Yes, dear blog readers, your eyes are not deceiving you. Self finally, finally finished reading Con/Artist: A Memoir. It only took 10 days! At the end, Tony Tetro still owns four luxury cars. He found a second home in Puerto Rico. He vows: “In a few months I will return to London and visit the British Museum.”
Onward!
Self is only a few pages into her next read, her first Ben Macintyre book in aaaaages, The Spy and The Traitor. And it is already enthralling.
The main is a KGB operative named Oleg Gordievsky who, upon receiving his first foreign posting, in Copenhagen, decides to test the limits of his freedom by going to Copenhagen’s red-light district and entering a sex shop. Faster than you can say KGB-Operative-Enters-a-Sex-Store, he ends up walking out with three homosexual magazines, which he takes great delight in showing to his wife.
- Either PET (NOT the KGB, the Politiets Efterretningstjeneste — the Danish Security and Intelligence Service) was monitoring Copenhagen’s red-light district or the Danes were shadowing Gordievsky, because he was spotted entering the sex shop and buying homosexual porn magazines.
OOPSIE!
For the first time in Western intelligence files, “a question mark appeared alongside Gordievsky’s name.” Spotting an opening, the Danes thenceforward regularly threw young Danish men Gordievsky’s way, trying for “homosexual entrapment.” LOL
Prompted by his apparent taste for gay pornography, the Danes had set a honeytrap, one of the oldest, grubbiest, and most effective techniques in espionage.
PET could not understand why the honeytrap failed.
Stay tuned.