Gordievsky

Did the fact checkers ever correct Tony Fauci, Rochelle Walensky, or Rachel Maddow for saying that the COVID-19 vax prevents you from getting and spreading COVID-19? If not, why not?

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Karl Spence characterizes the views of the liberal intelligentsia as: “Let my conscience be your guide.”

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Gordievsky

Oleg Gordievsky was the most significant British agent of the Cold War. For 11 years, he spied for MI6.

Gordievsky told the story of his improbable survival in his 1995 memoir, Next Stop Execution. It charts his recruitment by the KGB, where his older brother Vasili served as a deep-cover “illegal”, and Gordievsky’s growing disillusionment with the grey totalitarian world of 1960s Moscow which culminated in his revulsion of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor complements and enhances Gordievsky’s first-person account. It reveals the dramatic role of MI6 in recruiting and cultivating a serving KGB insider – and keeping him alive against the odds. Gordievsky’s British contacts were a colorful collection of upper-class Cold War adventurers and gifted working-class linguists recruited from Oxbridge

Gordievsky would go on to meet his British handlers once a month; he didn’t want money and said he was spying out of ideological conviction. Cassettes of these conversations were sent back to London in a diplomatic bag. Gordievsky, MI6 discovered, was a star asset. He had a prodigious memory and thorough knowledge of current and former KGB operations. At lunchtime, he would slip out of the embassy and hand over microfilm strips to his case officer for copying. These were Moscow’s secret instructions.

There were close shaves, including an approach to the Soviet embassy by Michael Bettaney, a renegade MI5 loner. Betrayal eventually came from a venal CIA officer, Aldrich Ames, who tipped off Moscow – Ames is the traitor of the book’s title. Ames!

Macintyre touches only briefly on the unprecedented “download” of information Gordievsky gave to the West. It included details of the KGB’s attempts to influence Western elections through “active measures”. In 1985 the KGB circulated a top-secret “personality questionnaire”. It set out the characteristics it was looking for in a potential agent: narcissism, vanity, greed, and marital infidelity. Soon afterward, the Soviet government invited a prominent American, Donald Trump, to visit Moscow. (In fairness, we do not know if there was a connection.)

In the summer of 1985 – after Gordievsky was hastily recalled from London to Moscow by his suspicious bosses – British intelligence officers helped him to escape. It was the only time that the Brits ever managed to exfiltrate a penetration agent from the USSR, outwitting their Russian adversaries. It went some way towards exorcising the Cambridge spies, who a generation earlier had traveled in the opposite direction.

His two books on Soviet intelligence operations with historian Christopher Andrew are invaluable references.

Much from The Guardian