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

This occurs when two people, often a spy and a handler, meet at a predetermined time and place to pass something like a message from one to the other. Pretending to be strangers, they “brush” by each other as they pass and surreptitiously hand over or drop into a pocket whatever is being transferred.

In spy lingo, this means low-level information that is real but not particularly useful or damaging. It’s often given to the enemy to prove that one is who one claims to be, and it can be a “good faith” gesture to indicate that one has access to (and can give) information that is more useful. For instance, an intelligence agent offering to spy for the enemy might provide a list of fellow agents already known to have been identified by the enemy.

This term refers to the period extending from just after World War II to the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Although the US and the Soviet Union were allies during the war, fighting the common enemy of Nazi Germany, they weren’t natural allies due to their significantly different political systems. As the war ended, tensions led to a split between the democratic nations of the US, Great Britain, and France, on one hand, and the Soviet Union on the other. During the reconstruction period in Europe after the war, the Soviet Union installed Communist governments in the eastern areas under its control, while the western areas developed democracies fostered by the Americans, British, and French. As the geopolitical conflict hardened, the two sides were said to be engaging in a “cold war”—that is, confrontational and oppositional but falling short of a shooting war (or “hot war”).

This spy lingo means taking evasive measures to ensure that any surveillance is lost. When Gordievsky wanted to secretly contact MI6 agents in Moscow, he first spent a couple of hours “dry cleaning,” or going here and there randomly and quickly, changing modes of transportation often, to lose the KGB agents who were tailing him. The goal is to make it look incidental, not as if one is intentionally trying to lose a tail and thus potentially raising suspicion.

This refers to a section within the KGB that was responsible for the spies considered to be “illegal” (or nelegal—see below). The “S” stood for “special.” It was part of the department called the First Chief Directorate (FCD), which ran foreign intelligence. Gordievsky worked in Directorate S for a time in Moscow.

The full name was Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or Committee for State Security, and it was the intelligence agency of the Soviet Union responsible for both domestic and foreign intelligence.

Short for “Military Intelligence, Section 5,” this British intelligence agency is responsible for domestic intelligence.

Short for “Military Intelligence, Section 6,” this British intelligence agency is responsible for foreign intelligence.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a product of the Cold War, is a military alliance between the US and European nations. The alliance was formed in 1949, after World War II, because the Soviet Union was seen as a threat to the security of democratic nations in Europe. NATO’s members commit to defending any other member that comes under attack.

This Russian term means “illegal spy.” The agents of the KGB were divided into two groups. One operated in the open as agents and spies as part of the Soviet diplomatic corps—embassy staff, for example. Because of their diplomatic status, if they were caught, they could be expelled from a country but not prosecuted. The second group consisted of “illegals,” or spies that operated covertly without any official status. They often took false names and professions, such as pretending to be businesspeople, and lived abroad, all the while spying for the KGB. If they were caught, they could be prosecuted for espionage.

This is the Russian acronym for People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, Stalin’s secret police and the precursor to the KGB.

This was the MI6 code name for Gordievsky’s case when he moved to London. (Previously, when he was spying for them in Denmark, MI6 called it Operation SUNBEAM.)

This was the MI6 code name for the plan to smuggle Gordievsky out of the Soviet Union should circumstances require it. It was put into action in the summer of 1985, after Gordievsky returned to Moscow from London and learned that the KGB had discovered his spying.

Macintyre calls this “the biggest peacetime Soviet intelligence operation ever launched” (143). As KGB chief, Yuri Andropov initiated Operation RYAN in the early 1980s. Convinced that the US was planning a first-strike nuclear attack, Andropov directed KGB offices around the world to look for evidence of such an attack. The name was an acronym that stood for raketno-yadernoye napadeniye, the Russian translation of “nuclear missile attack.”

This was the MI6 code name for Gordievsky’s case when the British agency first recruited him in Copenhagen. After he moved to London, MI6 changed the code name to Operation NOCTON.

This is the acronym for Politiets Efterretningstjeneste, the Danish intelligence service.

This is the translation of the term that the KGB uses to refer to the office responsible for political intelligence. The word “line” here means something akin to “section” or “department.” Gordievsky worked for the PR Line in both Copenhagen and London.