"The deadline was close and I knew now what London had sent me out here to do: define, infiltrate and destroy. And I couldn't do it just by standing in the way of the program Moscow was running. I'd have to get inside and blow it up from there."

Across the black snowscape of Poland's capital, a city where winter is more than a season, falls the shadow of a British Intelligence operation designed to save detente from explosion-an operation that pivots on an agent callously thrown into the front line of the Cold War and caught in the crossfire.

"Entertainment of the first rank." (The Guardian, London)