First edition

DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC., GARDEN CITY, N. Y., 1949

Printed in the United States at The Country Life Press, Garden City, N. Y.

ENTRANCE TO ESPIONAGE

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.

As a result of my call I was for three vital years of the war a member and, to a large extent, controller of the Russian spy net in Switzerland which was working against Germany. The information passed to Moscow over my secret transmitter affected the course of the war at one of its crucial stages. I was a key link in a network whose lines stretched into the heart of the German high command itself; and it was I who sent back much of the information which enabled the Russians to make their successful stand before Moscow.

This story is entirely factual; every incident and every character is true and genuine. The result may prove disillusioning to those who believe that every brunette is a spy and every blonde a virtuous woman in distress. Actually, of course, the life of a spy is often extremely dull and prosaic. It is the ambition of the good spy to be as inconspicuous and ordinary as possible. Anything out of the ordinary is liable to attract attention or, worse still, arouse suspicion. A suspected spy is well on the way to being an arrested spy, so it can be understood why a spy has a liking for the cloak of mediocrity.