The Defector by Richard Kerbaj review: 'a thrill to read'
Richard Kerbaj’s excellent new book shows how the 1971 defection of KGB spy Oleg Lyalin completely changed the way Western intelligence agencies operated, writes Vin Arthey
Ask anyone to name a Soviet who spied for the UK during the Cold War and it’s unlikely that they’ll come up with Oleg Lyalin. Richard Kerbaj’s new book The Defector, however, reveals that Lyalin was every bit as important as the better-known Penkovsky, Gordievsky and Mitrokhin. Moreover, while those three offered their services to British officials in the Nordic states, Lyalin was serving as a KGB spy in London from 1969 and on an April day in 1971 simply walked into a police station and asked to speak to a British counter-intelligence specialist.
Not only did Lyalin’s debrief lead just a few weeks later to Operation Foot, the expulsion from the UK of over 100 Soviet diplomats along with their families, but it upended MI5 strategies (and in the USA, the CIA’s) of the previous 20 years.
At the beginning of Kerbaj’s book we’re introduced to Anatoly Golitsyn, who defected to the USA in 1961. Golitsyn convinced top CIA man James Angleton that the key KGB policy was to create nests of spies in the West’s intelligence agencies. Angleton, aware of the Burgess, Maclean and Philby disasters, bought into this, and for ten years the CIA and MI5 were obsessed with mole hunting.
In the UK, MI5 investigated whether its most recent director general, Roger Hollis, might have been a “double” and even whether Prime Minister Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent. It was only when Lyalin walked in, named his three British agents and showed that a cohort of Soviet trade representatives were assessing British coastal vulnerabilities, how to disrupt energy supplies and ways of demoralising civilians, that MI5 realised that it had been looking at the wrong things for years.
MI5 was cagey about briefing the CIA and Angleton about Lyalin, so it was only when the big expulsion of the diplomats occurred that he became aware of what had gone on. Angleton had been “found out” and Golitsyn, although a genuine defector, was always egocentric (as Kerbaj puts it, he displayed “the kind of prima donna antics that would make a Broadway performer blush”) and, it turns out, probably paranoid.
This book gives a sharp new perspective on the events that shaped national security services in the UK and USA during a significant period of the 20th century, and it’s good to see a timeline along with the source notes. It also sheds different light on many of the key players – for example, Prime Minister Edward Heath comes out with an enhanced reputation.
At the centre of it all, meanwhile, is The Defector, the eccentric Lyalin. Kerbaj tells his story with aplomb. His research is inspired, his book’s structure is seamless and it is a thrill to read.
The Defector: The Untold Story of the KGB agent who saved MI5 and changed the Cold War, by Richard Kerbaj, Blink Publishing, £25
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