

In the opening scene of Citadel, Mason and Nadia are attacked by Manticore agents, barely escaping alive.

Mason and Nadia are part of a spy organization called Citadel, which gets destroyed by the villainous Manticore after a single scene. Like the greatest novels of John le Carré, it brings readers deep into a world of treachery and betrayal, where the lines overlap between the personal and the professional, and one man’s hatred of communism had the power to change the future of nations.The first two episodes of Citadel introduce the series leading stars, Richard Madden as Mason Kane and Priyanka Chopra Jonas as Nadia Sinh. Unfolding the three-way gamesmanship between America, Britain, and the Soviet Union, and culminating in Gordievsky’s nail-biting escape from Moscow in 1985, Ben Macintyre’s latest may be his best yet. Their obsession ultimately doomed Gordievsky: the CIA officer assigned to identify him was none other than Aldrich Ames, the man who would become infamous for secretly spying for the Soviets. Desperate to keep the circle of trust close, MI6 never revealed Gordievsky’s name to its counterparts in the CIA, which in turn grew obsessed with figuring out the identity of Britain’s obviously top-level source. For nearly a decade, as the Cold War reached its twilight, Gordievsky helped the West turn the tables on the KGB, exposing Russian spies and helping to foil countless intelligence plots, as the Soviet leadership grew increasingly paranoid at the United States’ nuclear first-strike capabilities and brought the world closer to the brink of war. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union’s top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6.

The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation’s communism as both criminal and philistine. If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. In this book by Ben Macintyre, a 2018 O’Keeffe speaker at The Four Arts, find the thrilling tale of Oleg Gordievsky, the Soviet Union’s top man in London who was secretly working for MI6 and helped hasten the end of the Cold War.
