Double jeopardy: the story of history’s most audacious KGB defector
Two spies meet in a white-tiled bathroom in Tehran. One large chap is perched on a creaking laundry basket, while his host, seated on the toilet, pours good-quality vodka into a pair of glasses. Water gushing from the taps and the radio playing prevents any officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard who might have bugged the place from overhearing their conversation. It is 1981, two years after the Iranian revolution, when ‘the world’s oldest empire folded and plummeted like a kite in a hurricane’, Macintyre tells us in true Bond-baddie style. Then comes an astounding confession, words that Bond has never uttered, and ‘by the time it took to run a bath, the KGB spy had become a double agent’.
