Ben MacIntyre delivers once again with a thrilling play-by-play of the West's greatest espionage success in the Cold War. MacIntyre's deft and inviting prose guides the reader through the labyrinthine, knife-edge world inhabited by our protagonist, Oleg Gordievsky. MacIntyre's humanizing approach to telling Gordievsky's story, along with some of the most vampiric creatures in the KGB and its orbit, makes the story feel almost too real. After the first third, I could not put this book down.
My only wish is that the life of Aldrich Ames had been detailed more granularly. Ames is (perhaps rightly) cast one-dimensionally as a money-grubbing, faithless turncoat, in contrast to the cerebral and ideologically motivated Gordievsky. While this may be fundamentally true, I feel there has to be much more to the Ames story than written here. Regardless, Ames as a foil to Gordievsky works well and stays true to the history.
Ben MacIntyre is part and parcel of my reading routine now. Having already conquered Agent Sonya, A Spy Among Friends will be my next MacIntyre read. I can hardly wait to read more MacIntyre.
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