Originally posted by LMcD
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I'm half way through Ben Macintyre's The Spy and the Traitor, about Oleg Gordievsky - riveting stuff about a brave man who did much to help bring about an end to the Cold War, for example when NATO's "Able Archer" exercise so nearly (and quite unwittingly on their part) brought about a conflict with the profoundly paranoid Soviet Union under Andropov in 1983-4. The general public was unaware of this at the time, but material proved by Gordievsky helped to guide the thinking of Thatcher and Reagan towards the detente which eventually (under Gorbachev) led to the end of the Cold War - for a while at any rate
Private Eye have been dissing the book, Macintyre and Gordievsky in defence of Michael Foot, who is outed as one of the KGB's - not agents exactly, he wasn't one, but "confidential contacts" - at best, "stunningly naive". Inevitable, I suppose, given Paul Foot's place in the history of the Eye, but it's been going downhill for a while and I've decided to stop reading it, after over 50 years.
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