© FIONA HANSON / AFP
Former Russian KGB Colonel Oleg Gordievsky, 18 October 2007
I knew the double agent Oleg Gordievsky, though he evidently didn't know me, thank God.
I was rather junior at the time, it's true, but I grew up to be less so. The absence of my name in his ghost-written memoir officially penned by
The Times' Ben Macintyre is evidence either of no
post facto additions to his photographically-memorized perusal of Soviet secrets regarding the British labour movement, or else it is evidence that his memory isn't quite as photographic as the memoir seeks to persuade us.
The absence of my name in this latest boost to his pension fund is the least interesting thing about the book, however.
The
memoir - titled
The Spy and the Traitor - is happily timed to buttress the tide of Russophobic propaganda in London around the Skripal affair, in which
The Times is playing such a sterling role.
That the revelations within are only scarcely reheated souffles of discredited allegations raised by Gordievsky decades ago. It does not seem to have mattered that one such allegation was previously defeated in the courts, having been published by the same newspaper group under the same editor. These are souffles which can rise twice!
Comment:
Update: Sputnik reports arrest of Utah man: "