the NKVD, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, Stalin's secret police and the precursor of the KGB. An officer in the political directorate, he was responsible for political discipline and indoctrination. Anton married Olga Nikolayevna Gornova, a twenty-four-year-old statistician, and the couple moved into a Moscow apartment block reserved for the intelligence elite. A first child, Vasili, was born in 1932. The Gordievskys thrived under Stalin. When Comrade Stalin announced that the revolution was facing a lethal threat from within, Anton Gordievsky stood ready to help remove the traitors. The Great Purge of 1936 to 1938 saw the wholesale liquidation of "enemies of the state": suspected fifth columnists and hidden Trotskyists, terrorists and saboteurs, counterrevolutionary spies, Party and government officials, peasants, Jews, teachers, generals, members of the intelligentsia, Poles, Red Army soldiers, and many more. Most were entirely innocent. In Stalin's paranoid police state, the safest way to ensure survival was to denounce someone else. "Better that ten innocent people should suffer than one spy get away," said Nikolai Yezhov, chief of the NKVD. "When you chop wood, chips fly." The informers whispered, the torturers and executioners set to work, and the Siberian gulags swelled to bursting. But as in every revolution, the enforcers themselves inevitably became suspect. The NKVD began to investigate and purge itself. At the height of the bloodletting, the Gordievskys" apartment block was raided more than a dozen times in a six-month period. The arrests came at night: the man of the family was led away first, and then the rest. It seems probable that some of these enemies of the state were identified by Anton Gordievsky. "The NKVD is always right," he said: a conclusion both wholly sensible, and entirely wrong. A second son, Oleg Antonyevich Gordievsky, was born on October 10, 1938, just as the Great Terror was winding down and war was looming. To friends and neighbors, the Gordievskys appeared to be ideal Soviet citizens, ideologically pure, loyal to Party and state, and now the parents to two strapping boys. A daughter, Marina, was born seven years after Oleg. The Gordievskys were well fed, privileged, and secure. But on closer examination there were fissures in the family façade, and layers of deception beneath the surface. Anton Gordievsky never spoke about what he had done during the famines, the purges, and the terror. The older Gordievsky was a prime example of the species Homo Sovieticus, an obedient state servant forged by Communist repression. But underneath he was fearful, horrified, and perhaps gnawed by guilt. Oleg later came to see his father as "a frightened man." Olga Gordievsky, Oleg's mother, was made of less tractable material. She never joined the Party, and she did not believe that the NKVD was infallible. Her father had been dispossessed of his watermill by the Communists; her brother sent to the eastern Siberian gulag for criticizing collective agriculture; she had seen many friends dragged from their homes and marched away in the night. With a peasant's ingrained common sense, she understood the caprice and vindictiveness of state terror, but kept her mouth shut. Oleg and Vasili, separated in age by six years, grew up in wartime. One of Gordievsky's earliest memories was of watching lines of bedraggled German prisoners being paraded through the streets of Moscow, "trapped, guarded, and led like animals." Anton was frequently absent for long periods, lecturing the troops on Party ideology. Oleg Gordievsky dutifully learned the tenets of Communist orthodoxy: he attended School 130, where he showed an early aptitude for history and languages; he learned about the heroes of Communism, at home and abroad. Despite the thick veil of disinformation surrounding the West, foreign countries fascinated him. At the age of six, he began reading British Ally, a propaganda sheet put out in Russian by the British embassy to encourage Anglo-Russian understanding. He studied German. As expected of all teenagers, he joined Komsomol, the Communist Youth League. His father brought home three official newspapers and spouted the Communist propaganda they contained. The NKVD morphed into the KGB, and Anton Gordievsky obediently followed. Oleg's mother exuded a quiet resistance that only occasionally revealed itself in waspish, half-whispered asides. Religious worship was illegal under Communism, and the boys were raised as atheists, but their maternal grandmother had Vasili secretly baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church, and would have christened Oleg too had their horrified father not found out and intervened. Oleg Gordievsky grew up in a tight-knit, loving family suffused with duplicity. Anton Gordievsky venerated the Party and proclaimed himself a fearless upholder of communism, but inside was a small and terrified man who had witnessed terrible events. Olga Gordievsky, the ideal KGB wife, nursed a secret disdain for the system. Oleg's grandmother secretly worshipped an illegal, outlawed God. None of the adults in the family revealed what they really felt--to one another, or anyone else. Amid the stifling conformity of Stalin's Russia, it was possible to believe differently in secret but far too dangerous for honesty, even with members of your own family. From boyhood, Oleg saw that it was possible to live a double life, to love those around you while concealing your true inner self, to appear to be one person to the external world and quite another inside. Oleg Gordievsky emerged from school with a silver medal, head of the Komsomol, a competent, intelligent, athletic, unquestioning, and unremarkable product of the Soviet system. But he had also learned to compartmentalize. In different ways, his father, mother, and grandmother were all people in disguise. The young Gordievsky grew up around secrets. Stalin died in 1953. Three years later he was denounced, at the 20th Party Congress, by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev. Anton Gordievsky was staggered. The official condemnation of Stalin, his son believed, "went a long way towards destroying the ideological and philosophical foundations of his life." He did not like the way Russia was changing. But his son did. The "Khrushchev Thaw" was brief and restricted, but it was a period of genuine liberalization that saw the relaxation of censorship and the release of thousands of political prisoners. These were heady times to be young, Russian, and hopeful. At the age of seventeen, Oleg enrolled at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations. There, exhilarated by the new atmosphere, he engaged in earnest discussions with his peers about how to bring about "socialism with a human face." He went too far. Some of his mother's nonconformity had seeped into him. One day, he wrote a speech, naïve in its defense of freedom and democracy, concepts he barely understood. He recorded it in the language laboratory, and played it to some fellow students. They were appalled. "You must destroy this at once, Oleg, and never mention these things again." Suddenly fearful, he wondered if one of his classmates had informed the authorities of his "radical" opinions. The KGB had spies inside the institute. The limits of Khrushchev's reformism were brutally demonstrated in 1956 when the Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary to put down a nationwide uprising against Soviet rule. Despite the all-embracing Soviet censorship and propaganda, news of the crushed rebellion filtered back to Russia. "All warmth disappeared," Oleg recalled of the ensuing clampdown. "An icy wind set in." The Institute of International Relations was the Soviet Union's most elite university, described by Henry Kissinger as "the Harvard of Russia." Run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it was the premier training ground for diplomats, scientists, economists, politicians--and spies. Gordievsky studied history, geography, economics, and international relations, all through the warping prism of Communist ideology. The institute provided instruction in fifty-six languages, more than any other university in the world. Language skills offered one clear pathway into the KGB and the foreign travel that he craved. Already fluent in German, he applied to study English, but the courses were oversubscribed. "Learn Swedish," suggested his older brother, who had already joined the KGB. "It is the doorway to the rest of Scandinavia." Gordievsky took his advice. The institute library stocked some foreign newspapers and periodicals that, though heavily redacted, offered a glimpse of the wider world. These he began to read, discreetly, for showing overt interest in the West was itself grounds for suspicion. Sometimes at night he would secretly listen to the BBC World Service or the Voice of America, despite the radio-jamming system imposed by Soviet censors, and picked up "the first faint scent of truth." Like all human beings, in later life Gordievsky tended to see his past through the lens of experience, to imagine that he had always secretly harbored the seeds of insubordination, to believe his fate was somehow hardwired into his character. It was not. As a student, he was a keen Communist, anxious to serve the Soviet state in the KGB, like his father and brother. The Hungarian Uprising had caught his youthful imagination, but he was no revolutionary. "I was still within the system but my feelings of disillusionment were growing." In this he was no different from many of his student contemporaries. At the age of nineteen, Gordievsky took up cross-country running. Something about the solitary nature of the sport appealed to him, the rhythm of intense exertion over a long period, in private competition with himself, testing his own limits. Oleg could be gregarious, attractive to women, and flirtatious. His looks were bluntly handsome, with hair swept back from his forehead and open, rather soft features. In repose, his expression seemed stern, but when his eyes flashed with dark humor, his face lit up. In company he was often convivial and comradely, but there was something hard and hidden inside. He was not lonely, or a loner, but he was comfortable in his own company. He seldom revealed his feelings. Typically hungry for self-improvement, Oleg believed that cross-country running was "character building." For hours he would run, through Moscow's streets and parks, alone with his thoughts. One of the few students he grew close to was Stanislaw Kaplan, a fellow runner on the university track team. "Standa" Kaplan was Czechoslovakian, and had already obtained a degree from Charles University in Prague by the time he arrived at the institute as one of several hundred gifted students from the Soviet bloc. Like others from countries only recently subjugated to Communism, Kaplan's "individuality had not been stifled," Gordievsky wrote, years later. A year older, he was studying to be a military translator. The two young men found they shared compatible ambitions and similar ideas. "He was liberal-minded and held strongly sceptical views about communism," wrote Gordievsky, who found Kaplan's forthright opinions exciting, and slightly alarming. With his dark good looks, Standa was a magnet to women. The two students became firm friends, running together, chasing girls, and eating in a Czech restaurant off Gorky Park. An equally important influence was his idolized older brother, Vasili, who was now training to become an "illegal," one of the Soviet Union's vast global army of deep undercover agents. The KGB ran two distinct species of spy in foreign countries. The first worked under formal cover, as a member of the Soviet diplomatic or consular staff, a cultural or military attaché, accredited journalist or trade representative. Diplomatic protection meant that these "legal" spies could not be prosecuted for espionage if their activities were uncovered, but only declared persona non grata, and expelled from the country. By contrast, an "illegal" spy (nelegal, in Russian) had no official status, usually traveled under a false name with fake papers, and simply blended invisibly into whatever country he or she was posted to. (In the West such spies are known as NOCs, standing for Non-Official Cover.) The KGB planted illegals all over the world, who posed as ordinary citizens, submerged and subversive. Like legal spies, they gathered information, recruited agents, and conducted various forms of espionage. Sometimes, as "sleepers," they might remain hidden for long periods before being activated. These were also potential fifth columnists, poised to go into battle should war erupt between East and West. Illegals operated beneath the official radar and therefore could not be financed in ways that might be traced or communicate through secure diplomatic channels. But unlike spies accredited to an embassy, they left few traces for counterintelligence investigators to follow. Excerpted from The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War by Ben Macintyre All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.