Spy who got the cold shoulder: how the west abandoned its star defector

Michal Goleniewski exposed Soviet agents in the UK, but the CIA airbrushed him from history, says author

On a cold winter's day, eight months before the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, the west's most valuable double agent went on the run in East Berlin. Warned that his colleagues in both the Polish intelligence service and the KGB were on to him, Michal Goleniewski spent days crisscrossing the city, desperately trying to evade their surveillance for long enough to reach the US consulate - and defect to the west.

The day he managed it proved to be one of the most important of the cold war, a new book published later this month will argue. Drawing on previously unpublished documents, it reveals that Goleniewski exposed 1,693 Soviet bloc agents, including some of the most infamous spies of the period.