We are informed, even warned, at the start that nothing has been made up and that everything in his story has a basis in Paul Willetts’ extensive interviews and archival research. He writes in the style of a television “drama-documentary”: anchored sufficiently in fact to be informative, but not without a touch of imagination. Tyler Kent is a young American of good family and education working in 1939 at the US Embassy in Moscow; not as a diplomat, but as a translator and coder. He has marked right-wing political sympathies, a taste for the high life, and a certain resentment that his career is not advancing as fast as he had hoped. He makes contacts with members of the law enforcement agency NKVD, and is moved by his suspicious employers to a post in London. Here he use