The Defector

‘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 *

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.’