Treachery

From noted intelligence authority and author Chapman Pincher comes an utterly riveting book that reveals in startling detail sixty years of Soviet spying against Great Britain and the United States. Using a huge cache of recently released documents and exclusive interviews, Pincher makes a compelling new case that–as he has long believed–the head of Britain’s own counterintelligence and security agency was himself a double agent, acting to undermine and imperil the U.K. and America. Written with the power of a heart-pounding thriller, Treachery pulls the mask from intelligence leader Roger Hollis. As a result, years of traitorous action and inaction on his watch come tumbling down.

Pincher reveals Hollis’s early years, when he was schooled at Oxford, which “educated” many agents, and worked in 1930s Shanghai, a hotbed of soon-to-be spies and Soviet recruiters. Hired by MI5–at a time when there was virtually no vetting of employees–he was a gray presence who rose in the ranks over twenty-seven years while, Pincher suspects, he was allowing the most notorious Soviet spies of the century to flourish.

Myriad fascinating case histories are portrayed here, including that of Lt. Igor Gouzenko, a Red Army cipher clerk who said cryptically in 1945 that there was a mole in MI5 with access to important files. Pincher also provides exciting new perspectives on the most infamous operatives of our time, including Kim Philby and Klaus Fuchs. Perhaps most explosively, Pincher posits that long after Hollis stepped down, a cover-up was perpetrated at the highest levels, and that Margaret Thatcher was induced to mislead Parliament to prevent the truth from coming out.

An essential volume for a world potentially facing a new cold war as Russia dangerously flexes its military and espionage muscles once again, Treachery warns us to protect our society and institutions from enemy infiltration in the future. This is a revelatory work that puts twentieth-century politics and war into stunning new relief.