Gordievsky was born in Moscow in 1938, fraught times, even by Soviet standards. But Gordievsky actually had little to complain of. As the son of a K.G.B. agent and loyal party member, he led a privileged life — nice apartment, enough food, no members of his immediate family executed in the basement of the Lubyanka, or sent to a Siberian gulag. In time, his father’s status and his own obvious intelligence ensured his admission to Moscow’s most prestigious university. By the early 1960s, he had been recruited by the K.G.B. and embarked on a career he had reason to hope would give him access to foreign places.

So it happened that Gordievsky’s first cultural shock took place in East Berlin in 1961. The Wall was going up, and he was amazed to realize, as he later wrote, that “only a physical barrier, reinforced by armed guards in their watchtowers, could keep the East Germans in their socialist paradise.” A few years later he was assigned to Copenhagen, where the shock lay in the plenitude of the West, its material riches and cultural openness. The Soviet Union began to seem to him a “vast, sterile concentration camp … a form of hell.” And finally, in 1968, when Russian tanks rolled into Prague to crush Czechoslovakia’s attempts at liberalization, Gordievsky arrived at his “Kronstadt” moment — so-named for the crisis of faith that came to the Russian anarchist Alexander Berkman in 1921 when the infant Bolshevik Army brutally suppressed a rebellion by sailors in the port of Kronstadt, and later, to the American journalist and Soviet sympathizer Louis Fischer in 1939, with the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. “Kronstadt” has entered history as a term for the moment when the ideological scales fall from the eyes of a believer, and the true nature of the Soviet regime is revealed. The crackdown following the Prague Spring was that moment for Gordievsky. Now completely alienated from the Soviet system, he was vulnerable to an approach by the proper stranger. British intelligence sources had been keeping an eye on him. In 1974 he offered his allegiance to the British, and gave over his life to the constant threat of exposure.

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Enter Aldrich Ames. “Deep inside Rick Ames was a canker of cynicism, hard and inflamed,” Macintyre writes, a metaphor that is, perhaps, itself a little inflamed. Nevertheless, it’s possible to view Ames as Gordievsky’s evil twin. The men were close in age; Ames, too, had followed in his father’s footsteps, in his case into the C.I.A. And, at the very moment that Gordievsky experienced his Kronstadt crisis, Ames, then working in Ankara, was assigned to paper the city with hundreds of posters bearing the slogan Remember ’68 — “to give the impression that the Turkish population was outraged by the Soviet invasion. He dumped the posters in a bin and went for a drink.”

Ames was a dissatisfied man, a heavy drinker whose career was going nowhere. He felt underpaid and unappreciated. He had a wife whose extravagance was far beyond his means to gratify. He was desperate for money. On May 15, 1985, he met with a K.G.B. officer at the Soviet Embassy in Washington. In return he received a shopping bag containing $50,000, the first of many payments. It is still unclear whether Ames revealed Gordievsky’s name at that initial meeting, but over the course of nine years, he turned over reams of confidential material to the K.G.B., including the names of 25 C.I.A. assets whom he considered a threat to his personal safety. Gordievsky’s name was very likely among them. Most were executed by the Russians.