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People on each side of the Iron Curtain defected for many reasons during the Cold War, and afterwards. Among spies, it was often because they feared being caught. Others were simply bribed by an opposing intelligence organization. Some, no doubt, defected for ideological reasons. Guy Burgess, notoriously, defected by mistake, thinking he was just helping Donald Maclean get to Prague. Oleg Lyalin defected because he wanted a divorce. He wanted MI5 to have him expelled, so he said, so that he could return to Moscow to start the process. His reasoning in this is rather difficult to follow.

Richard Kerbaj sets out to tell Lyalin’s story, but it is hardly “untold” as his subtitle claims. Both Peter Wright, in Spycatcher (1987), and Christopher Andrew, in The Defence of the Realm: The authorized history of MI5 (2009) referred to it. Kerbaj’s research into this twice-told tale was facilitated by his unusual ability to read the minds of dead people. There is hardly a page in The Defector without a report of what a crucial source “would have thought”, “would have known” or “would have suspected”. The prose moves from one cliché to another: “a sense of foreboding that he was a marked man … Lyalin had never felt shackled by the bonds of matrimony”. The claim that Lyalin “saved MI5 and changed the Cold War” is unintelligible, as he did neither (and neither Wright nor Andrew made such claims for him).

Much of The Defector is devoted not to Lyalin, but to another more than twice-told story, that of the conflict within the CIA between the staff whose job it was to find and “run” agents, and those whose job it was to prevent foreign services from placing their agents within the CIA. For a long time – when adjudicated by, for example, Richard Helms – this was a healthy dialogue. But eventually it came to be believed that the chief of the counterintelligence staff, James Angleton, had won too often. When William Colby succeeded Helms, he closed Angleton’s counterintelligence office, which confirmed, for Angleton, Angleton’s long-held belief that Colby was a Soviet agent. Be that as it may, later, with no one watching, Aldrich Ames was able to spend years spying on the CIA from inside. This, of course, did not end the debates, which have become, if anything more vicious, of which Kerbaj reports only the anti-counterintelligence side.

Lyalin disappears entirely from the book at page 269, to be replaced in the final twenty-five pages by Kerbaj’s thoughts about Vladimir Putin. Many people believe that the Cold War ended some time ago, and that accounts of that period need not be heavily ideological. Others, Kerbaj clearly among them, disagree.