This weekend the Daily Express had a fantastic feature written by Anna Pukas on Vin Arthey's The Kremlin's Geordie Spy.
"IN the early hours of June 21, 1957, two FBI agents knocked on the door of room 839 at the Latham Hotel in New York.
It was opened by a lean, balding man in his 50s and as he sat on the bed, naked, silent and minus his dentures, he could not have looked more unprepossessing. Though they didn’t yet know it the FBI men had just bagged one of the most important Soviet spies working in the West.
As a search of his hotel room unearthed a miniature photographic kit, messages on microfilm hidden in hollowed out pencils and thousands of dollars in cash it became apparent that the man calling himself Martin Collins – who was wanted for entering the US illegally – had done more than cross the border on a forged passport. Finally he admitted that Collins was not his real name. “My name is Rudolf Ivanovich Abel,” he said.
If the arresting FBI agents wondered how a Russian had acquired such fluent, accentless English they would have found the answers on his birth certificate. Abel was in fact born William August Fisher in 1903 at 140 Clara Street, Benwell, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England. A bona fide British grammar schoolboy he rose to become a colonel in the KGB, as a fascinating new book on his life reveals."<!--more-->
The feature is available to read in its entirety on the Daily Express website.
The Kremlin's Geordie Spy by Vin Arthey is published later this month, and is available for pre-order from the Biteback website, priced £9.99