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His father, Anton Lavrentyevich Gordievsky, the son of a railway worker, had been a teacher before the revolution of 1917 transformed him into a dedicated, unquestioning Communist, a rigid enforcer of ideological orthodoxy. Oleg Gordievsky never seriously contemplated doing anything else. Entering the ranks of the KGB was an honor and a duty to those with sufficient talent and ambition to do so. This was an exclusive club to join—and an impossible one to leave. "There is no such thing as a former KGB man," the former KGB officer Vladimir Putin once said. Those who joined the service did so for life.

Membership in this elite and privileged force was a source of admiration and pride. Certainly it inspired fear and obedience, but the KGB was also admired as a Praetorian guard, a bulwark against Western imperialist and capitalist aggression, and the guardian of Communism. But the KGB was not regarded that way by those who lived under its stern rule. To the West, the initials were a byword for internal terror and external aggression and subversion, shorthand for all the cruelty of a totalitarian regime run by a faceless official mafia. At the height of its power, with more than one million officers, agents, and informants, the KGB shaped Soviet society more profoundly than any other institution. It recruited agents and planted spies worldwide, gathering, buying, and stealing military, political, and scientific secrets from anywhere and everywhere. It rooted out internal dissent, guarded the Communist leadership, mounted espionage and counterintelligence operations against enemy powers, and cowed the peoples of the USSR into abject obedience. Oppressive, mysterious, and ubiquitous, the KGB penetrated and controlled every aspect of Soviet life.

The direct successor of Stalin's spy network, it combined the roles of foreign- and domestic-intelligence gathering, internal security enforcement, and state police.

The KGB—the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or committee of state security—was the most complex and far-reaching intelligence agency ever created. The Gordievskys lived amid the spy fraternity in a designated apartment block, ate special food reserved for officers, and spent their free time socializing with other spy families. His father worked for the intelligence service all his life, and wore his KGB uniform every day, including weekends. The Soviet spy service was in his heart and in his blood. Oleg Gordievsky was born into the KGB: shaped by it, loved by it, twisted, damaged, and very nearly destroyed by it.