Guyon Espiner

A journalist once asked Oleg Gordievsky, our greatest defector,

He said, well, you know, you did the same thing.

And Gordievsky said, no, I didn't.

The people that I fingered went to prison.

The people that he fingered were shot in the back of the head.

And there's a bit of a difference, you know.

So we're the good guys.

And I'm Guyon Espiner.

This is Episode 5, Treachery.

Who do you trust?

Who can you trust?

In this episode, we're going to look at what is perhaps the most important question of all for an intelligence service.

You have to trust some people to get anything done.

But if you trust the wrong person, well, that can sometimes do enormous damage.

At the same time, it's great if you can get someone from the other side to come over.

At the very highest political level, where it involves the so-called leader of the free world.

We often hear people who go from the West to the East referred to as traitors, whereas the ones who come across in the other direction, they're just defectors.

The language, of course, is emotional.

You could say it's a bit like two sides of the coin being the terrorists and the freedom fighter.

Yeah, the book was called Betrayal, and Tim Weiner was not impressed by Rick Ames.