DEAD DOUBLES

An eye-opening look at the mechanics of espionage, Soviet-style.

In 1960, an age of abundant cocktails and government offices whose “air was often fuggy from cigarettes,” British and American intelligence cracked a ring of spies operating in the U.K. The chief operative was a British citizen named Harry Houghton, who had been sent home from a post in Poland because of his pattern of heavy drinking. He was assigned to an office that oversaw British submarine activities, handling sensitive information that he handed on to a Soviet handler for the oldest of reasons: After having served time in prison, he “confessed that he had spied ‘for money,’ but refused to disclose how much he had been paid.” Divorced from a wife who tipped off intelligence agents to the fact that Houghton “was divulging secret information to people who ought not to get it,” Houghton recruited a paramour and worked with another couple who, it turns out, were American Communists who had fled the U.S. a step ahead of the FBI, though they had long managed to evade capture. As Barnes writes in this entertaining thriller, the members of the so-called Portland Spy Ring “were arrested at a pivotal moment in the Cold War,” a time marked by the quickening space race and, soon, the Cuban missile crisis and other moments when hot war nearly broke out. The American agents and their Soviet handler were exchanged, though, for British spies the Russians had captured. On his death, that handler was declared a hero—and not by the Soviets but instead by Boris Yeltsin, the first president of supposedly democratic Russia. The author does a good job of showing how Soviet intelligence used death records, stolen passports, and other instruments to plant spies throughout the West, and fans of Furst, Ludlum, and their kind will find this real-world exploration of old-school espionage suitably intriguing.

The fraught spy game ably viewed as historical artifact and—thanks to Russia, China, and others—ongoing concern.