The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War The Spy and the Traitor

First up is an adaptation of The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War. The book tells the story of Oleg Gordievsky, a former KGB colonel who became a bureau chief in London and was a double agent, providing information to the British secret intelligence service MI6.

It tells the story of how, on a warm July evening in 1985, a middle-aged man stood on the pavement of a busy avenue in the heart of Moscow, holding a plastic carrier bag. In his grey suit and tie, he looked like any other Soviet citizen. The bag alone was mildly conspicuous, printed with the red logo of Safeway, the British supermarket. The man was a spy. A senior KGB officer, for more than a decade he had supplied his British spymasters with a stream of priceless secrets from deep within the Soviet intelligence machine. No spy had done more to damage the KGB. The Safeway bag was a signal: to activate his escape plan to be smuggled out of Soviet Russia.