Classified! The Adventures of a Molehunter by Nigel West

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29 February 2024

Nigel West is perhaps our most authoritative author on espionage and the secret services. His first encounter with the intelligence community was a lecture given at his school by John le Carré, the guest of a Benedictine monk who had recently retired from MI6. The priest, who had killed a German civilian while escaping from a PoW camp in 1942, inspired many of his pupils to join the intelligence community. West’s most recent investigation involved the identification in 2023 of a Soviet mole inside the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. In between, he worked as a researcher for a wartime SOE agent, Ronnie Seth, who was sentenced to death by the Nazis after he had been captured during Operation Blunderhead; exposed two of the Cambridge spies recruited by Anthony Blunt, and then participated in an MI5 operation to obtain a deathbed confession from a suspected Soviet spy who had joined the organisation in 1937, and by 1963 had risen to be Deputy Director-General. Later still, in 1984, in time for the 40th anniversary of the D-Day landings, West traced the MI5 double agent codenamed Garbo - perhaps the most influential spy of the Second World War - to Venezuela, and brought him to London so he could be decorated at Buckingham Palace. As action-packed as those of the spies he has written about, Classified! Is the surprising life story of one of our most celebrated writers.