The Defector

"The Defector is billed as the “untold story of the KGB agent who saved MI5 and changed the Cold War.” The defector in question is Oleg Lyalin, and, if truth be told, I knew very little about him, so I am grateful to Kerbaj for educating me about his impact on Cold War espionage and history. Lyalin’s defection changed everything. Arrested in London for drunk driving, he defected almost impulsively, revealing that while posing as a Soviet trade representative, he had been running agents and assessing Britain’s vulnerabilities, ports, energy supplies, and infrastructure. MI5 suddenly realised it had been hunting phantoms such as the MI5 director and deputy director, Roger Hollis and Graham Mitchell, while missing the real threat. The response was swift and dramatic: within weeks, Britain launched Operation FOOT and expelled 105 Soviet ‘diplomats’ and their families, dealing the KGB a devastating blow. What really stands out is the writing. Kerbaj captures the psychology of these figures with a novelist’s touch while staying rigorously factual, turning intelligence history into a gripping read. It’s an important book, and a timely reminder of how easily intelligence services can lose their way when fear and paranoia override judgment. Through the figure of Lyalin, we gain a deeper understanding of how the Soviets operated in London. You don’t need to be a Cold War expert to appreciate this book either. Kerbaj deserves real credit for laying out the earlier Cold War context in clear, accessible language, setting the scene for what follows. In short, this is emphatically not the kind of dry espionage history that can sometimes put readers off. Staying with non-fiction, I must give a shout-out to Gordon Corera’s A Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB . The book is about Vasili Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist who defected to the West and smuggled out vast amounts of secret Soviet intelligence files. It’s another stranger than fiction espionage history story!"