The Defector: The untold story of the KGB agent who changed the Cold War and saved MI5 - 'Reads like Le Carre', Robert Verkaik

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Never told in full before, this is the account of how, in 1971, the defection of a KGB agent in London led to the expulsion of more than a hundred Soviet 'diplomats' from the UK.

Drawing on newly released case files, The Defector tells a startling story of Soviet plans to plant fake double-agents within British and American intelligence services, the paranoia that ensued, and how the actions of a genuine turncoat, the former KGB agent Oleg Lyalin, and the secrets he revealed led to one of the most dramatic and pivotal moments in the Cold War.

For Lyalin's defection to Britain not only discredited a previous KGB defector, Anatoliy Golitsyn, the darling of the CIA, but eventually destroyed the reputation of the Agency's head of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton. As Richard Kerbaj writes: 'There was a poetic irony in Golitsyn's loss of credibility. It came, as he had previously feared, at the hands of a KGB defector. Except Oleg Lyalin had not been sent by the KGB - he was running away from it.'

At the heart of Lyalin's story is a narrative entwined with lies, disinformation, Kremlin deception campaigns, intelligence failures by the CIA and MI5, and a tangled love life. Told in full here, for the first time, by one of this country's leading commentators on intelligence and security, it shows how the Soviet Union finally lost the Cold War.

Reviews

'An absolutely thrilling read based on deep research which brings this MI5 asset's importance to life' -- Gordon Corera, co-host of The Rest is Classified
'A truly gripping, untold story of how a Russian defector helped British intelligence defeat the Soviet spies. Richard Kerbaj's painstaking research, including interviews with key players, upends much of the orthodoxy about what happened in the Cold War. The Defector reads like Le Carre but uncovers important truths that are being played out in Putin's Russia today' -- Robert Verkaik, Sunday Times Bestselling author of The Traitor of Colditz
'A lucidly written account of a significant setback for Soviet intelligence. Dynamic and vivid, reads like a spy thriller. Kerbaj skillfully makes major figures of the Cold War cloak-and-dagger operations come to life: defectors Oleg Lyalin and Anatoly Golitsyn, CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, MI5 director Martin Furnival Jones, KGB chairman Yuri Andropov, and many others' -- Dr. Filip Kovacevic, University of San Francisco and author of KGB Literati: Spy Fiction and State Security in the Soviet Union
'[The Secret History of the Five Eyes] Unencumbered by any sense of an agreed or official narrative' -- staff * Sunday Times *

Author Bio

Richard Kerbaj is a writer, journalist and Bafta-winning filmmaker, and the author of The Secret History of the Five Eyes, the first account of the highly secret intelligence collaboration between the USA, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, of which The Times wrote: 'It is an extraordinary development . . . sets out evidence that the British authorities conspired in a cover-up.'