Nigel West is perhaps our most authoritative writer on espionage and the secret services. His first encounter with the intelligence community was a lecture given at his school by John le Carre, the guest of a Benedictine monk who had recently retired from MI6. The monk, 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 of a Soviet mole inside the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation in 2023. In between, he worked as a researcher for a wartime SOE agent, Ronnie Seth, who was sentenced to death by the Nazis after being captured during Operation Blunderhead; exposed two of the Cambridge spies recruited by Anthony Blunt; and participated in an MI5 operation to obtain a deathbed confession from a suspected Soviet spy who had joined MI5 in 1937 and risen to be deputy director-general by 1963. In 1984, in time for the fortieth 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 the lives of the spies he has written about, Classified! is the surprising life story of one of our most celebrated writers.
