Treachery by Harry Chapman Pincher
Treachery | Betrayals, Blunders, and Cover-Ups: Six Decades of Espionage Against America and Great Britain by Harry Chapman Pincher reveals decades of espionage from within British intelligence.
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.
Harry Chapman Pincher is the most experienced and perhaps the best-known British espionage writer. Born in India in 1914, he was educated at King’s College London and the Royal Military College of Science. His book Their Trade Is Treachery, which first charged Sir Roger Hollis with being a Soviet agent, was a sensation. For decades he has been the most effective critic of the British security system, and over the years he has broken scores of stories that have created headlines.
- ISBN: 9781588368591
- 704 pages
- July 7, 2009
Publisher: Random House
