Every Spy a Traitor, page 34
‘Of course!’ The private secretaries spoke in a chorus and stood up and hands were warmly shaken and the man who was there from MI6 announced perhaps this was the opportunity to close The Annexe and subsume its functions into the Service.
Percy Burton was escorted back to The Annexe’s offices in Bryanston Square to collect a few personal possessions, unlock his safe and hand over the main Annexe codebook and his master list of contacts.
And that was that. A Service car took him to his London apartment where he was finally able to reflect on matters. He was upset, of course, at the rapid turn of events, but not a little relieved at the same time. But most of all, he was shocked that in their haste to get rid of him the private secretaries had failed to pursue answers for the questions they’d originally asked, not least who the source for this information was.
He did wonder how Cooper would get on now, because in these circumstances the staff who worked for The Annexe would be absorbed into MI6, but agents were cut adrift.
Percy Burton had taken precautions though. When it became apparent earlier in the week that something was up in Moscow, he did anticipate that he could be in some kind of trouble, so he’d taken Cliff Milne’s Molotov letters and the negatives from The Annexe and quite contrary to every rule in the book, placed them in a bank security deposit box under an assumed name.
One never knew when one would find intelligence like this to be useful.
* * *
Cooper had been oblivious to the events of that last weekend in August. He’d followed the news closely, of course, and his reaction to the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact, as it was being called, was one of vindication. He knew Burton would be delighted and probably quite apologetic and he waited for a message to come to The Annexe.
But no message came.
In those last days of August, the atmosphere in the King Street headquarters of the Communist Party was as tense as he’d ever known it: more meetings behind closed doors and furtive conversations in dimly lit corridors.
Cliff Milne acted like someone who’d suffered a terrible bereavement. He looked pale and drawn, hardly spoke and spent much of the time in his inner office with the door locked. He left in a hurry on the Thursday afternoon, carrying two briefcases and wearing an overcoat, which struck Cooper as odd as it was such a warm day and it also struck him as out of character when he paused to shake Cooper’s hand before leaving.
Cooper waited an hour and then broke into the safe.
It was empty, apart from a solitary ten-shilling note on the middle shelf.
It was obvious something was up, and Cooper realised he too had to leave King Street quickly.
Rather than returning to the safe house in Willesden he headed to Dorset Square and feeling the need to be even more careful than usual, walked all the way to Park Lane to catch the number 74 bus, stopping en route at a telephone box in New Bond Street to dial a Pimlico number.
It was the first time he called it.
It was only to be used in an extreme emergency, Burton had told him. ‘If you think your life may be in danger,’ Pamela had added, and although he thought that may be going a bit far, he sensed something serious was up and certainly the fact he’d heard nothing from The Annexe for a week now, despite the grave international situation, was most worrying.
A man answered the phone, saying ‘how may I help you?’ in a bored manner and this took Cooper aback because for some reason, he’d expected a woman to answer the phone and rather more urgently.
‘I am in town for a couple of days and would very much like to meet with my Uncle Robert.’ He hoped he’d got the message exactly right because otherwise the call would be aborted.
‘And is that his nephew, Alan?’
‘No, it’s Alan’s brother, Graham.’
‘Very well, I shall pass the message on.’
And that was that. It should all be fine now.
* * *
But nothing happened. He returned to Dorset Square and expected to hear back from The Annexe within a couple of hours or certainly that evening but the phone remained silent and he went to bed at midnight and hardly slept until dawn when he eventually dozed off and when he woke up it was gone eleven o’clock and the phone was still silent and he had no idea what to do other than remain in the flat and wait.
At noon he turned on the radio to catch the midday news.
Germany has invaded Poland.
Five German armies including tanks and cavalry units have crossed the border.
Over one million troops taking part in the invasion.
Fierce Polish resistance.
Warsaw and other Polish cities have been bombed.
The British and French governments have issued an ultimatum.
He was so shocked he turned off the radio and for some reason closed the curtains, only to find himself spending the next hour peeking out of them and then decided he couldn’t stay in the flat and wondered about going to The Annexe, but planned instead to head to the safe house in Willesden where there’d most probably be a message waiting for him. Maybe he ought to have headed there in the first place.
But the house in Willesden appeared to be abandoned. No one answered the door, there were no lights, and this was unusual because it was very rare for Mr Meldrake to leave the house, and now Cooper was very worried because none of this felt right and, if he was honest, he was rather frightened.
He returned to Dorset Square and after pacing around it for the best part of an hour decided his best course of action would be to go to The Annexe after all.
He’d get it sorted there. After all, he’d provided first-class intelligence and had been proved right. Maybe the message to the Pimlico number hadn’t been passed on. No doubt with the Soviet–German pact and Germany invading Poland everyone was rather busy.
He had a bath and got changed and felt better and decided to open the curtains but before doing so peered out of the gap.
He stood frozen in terror, gripping the curtains so hard it seemed they may come off the rails and his heartbeat quickening as a cold fear wrapped around him.
Below him in the square was the unmistakable figure of Murray, pausing to light a cigarette and casually looking in the direction of his apartment and then at his watch.
It took Cooper a whole minute to regain his composure and then another five minutes to throw a few things into an overnight bag, including all his papers and his cash.
He slipped out through the rear of the building, worried Murray may have someone covering it, but then remembered he preferred to work on his own. There was a small wall to clamber over then a narrow alley leading into the mews and from there into Linhope Street, trying to walk as calmly as possibly, skirting Regent’s Park and north towards Primrose Hill, where he found a pleasant-looking small hotel and booked a room in the name of Dickens and when asked for his first name for some unaccountable reason he said ‘Percy’ and he couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid and the fact that Percy was on his mind was hardly any kind of an excuse.
* * *
He remained in his room for most of the Saturday and Pamela Clarke found him the next morning, the Sunday.
Soon after he’d come down for breakfast, he heard a woman’s voice behind him ask if he minded her joining him and before he could answer she’d sat down and said well done for choosing a table in the corner and would he mind passing the sugar?
She looked exhausted, like someone who’d not slept in days, and when she lit a cigarette her hand was trembling.
‘How on earth did you find me?’
She didn’t answer for a moment, the narrowing of her eyes indicating she wasn’t in the mood to discuss it. ‘That really doesn’t matter, though it ought to be a lesson to you as to how careful you need to be.’ She drank from her teacup with the same hand which was holding the cigarette and Cooper found himself thinking that looked quite stylish, almost Continental.
‘I don’t have long, Cooper, so you need to listen most carefully. Don’t ring the Pimlico number ever again. Under no circumstances are you to go anywhere near Bryanston Square or your apartment or the house in Willesden. You must not visit or telephone your mother. Do not return to King Street. Do not have any contact with anyone from the Communist Party.’
‘And what about Murray because—’
‘Forget about Murray and forget about Burton.’ She poured herself another cup of tea and said he ought to eat some breakfast and act normally.
‘The Annexe no longer exists. For the time being you are in great danger. That applies to a number of us, myself included.’
‘How long is for the time being?’
He’d expected her to be annoyed at the question, but she replied in a business-like manner.
‘There’s an envelope here with some cash and a new identity for you. Check out of this hotel after breakfast and leave London and then disappear for a few weeks. There’s a telephone number in the envelope. You’re to ring that number in the first week of October, not before then. You’re to say you have a violin to be repaired and the person who answers will ask you what is the problem and you’re to say the bridge is broken. They’ll give you an address to bring it to. You’re to go there.’
‘And if no one answers?’
Pamela was standing up now. Her hair was loose and when she ran her hand through it she looked as pretty as she had done that foggy February afternoon outside Aldgate station and Cooper couldn’t help thinking what would have happened had he not stopped then and taken one of her leaflets.
‘If no one answers? Then God help you. There’s something I need to ask you before I go.’
She hesitated for a moment or two and leant closer to him, her face just inches from his. He could smell the cigarette and perfume.
‘Does the name Archie mean anything to you? I need to know if it does.’
Cooper was unsure how to answer. Burton had told him about Archie a year previously, but he didn’t know whether he should admit to that. After all, she’d just told him he should forget about Burton.
‘No, I don’t believe so… may I ask in connection with what?’
She shook her head and then tapped the brown envelope on the white tablecloth before sweeping out of the room.
He went up to his room to pack and decided he’d walk to Chalk Farm Road and catch the 639 bus to Kings Cross. He’d take the first train north he could get on and he’d keep moving and maybe everything would be fine.
When he went down to reception it was approaching a quarter past eleven and he asked if they could prepare his bill because he was checking out, but the receptionist seemed distracted, so much so that he asked if she was all right and she pointed to the lounge, which was full of guests and staff gathered round a radio set.
‘The prime minister is about to make an announcement sir.’
Cooper stood at the back of the warm room, crowded with people looking like mourners awaiting the start of a funeral service.
The silence was broken by the voice of Neville Chamberlain.
‘This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.’
There were gasps in the room and the sound of soft weeping and muffled coughing and an elderly man said, ‘Good God!’ and someone else turned up the radio.
Cooper was in such a state of shock that much of what the prime minister subsequently said didn’t register, apart from his final words.
‘It is the evil things that we shall be fighting against – brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution – and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.’
Author’s Note
Every Spy a Traitor is a work of fiction and therefore any similarities between the characters in the book and real people are unintended and should be regarded as purely coincidental.
There are some obvious exceptions to this – historical figures such as Stalin and others who are referred to in the text, though not appearing as characters in themselves. The one person who does feature as a character is Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, who as the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs from May 1939 was the Soviet Foreign Minister and the man behind the Soviet Union’s notorious pact with Nazi Germany.
Likewise, Maxim Litvinov. He was the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs from 1930 until being replaced by Molotov in 1939. He was regarded as an opponent of any pact with Germany and when he was dismissed, Stalin said: ‘The Soviet Government intended to improve its relations with Hitler and if possible sign a pact with Nazi Germany. As a Jew and an avowed opponent of such a policy, Litvinov stood in the way.’
Despite this, Litvinov survived: he was Soviet ambassador to the United States from 1941 until 1943 and died in 1951 at the age of seventy-five.
The Nazi–Soviet Pact – also known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact – is referred to from Chapter 29 onwards. For readers interested in finding out more about it, I highly recommend The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin 1939–1941 (Vintage, 2016) by my friend Roger Moorhouse.
The details about the events leading up to the Pact in the Molotov letters (Chapter 32) are accurate, though the letters themselves are fictional. Likewise, the antisemitism alluded to in this chapter was certainly an aspect of the Soviet Union under Stalin.
Isidor Yevstigneyevich Lyubimov in Chapter 27 was also a real person.
Currencies and their relative value are always a bit of a minefield – if that’s the right metaphor – but if it helps, £10 in 1937 would be the equivalent of £560 today, which equates to $700 (US) and €640.
Goslitizdat, or the State Publishing House of Fiction, referred to in Chapter 10, did exist, though of course its role here is fictional, in keeping with their chosen genre. In Chapter 7, the quote from a guide book about ‘fruitless Parliamentarianism’ and ‘the reawakening of race-consciousness’ is taken from an original 1936 edition of the Baedeker Travel Guide to Germany.
I do try to ensure that when I refer to a place by name – be it a town or a city, a railway station or a street or hotel or even a restaurant – then that place would have existed at the time. My sources are a mixture of original research and contemporary guide books and maps.
All the intelligence organisations featured in Every Spy a Traitor are genuine. The one exception is The Annexe, which is completely fictional – as is its location in Bryanston Square and the hiring of assassins.
As a general rule – though not an absolute one – characters in my books are always fictional unless I state otherwise or they’re obviously historical figures. On the other hand, readers can assume that places are genuine.
One of these places is 16 King Street in the Covent Garden area of Central London, which in Every Spy a Traitor is infiltrated by Cooper. It was the headquarters of the Communist Party of Great Britain during the war and indeed up to 1991. Many of the Communist Party leaders referred to in the book were real people: Pollitt, Gallagher, Campbell, Dutt, Rust, Klugman and Springhall. Pollitt, Gallagher and Campbell were the only members of the Party’s Central Committee to oppose the Soviet Union’s Pact with the Nazis when it met in October 1939.
Other communists featured in the book – notably Cliff Milne and Douglas Marsh – are fictional characters. If you’re interested in finding out more about the British Communist Party, I can recommend a book by another friend: Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party by Francis Beckett (The Merlin Press, 1998).
Sir Hugh Sinclair (first mentioned in Chapter 18) was Head of MI6 until his death in November 1939. All other intelligence officers named in the book – British and Soviet – are fictional.
The facts about the Spanish Civil War and the locations in Barcelona (Chapter 25) are all accurate. The hardware store called Rafols was a secret Republican base and is now an excellent restaurant called Casa Rafols and a particularly pleasant venue for research. I was able to visit what was the hidden basement: it is now a club, but is entered through a door disguised as a mirror, as it was during the Civil War.
I’d especially like to thank my agent, Gordon Wise, and his colleagues at Curtis Brown. Gordon has been enormously supportive and encouraging for many years now and I’m delighted to be able to express my appreciation. Likewise, my sincere thanks to my publishers, Canelo, who couldn’t have been more supportive and professional with the manner in which they’ve handled all three of my series published by them – eleven novels – prior to this one. As ever, Michael Bhaskar and the whole team at Canelo have been thoroughly professional, supportive and encouraging throughout the writing and publication process. This is the last of my novels that Michael has commissioned and been involved with. He’s stepping back from day-to-day involvement at Canelo and I’m delighted that Craig Lye is my new editor: he’s been closely involved with Every Spy a Traitor and his input and advice has been invaluable. I’d like to thank James Macey at Black Sheep for the cover design and Jo Gledhill for her skilful copy-edit, and to everyone who helped me with aspects of the book and answered seemingly odd questions as I was writing it.
And, finally, to my family – especially my wife, Sonia, my daughters, their partners and my grandsons – for their encouragement, understanding and love.
Alex Gerlis
London, December 2023
About the Author
Alex Gerlis was born in Lincolnshire and worked as a BBC journalist for nearly thirty years. His first novel, The Best of Our Spies (2012), is an Amazon bestseller and has been optioned for television serialisation.
Every Spy a Traitor is Alex’s twelfth novel and is the first in a new series of four novels, spanning the mid 1930s to the late 1950s, through Stalin’s Great Purge, the rise of the Nazis, the Second World War and the Cold War.
Percy Burton was escorted back to The Annexe’s offices in Bryanston Square to collect a few personal possessions, unlock his safe and hand over the main Annexe codebook and his master list of contacts.
And that was that. A Service car took him to his London apartment where he was finally able to reflect on matters. He was upset, of course, at the rapid turn of events, but not a little relieved at the same time. But most of all, he was shocked that in their haste to get rid of him the private secretaries had failed to pursue answers for the questions they’d originally asked, not least who the source for this information was.
He did wonder how Cooper would get on now, because in these circumstances the staff who worked for The Annexe would be absorbed into MI6, but agents were cut adrift.
Percy Burton had taken precautions though. When it became apparent earlier in the week that something was up in Moscow, he did anticipate that he could be in some kind of trouble, so he’d taken Cliff Milne’s Molotov letters and the negatives from The Annexe and quite contrary to every rule in the book, placed them in a bank security deposit box under an assumed name.
One never knew when one would find intelligence like this to be useful.
* * *
Cooper had been oblivious to the events of that last weekend in August. He’d followed the news closely, of course, and his reaction to the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact, as it was being called, was one of vindication. He knew Burton would be delighted and probably quite apologetic and he waited for a message to come to The Annexe.
But no message came.
In those last days of August, the atmosphere in the King Street headquarters of the Communist Party was as tense as he’d ever known it: more meetings behind closed doors and furtive conversations in dimly lit corridors.
Cliff Milne acted like someone who’d suffered a terrible bereavement. He looked pale and drawn, hardly spoke and spent much of the time in his inner office with the door locked. He left in a hurry on the Thursday afternoon, carrying two briefcases and wearing an overcoat, which struck Cooper as odd as it was such a warm day and it also struck him as out of character when he paused to shake Cooper’s hand before leaving.
Cooper waited an hour and then broke into the safe.
It was empty, apart from a solitary ten-shilling note on the middle shelf.
It was obvious something was up, and Cooper realised he too had to leave King Street quickly.
Rather than returning to the safe house in Willesden he headed to Dorset Square and feeling the need to be even more careful than usual, walked all the way to Park Lane to catch the number 74 bus, stopping en route at a telephone box in New Bond Street to dial a Pimlico number.
It was the first time he called it.
It was only to be used in an extreme emergency, Burton had told him. ‘If you think your life may be in danger,’ Pamela had added, and although he thought that may be going a bit far, he sensed something serious was up and certainly the fact he’d heard nothing from The Annexe for a week now, despite the grave international situation, was most worrying.
A man answered the phone, saying ‘how may I help you?’ in a bored manner and this took Cooper aback because for some reason, he’d expected a woman to answer the phone and rather more urgently.
‘I am in town for a couple of days and would very much like to meet with my Uncle Robert.’ He hoped he’d got the message exactly right because otherwise the call would be aborted.
‘And is that his nephew, Alan?’
‘No, it’s Alan’s brother, Graham.’
‘Very well, I shall pass the message on.’
And that was that. It should all be fine now.
* * *
But nothing happened. He returned to Dorset Square and expected to hear back from The Annexe within a couple of hours or certainly that evening but the phone remained silent and he went to bed at midnight and hardly slept until dawn when he eventually dozed off and when he woke up it was gone eleven o’clock and the phone was still silent and he had no idea what to do other than remain in the flat and wait.
At noon he turned on the radio to catch the midday news.
Germany has invaded Poland.
Five German armies including tanks and cavalry units have crossed the border.
Over one million troops taking part in the invasion.
Fierce Polish resistance.
Warsaw and other Polish cities have been bombed.
The British and French governments have issued an ultimatum.
He was so shocked he turned off the radio and for some reason closed the curtains, only to find himself spending the next hour peeking out of them and then decided he couldn’t stay in the flat and wondered about going to The Annexe, but planned instead to head to the safe house in Willesden where there’d most probably be a message waiting for him. Maybe he ought to have headed there in the first place.
But the house in Willesden appeared to be abandoned. No one answered the door, there were no lights, and this was unusual because it was very rare for Mr Meldrake to leave the house, and now Cooper was very worried because none of this felt right and, if he was honest, he was rather frightened.
He returned to Dorset Square and after pacing around it for the best part of an hour decided his best course of action would be to go to The Annexe after all.
He’d get it sorted there. After all, he’d provided first-class intelligence and had been proved right. Maybe the message to the Pimlico number hadn’t been passed on. No doubt with the Soviet–German pact and Germany invading Poland everyone was rather busy.
He had a bath and got changed and felt better and decided to open the curtains but before doing so peered out of the gap.
He stood frozen in terror, gripping the curtains so hard it seemed they may come off the rails and his heartbeat quickening as a cold fear wrapped around him.
Below him in the square was the unmistakable figure of Murray, pausing to light a cigarette and casually looking in the direction of his apartment and then at his watch.
It took Cooper a whole minute to regain his composure and then another five minutes to throw a few things into an overnight bag, including all his papers and his cash.
He slipped out through the rear of the building, worried Murray may have someone covering it, but then remembered he preferred to work on his own. There was a small wall to clamber over then a narrow alley leading into the mews and from there into Linhope Street, trying to walk as calmly as possibly, skirting Regent’s Park and north towards Primrose Hill, where he found a pleasant-looking small hotel and booked a room in the name of Dickens and when asked for his first name for some unaccountable reason he said ‘Percy’ and he couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid and the fact that Percy was on his mind was hardly any kind of an excuse.
* * *
He remained in his room for most of the Saturday and Pamela Clarke found him the next morning, the Sunday.
Soon after he’d come down for breakfast, he heard a woman’s voice behind him ask if he minded her joining him and before he could answer she’d sat down and said well done for choosing a table in the corner and would he mind passing the sugar?
She looked exhausted, like someone who’d not slept in days, and when she lit a cigarette her hand was trembling.
‘How on earth did you find me?’
She didn’t answer for a moment, the narrowing of her eyes indicating she wasn’t in the mood to discuss it. ‘That really doesn’t matter, though it ought to be a lesson to you as to how careful you need to be.’ She drank from her teacup with the same hand which was holding the cigarette and Cooper found himself thinking that looked quite stylish, almost Continental.
‘I don’t have long, Cooper, so you need to listen most carefully. Don’t ring the Pimlico number ever again. Under no circumstances are you to go anywhere near Bryanston Square or your apartment or the house in Willesden. You must not visit or telephone your mother. Do not return to King Street. Do not have any contact with anyone from the Communist Party.’
‘And what about Murray because—’
‘Forget about Murray and forget about Burton.’ She poured herself another cup of tea and said he ought to eat some breakfast and act normally.
‘The Annexe no longer exists. For the time being you are in great danger. That applies to a number of us, myself included.’
‘How long is for the time being?’
He’d expected her to be annoyed at the question, but she replied in a business-like manner.
‘There’s an envelope here with some cash and a new identity for you. Check out of this hotel after breakfast and leave London and then disappear for a few weeks. There’s a telephone number in the envelope. You’re to ring that number in the first week of October, not before then. You’re to say you have a violin to be repaired and the person who answers will ask you what is the problem and you’re to say the bridge is broken. They’ll give you an address to bring it to. You’re to go there.’
‘And if no one answers?’
Pamela was standing up now. Her hair was loose and when she ran her hand through it she looked as pretty as she had done that foggy February afternoon outside Aldgate station and Cooper couldn’t help thinking what would have happened had he not stopped then and taken one of her leaflets.
‘If no one answers? Then God help you. There’s something I need to ask you before I go.’
She hesitated for a moment or two and leant closer to him, her face just inches from his. He could smell the cigarette and perfume.
‘Does the name Archie mean anything to you? I need to know if it does.’
Cooper was unsure how to answer. Burton had told him about Archie a year previously, but he didn’t know whether he should admit to that. After all, she’d just told him he should forget about Burton.
‘No, I don’t believe so… may I ask in connection with what?’
She shook her head and then tapped the brown envelope on the white tablecloth before sweeping out of the room.
He went up to his room to pack and decided he’d walk to Chalk Farm Road and catch the 639 bus to Kings Cross. He’d take the first train north he could get on and he’d keep moving and maybe everything would be fine.
When he went down to reception it was approaching a quarter past eleven and he asked if they could prepare his bill because he was checking out, but the receptionist seemed distracted, so much so that he asked if she was all right and she pointed to the lounge, which was full of guests and staff gathered round a radio set.
‘The prime minister is about to make an announcement sir.’
Cooper stood at the back of the warm room, crowded with people looking like mourners awaiting the start of a funeral service.
The silence was broken by the voice of Neville Chamberlain.
‘This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.’
There were gasps in the room and the sound of soft weeping and muffled coughing and an elderly man said, ‘Good God!’ and someone else turned up the radio.
Cooper was in such a state of shock that much of what the prime minister subsequently said didn’t register, apart from his final words.
‘It is the evil things that we shall be fighting against – brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution – and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.’
Author’s Note
Every Spy a Traitor is a work of fiction and therefore any similarities between the characters in the book and real people are unintended and should be regarded as purely coincidental.
There are some obvious exceptions to this – historical figures such as Stalin and others who are referred to in the text, though not appearing as characters in themselves. The one person who does feature as a character is Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, who as the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs from May 1939 was the Soviet Foreign Minister and the man behind the Soviet Union’s notorious pact with Nazi Germany.
Likewise, Maxim Litvinov. He was the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs from 1930 until being replaced by Molotov in 1939. He was regarded as an opponent of any pact with Germany and when he was dismissed, Stalin said: ‘The Soviet Government intended to improve its relations with Hitler and if possible sign a pact with Nazi Germany. As a Jew and an avowed opponent of such a policy, Litvinov stood in the way.’
Despite this, Litvinov survived: he was Soviet ambassador to the United States from 1941 until 1943 and died in 1951 at the age of seventy-five.
The Nazi–Soviet Pact – also known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact – is referred to from Chapter 29 onwards. For readers interested in finding out more about it, I highly recommend The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin 1939–1941 (Vintage, 2016) by my friend Roger Moorhouse.
The details about the events leading up to the Pact in the Molotov letters (Chapter 32) are accurate, though the letters themselves are fictional. Likewise, the antisemitism alluded to in this chapter was certainly an aspect of the Soviet Union under Stalin.
Isidor Yevstigneyevich Lyubimov in Chapter 27 was also a real person.
Currencies and their relative value are always a bit of a minefield – if that’s the right metaphor – but if it helps, £10 in 1937 would be the equivalent of £560 today, which equates to $700 (US) and €640.
Goslitizdat, or the State Publishing House of Fiction, referred to in Chapter 10, did exist, though of course its role here is fictional, in keeping with their chosen genre. In Chapter 7, the quote from a guide book about ‘fruitless Parliamentarianism’ and ‘the reawakening of race-consciousness’ is taken from an original 1936 edition of the Baedeker Travel Guide to Germany.
I do try to ensure that when I refer to a place by name – be it a town or a city, a railway station or a street or hotel or even a restaurant – then that place would have existed at the time. My sources are a mixture of original research and contemporary guide books and maps.
All the intelligence organisations featured in Every Spy a Traitor are genuine. The one exception is The Annexe, which is completely fictional – as is its location in Bryanston Square and the hiring of assassins.
As a general rule – though not an absolute one – characters in my books are always fictional unless I state otherwise or they’re obviously historical figures. On the other hand, readers can assume that places are genuine.
One of these places is 16 King Street in the Covent Garden area of Central London, which in Every Spy a Traitor is infiltrated by Cooper. It was the headquarters of the Communist Party of Great Britain during the war and indeed up to 1991. Many of the Communist Party leaders referred to in the book were real people: Pollitt, Gallagher, Campbell, Dutt, Rust, Klugman and Springhall. Pollitt, Gallagher and Campbell were the only members of the Party’s Central Committee to oppose the Soviet Union’s Pact with the Nazis when it met in October 1939.
Other communists featured in the book – notably Cliff Milne and Douglas Marsh – are fictional characters. If you’re interested in finding out more about the British Communist Party, I can recommend a book by another friend: Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party by Francis Beckett (The Merlin Press, 1998).
Sir Hugh Sinclair (first mentioned in Chapter 18) was Head of MI6 until his death in November 1939. All other intelligence officers named in the book – British and Soviet – are fictional.
The facts about the Spanish Civil War and the locations in Barcelona (Chapter 25) are all accurate. The hardware store called Rafols was a secret Republican base and is now an excellent restaurant called Casa Rafols and a particularly pleasant venue for research. I was able to visit what was the hidden basement: it is now a club, but is entered through a door disguised as a mirror, as it was during the Civil War.
I’d especially like to thank my agent, Gordon Wise, and his colleagues at Curtis Brown. Gordon has been enormously supportive and encouraging for many years now and I’m delighted to be able to express my appreciation. Likewise, my sincere thanks to my publishers, Canelo, who couldn’t have been more supportive and professional with the manner in which they’ve handled all three of my series published by them – eleven novels – prior to this one. As ever, Michael Bhaskar and the whole team at Canelo have been thoroughly professional, supportive and encouraging throughout the writing and publication process. This is the last of my novels that Michael has commissioned and been involved with. He’s stepping back from day-to-day involvement at Canelo and I’m delighted that Craig Lye is my new editor: he’s been closely involved with Every Spy a Traitor and his input and advice has been invaluable. I’d like to thank James Macey at Black Sheep for the cover design and Jo Gledhill for her skilful copy-edit, and to everyone who helped me with aspects of the book and answered seemingly odd questions as I was writing it.
And, finally, to my family – especially my wife, Sonia, my daughters, their partners and my grandsons – for their encouragement, understanding and love.
Alex Gerlis
London, December 2023
About the Author
Alex Gerlis was born in Lincolnshire and worked as a BBC journalist for nearly thirty years. His first novel, The Best of Our Spies (2012), is an Amazon bestseller and has been optioned for television serialisation.
Every Spy a Traitor is Alex’s twelfth novel and is the first in a new series of four novels, spanning the mid 1930s to the late 1950s, through Stalin’s Great Purge, the rise of the Nazis, the Second World War and the Cold War.
