Book Review: The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre

Credentials first: I co-wrote an episode of the spy thriller CONDOR back in my Hollywood days, which means I’ve spent real hours in a writers’ room arguing about what makes espionage work on the page. So take it as a professional opinion when I say the best spy thriller I’ve ever read is a work of nonfiction.

The spoiler-free premise: Oleg Gordievsky, a rising officer in the KGB, spends more than a decade secretly working for MI6 — the most valuable British asset of the Cold War. Ben Macintyre reconstructs the double life piece by piece: the tradecraft, the dead drops, the family who can’t know, and the slow tightening of suspicion around him. How it all resolves is the ride, so that’s every detail you’re getting from me.

What I Loved About The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre

This is an incredible, page-turning story with the added benefit of being true, and Macintyre writes it with a novelist’s sense of dread. I kept having to remind myself that nobody invented these beats. If you pitched Gordievsky’s story in a writers’ room, you’d get notes back saying it was too much — too tense, too neat, stakes too high. Reality didn’t need the notes. As someone who writes fiction about people with secrets, watching a real double life run this long on this much nerve was genuinely humbling.

What I Didn’t Love About The Spy and the Traitor

That I can never read it for the first time again.

Final Thoughts on The Spy and the Traitor

I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It’s the one I push on thriller readers who “don’t read nonfiction” and nonfiction readers who “don’t do spy stuff.” If true stories that read like thrillers are your genre, Bad Blood belongs on the same shelf. And if you want to see what happens when the spy writing is mostly made up, come back tomorrow for my Thrilling Cities review — Ian Fleming, nonfiction, allegedly.

My final score: 5 out of 5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Do I recommend this book? 👍 Yes!

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