Espía y traidor

On a warm July afternoon in 1985, a middle-aged man stands on the sidewalk of a busy avenue in the heart of Moscow, holding a plastic bag. In his gray suit and tie, he looks like any other Soviet citizen; only the bag is slightly conspicuous by the red logo of Safeway, a British supermarket. The man was a spy for MI6. A KGB colonel who, for more than a decade, had provided British spies with valuable secrets from the depths of the Soviet intelligence machine: no spy had done more to harm the KGB. And the Safeway bag was a sign: activate his escape plan to get him out of Soviet Russia. Thus began one of the most daring and extraordinary episodes in the history of espionage, when Oleg Gordievski managed to prevent an atomic holocaust from taking place in 1985. In Spy and Traitor, Ben Macintyre reveals a story of betrayal, duplicity, and courage that changed the course of the Cold War forever.