Trotsky's Favourite Spy: The Life Of George Alexander Hill
UnaKroll was eleven when she first met her father. They stopped for lunch on theway from Brighton to London and he took her outside to play with theinnkeeper's Angora rabbit. In that pub garden, this stranger uttered words thatsent a chill through her heart, he would not be coming home. There was anotherwoman. Scarcely comprehending, she buried her face in the white rabbit's furand refused to cry. The lonely little girl already knew how to hide her tearsand she had invented a childish fantasy about her absent father to fend offunsympathetic classmates. He was an aviator and explorer who had gone missingin the desert, she told them.
Thiswas less extraordinary than the truth. Only years later did she discover thatGeorge Hill, her father, was a British spy who had befriended Trotsky at thetime of the Russian Revolution. He had smuggled the Romanian crown jewels outof the Soviet Union and was involved in a doomed attempt to rescue the Tsar. Duringthe Second World War he acted as the link between Churchill's SpecialOperations Executive and Stalin's secret service, the NKVD.
Una's mother, HildaPediani, had been one of his agents and one of many lovers. He married her sothat Una would be legitimate, but took no part in the child's upbringing. It wasa rare sympathetic act by a man who was capable of great bravery, but littlecompassion.
In this compelling memoir, author Peter Day brings to life the world of twentieth-century espionage through the story of one of Britain's most remarkable spies.
Peter Day is a former senior reporter at the Mail on Sunday. A writer and journalist, he writes regularly for the Sunday Times and Mail on Sunday.
Author: Peter Day
Format: Hardback, 304 pages
Published: 2017, Biteback Publishing, United Kingdom
Genre: Biography: Historical, Political & Military
UnaKroll was eleven when she first met her father. They stopped for lunch on theway from Brighton to London and he took her outside to play with theinnkeeper's Angora rabbit. In that pub garden, this stranger uttered words thatsent a chill through her heart, he would not be coming home. There was anotherwoman. Scarcely comprehending, she buried her face in the white rabbit's furand refused to cry. The lonely little girl already knew how to hide her tearsand she had invented a childish fantasy about her absent father to fend offunsympathetic classmates. He was an aviator and explorer who had gone missingin the desert, she told them.
Thiswas less extraordinary than the truth. Only years later did she discover thatGeorge Hill, her father, was a British spy who had befriended Trotsky at thetime of the Russian Revolution. He had smuggled the Romanian crown jewels outof the Soviet Union and was involved in a doomed attempt to rescue the Tsar. Duringthe Second World War he acted as the link between Churchill's SpecialOperations Executive and Stalin's secret service, the NKVD.
Una's mother, HildaPediani, had been one of his agents and one of many lovers. He married her sothat Una would be legitimate, but took no part in the child's upbringing. It wasa rare sympathetic act by a man who was capable of great bravery, but littlecompassion.
In this compelling memoir, author Peter Day brings to life the world of twentieth-century espionage through the story of one of Britain's most remarkable spies.
Peter Day is a former senior reporter at the Mail on Sunday. A writer and journalist, he writes regularly for the Sunday Times and Mail on Sunday.