Nigel West is an author who has concentrated on security and intelligence issues. The Sunday Times has commented: “His information is so precise that many people believe he is the unofficial historian of the secret services. He has been a frequent speaker at intelligence seminars and has lectured at both the KGB headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square, Moscow; and at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. He continues to lecture to members of the intelligence community at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies in Washington, D.C
Nigel West will meet with The Chelsea Society at Chelsea Old Town Hall on Monday 13th April 2026, and his subject will be “The Chinese Ministry of State Security – what is it doing in the UK and the West?” Tickets £25 (to include a glass of wine) available from the Box Office of the Cadogan Hall, 3 Sloane Terrace, London, SW1X 9DQ in person, or by phone 0207-730-4500 NB. The meeting is at Chelsea Old Town Hall, not at the Cadogan Hall. Tickets are also available online via Eventbrite
His special contribution to the study of modern historical espionage has been in tracking down former agents and persuading them to tell their stories. He traced the wartime double agent GARBO, who was reported to have died in Africa in 1949. However, he found him in Venezuela, and they collaborated on the book “Operation Garbo,” published in 1985. He was also the first person to identify and interview the mistress of Admiral Canaris, the German intelligence chief who headed the Abwehr, and he was responsible for the exposure of Leo Long and Edward Scott as Soviet spies.
His titles include “The Crown Jewels,” based on files made available to him by the KGB archives in Moscow; VENONA, which disclosed the existence of a GRU spy-ring operating in London throughout the war, allegedly headed by J. B. S. Haldane and Ivor Montagu; and The Third Secret, an account of the CIA’s intervention in Afghanistan. Mortal Crimes, published in September 2004, investigates the scale of Soviet espionage in the Manhattan Project, the Anglo-American development of an atomic bomb.
In 2005 he edited The Guy Liddell Diaries, a daily journal of the wartime work of MI5’s Director of Counter-Espionage. He also published a study of the Comintern’s secret wireless traffic, MASK: MI5’s Penetration of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and the first of a series of counter-intelligence textbooks, The Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence, The Historical Dictionary of International Intelligence and The Historical Dictionary of Cold War Counter-Intelligence.
In his 2018 book, “Cold War Spymaster:” A Legacy of Guy Liddell, Deputy Director of MI5, the author did not suggest that Liddell had passed secrets to the Soviets, as had been claimed by some other authors, including John Costello in his “Mask of Treachery.” In fact, he said that Liddell “was betrayed by Burgess, Blunt and Philby.”
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