Spectator Books: Oleg Gordievsky - the double agent who changed the Cold War

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The Spectator

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 17 July 2019

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There’s nobody who writes true-life spy stories like Ben MacIntyre — and with his latest book The Spy and the Traitor out in paperback, Ben joins me to talk about the astonishing career of Oleg Gordievsky, a single spy who really did change the whole course of the Cold War. Ben tells Sam about Oleg's rise, his downfall, his daring escape from Moscow — and how he lives now and what he thinks of the situation between Russia and the West these days. Plus, the peculiar role in the whole tale of Dire Straits’s Brothers In Arms…

Spectator Books is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor. Hear past episodes of Spectator Books here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.
0:11.0	This week I'm joined by Ben McIntyre, the best-selling author of several true, true spy stories,
0:18.2	of which the latest is The Spy and the traitor just out in paperback,
0:21.9	and it's the story of Oleg Gordievsky.
0:24.8	Welcome, Ben. Lots of spies, as you say in your book, don't make all that much difference,
0:30.0	and Gordievsky is one of the very few who did.
0:33.0	Yes, I think that's right. I mean, it seems an odd thing to say,
0:35.8	given how much I've written about spies, that actually they don't actually turn the world. But on the whole, if spies, if they're
0:41.8	good, they may make us a bit safer. They kind of oil the wheels of traditional diplomacy,
0:47.1	but they don't usually kind of strategically alter the way states behave. Oleg Gordievsky's
0:52.8	material was different. I mean, there are occasions.
0:55.2	There are occasions during D-Day, there are deceptions, there are, there's Bletchie Park, but I'm not,
0:59.2	I'm not going to exaggerate the unimportant agency. Exactly. But Oleg's stuff really was, it really was
1:05.1	going straight to Thatcher and Reagan and it was altering, you can tell, you can see the impact that it was having on policy.
1:13.6	And he really did, I think, paved the way for the, well, was one of the factors in paving the way for the beginning of the end of the Cold War.
1:20.6	And Gordiaf to him, you know, what was it that made you think, right, I'm going to come back and do this story?
1:29.2	And how did you get the access? Because you've obviously spoken to Oleg Gordievsky very extensively, as you say, in your involvement.
1:35.1	I think I trotted up the number of hours I'd spent in this unbelievably hot sitting room. I think it was about 140 hours in all. Yes, I got to know him very well. In fact, funnily enough, the spectators are running this
1:45.6	because, of course, Oleg used to review books for the spectator.
1:49.2	And he also used to review for us at the Times, my day job.
1:52.0	So actually, his finding him at that point was quite easy.
1:55.1	His email was in our roller decks.
	...

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