PositiveThe New York Review of BooksThe best true spy story I have ever read,\' says John Le Carré of The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre ... Yet it has already been told authoritatively by Gordievsky himself in his autobiography, Next Stop Execution, published in 1995 (and republished in 2015), which included a nail-biting description of the double agent’s desperate flight from Moscow afte ... So why has Macintyre told it again? And does he provide new information about Gordievsky or new insights into the business of espionage? ... The claim that Gordievsky at least contributed to the ending of the cold war and indirectly to the peaceful demise of the Soviet Union is a challenging one. Macintyre lends it some weight. It should be noted, however, that these insights, though persuasively described by Macintyre, have previously been revealed by Andrew, who has been close to Gordievsky since his defection ... Macintyre tells us disappointingly little about Gordievsky’s thirty-plus years in England since his escape. One wonders how happily he managed to settle into a placid British suburban existence ... Whether Macintyre has expanded our knowledge of Soviet espionage is debatable, but he has made it even more entertaining.
