Spy Who Came in From the Circus

For almost half a century, Bertram Mills Circus was a household name throughout Britain among both children and adults and it’s Director, Cyril Bertram Mills, was one of the best-known and most influential names in the country’s entertainment business.But for forty years, Cyril Mills had also enjoyed a top-secret and wide-ranging career in British intelligence: obtaining the best aerial intelligence on Nazi rearmament for MI6 before the Second World War; becoming the first case officer to monitor the best double agent (Garbo) of the war after joining MI5; and working part-time during the Cold War ‘for MI5 or 6 or both without being paid a penny’.Remarkably, no word of Mills’s secret career appeared in public until he was over eighty. Nobody suspected that the glamorous world of pre-war circus entertainment had been an extraordinarily fitting rehearsal for the lethal arena of deception and surveillance. In this remarkable true story, Christopher Andrew, best-selling official biographer of MI5, brings to life one of the most surprising and fascinating tales of espionage ever told.

Christopher Andrew is Emeritus Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and former Chair of the Faculty of History at Cambridge University. Founder of the renowned Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, he is also Chair of the British Intelligence Study Group and Founding Co-Editor of Intelligence and National Security. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Toronto and the Australian National universities, and President of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. His sixteen books include The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, which was an international bestseller. He lives in Cambridge.