Another agent recruited by Maxwell Knight was Joan Miller, a member of various right-wing organizations. He had by then spent five months at the Slade School in 1943 and the piece was written after the unnamed Herald reporter encountered him in the Towner Art Gallery and discovered that – partly because finding German ‘doodlebugs’ (V1 flying bombs) ‘somewhat trying’ – he had moved to 4 Ivy Terrace Eastbourne and enrolled in Eastbourne Art School for the last three weeks of the 1944 summer term. But whereas Blunt was undoubtedly a Soviet spy, the accusations against the other three individuals were later proved groundless.

Diaries, it is true, have the advantage of immediacy over memoirs, but one still has to bear in mind for whose benefit they are written. Washington was not keen, distinguishing between the activities of the Comintern, with which the Soviet government had consistently denied any link, and those of German Nazi and Italian Fascist political organisations which were "admittedly connected with the political parties controlling the governments of Germany and Italy respectively". This is the first volume of Nigel West's acclaimed presentation of these fascinating diaries from the heart of Britain's Second World War intelligence operations. Moreover, West cites one of his sources for his bibliographic entry on Liddell as Richard Deacon’s Greatest Treason.Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. We have it solely on Liddell’s word that Archer was fired, in November 1940, at Jasper Harker’s behest, because she had reputedly mocked the rather pompous Deputy Director-General once too much. Regarded by historians as the most important military intelligence documents from the whole of the Second World War.

They had one son and three daughters; Peter Lorillard Liddell (1927–2004), Elizabeth Gay Liddell (born 1928), Juno Liddell (1930–1968) and Maude Liddell (baptised Anne Jennifer Liddell) (born 1931). After the war, Liddell joined Scotland Yard where, in liaison with Special Branch and the Foreign Office, he was involved in breaking a spy ring based around the All Russian Cooperative Society in London. Papers released since have all but completely cleared him of the charge, with the general academic consensus being that he was naïve in his friendships with some of his colleagues.Why would you claim, on the one hand, that Liddell was a brilliant counter-espionage officer while on the other pointing your readers towards Richard Deacon, who thought he was a communist mole?

He drafted the patently mendacious, demonstrably erroneous 1955 white paper on the Burgess-Maclean defection. For example, Michael Jago (the same) in his biography of John Bingham, The Spy Who Was George Smiley, relates how Maxwell Knight tried to convince Bingham to replace him as head of the agent-runners. These include Sir Dick White, Philby's nemesis in both MI5 and MI6, both of which White headed, and Peter Wright (of Spycatcher fame), one of the most avid of all mole-hunters.By December he was still attending two days a week and had ‘rigged up’ a studio in premises on Silverdale Road. These diary entries, we are told, were dictated to his assistant (a jolly loyal assistant, I must believe) at the end of the working day. As chaos mounted during 1940, and Harker was judged to be ill-equipped for leadership, David Petrie was brought in to head the organisation, and in July 1941 he instituted a new structure in which counter-intelligence against communist subversion was hived off into a new F Division, initially under John Curry.