Handbook for Spies

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It was a perfectly ordinary front door. Its shining brass knocker, its neat but slightly faded green paint did not distinguish it from thousands of others of its kind. But that door was my entrance to espionage. Beyond that door lay the dim passageway leading through a twilight labyrinth of international intrigue. Once past that door, my feet were set on the road which led me to Germany, to Switzerland and a Swiss jail, beyond the Iron Curtain to Moscow, and back again to Berlin and freedom. When the door closed behind me there began a ten-year episode which was to end with my being condemned as a spy by the courts of one country and sentenced to death by the decrees of another.

It was an autumn day in October 1938. The leaves were still on the trees lining that pleasant road in St. John's Wood, and there was still something of summer in the air as I walked toward the house with the green door – the door of the flat where I was to be recruited into the Russian Secret Service.

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