Hello, this is a video about the Spy in the Trader by Ben McIntyre. This came out in 2018 and is the true story of a KGB colonel who was spying for MI6 during the 70s and 80s and a very high stakes way. First thing I have to say about this is it is incredibly well written. There are so many names and there's also so much historical context that he has to pack in and it's woven fantastically. You always feel like you know what's going on without being overloaded with information and it does a really good job of showing the tension at different parts of the cold wall and really kind of puts you into the mind of what people must have been feeling then. I learned so much in this book because I feel like with spine novels you're never really sure whether like how realistic anything is because it's fictional but this is a true story. So when they have like these crazy escape plans and code names and gadgets, you know it's all true. Oleg Goliewski is recruited in Copenhagen in the 70s by like some Danish officers that they had over to MI6 because it's just quite a big deal and then so he's spying Copenhagen for a couple years and then he goes back to Moscow and there's basically no contact while he's in Moscow and then he gets dispatched to London. So he becomes the head of political intelligence inside of the London like KGB places. Most of them are like diplomats but there are quite a few KGB officers in any embassy in the world at this point in time. So a lot of the intelligence he's giving MI6 is super valuable but they can't actually act on it because he's still within the KGB and if they go and pick off any like double agents for other intelligence services that he knows because you've got the information for inside the KGB they'll be up to figure out who it was and gave them that information and then he would be tortured and executed basically. So it's such a strange dynamic and I really think it speaks to the hubris of humanity when it's like these intelligence wars of maybe everyone actually knows everything like there's a decent amount of spies in each camp but no one can act on it because they can't make the move. It's such a game of cat and mouse and this book does a fantastic job of explaining that dynamic. Some of it comes off incredibly well in this book that I was unexpected to me is Margaret Thatcher. She takes a personal interest in Goliensky and his safety which is really quite touching but there's so many like things behind closed doors that we wouldn't have known as the public at that time that massively like informed her decisions and the way she acted. Like I didn't know that the Soviet Russia supported minus strikes used to me that's wild and when Thatcher met Gorbachev for the first time because he was the head of political intelligence in London he had to inform the KGB how he expected that like Britain to interact but obviously that was all being passed through through like the British government. So he kind of was key to orchestrating this diplomatic meeting and could control both sides and therefore like leave Virgit in however the Brits wanted to act does that make sense. And in many ways like that example he's had such enormous like political influence over the outcome of the Cold War. I think Goliensky is a fantastic subject for a book like this because he is quite relatable. His reasons were fine were completely ideological so he saw the construction of the Berlin Wall and he also saw the quashing of the Prague Spring in 1968 and you know never asked for any money but was just doing it because he thought it was right and you see the toil this takes on him and having to keep it from his family and knowing that he was betraying a lot of the people around him that he cared about personally and you really get an inside look into how you know he had to get through life like that. He really enjoyed western literature and music and just thought it was really sad that people in Soviet Russia didn't have access to this like gorgeous music that was in the West and were being like culturally deprived and he just thought that was so wrongly he was willing to put his whole life at stake and get involved in this big boy game and you know was willing to do that for the world. In contrast to that we also get a look into the story of Aldrich Ames who was kind of Goliensky's counterpart who was a intelligence officer in the CIA was kind of like not particularly competent but not too bad that he kind of just like stuck around and he got engaged to this Brazilian woman who had really high standards and he was just really greedy and was like I need more money I need money to buy a car and to support my new wife and he sold out dozens of agents to the KGB in exchange for money and was just so incredibly greedy and that in contrast to this wonderful ideological reasoning from Goliensky who just wanted people to have the music was really touching and also like fuck you Americans not you Americans but oh he just undid so much good that was being done from the other from our side anyway it all worked out in the end. My main criticism of it was that it was trying to act as if it was a thriller but then also sometimes acting as if it was a biographical document so it would kind of like leave you hanging at the end of a chapter and say oh but like is he going to do this thing and then within like 50 pages it was like this is the you know you can see on this page a map of the escape route and then the actual map just like totally spoils what happens it does say like on on the back kind of how things end up but I wanted to go into this completely blind and read it kind of as if it were a thriller and not be spoiled by things but they also has it has these two like photo sections of pages which also talk about things that haven't happened yet and yeah and you can you can know the broad outline of the story and there still be some things that it's really nice to learn as you read and so yeah I think it's just a really enjoyable thing to read blind but if you wanted to do that avoid the photos and avoid the photos because that will fog you over so this has been a review of The Spine Trader by Ben McIntyre let me know if you want to read it because I thought it was fantastic and that's enough cold war books for me this year thanks for watching and I'll see you soon bye