CLASSIFIED! Adventures of a Molehunter

The military historian Nigel West has been praised that his information is so precise that many people believe he is the unofficial historian of the secret services. His sources are undoubtedly excellent. Over the past 50 years he has been involved in almost every espionage-related investigation, breakthrough or revelation that you can think of. His molehunts have led to the unmasking of spies within MI5, MI6 and the CIA, and the identification of many others, some of whom were crucial to the Allied victory in the Second World War, and would have died without any public recognition were it not for him. West explains that his lifelong fascination began as a schoolboy at Downside where one of the monks, ex-MI6, used to invite a former colleague to give talks to a group of boys. His name was David Cornwell, aka John le Carré. A number of boys in the group later opted for careers in the clandestine world. One of West's greatest coups was finding GARBO, the codename given to Juan Pujol Garcia, a Spaniard living in Venezuela who had played a key role in Double Cross and uniting him with his wartime controller Roger Fleetwood-Hesketh, the mastermind behind Fortitude, the operation which fooled the Germans into thinking the D-Day landings would be in Calais rather than the beaches of Normandy. Another discovery was a Polish spy working for MI6 who had been the mistress of a Nazi head of military intelligence, Admiral Canaris. We meet in these pages the notorious traitors Anthony Blunt, George Blake and John Cairncross, the so-called Fifth Man, the Admiralty Spy John Vassall, lured to lunch at the Savoy when West was key researcher for the TV series Spy! West says : 'My experience of Soviet defectors in the UK suggested that they were also unhappy individuals who were wretched about having broken with the Motherland.' The book shines light on the dark and mysterious world of post-war intelligence. 364pp, eight pages of photos.