Go Spy the Land: Being the Adventures of Ik8 of the British Secret Service
By (Author) George Alexander Hill
Biteback Publishing
Biteback Publishing
1st April 2014
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
Military intelligence
Modern warfare
Second World War
European history
327.1241047
Paperback
320
Width 129mm, Height 198mm, Spine 25mm
330g
The latest in Biteback's best-selling Dialogue Espionage Classics series of rediscovered spy masterpieces, Go Spy the Land is George Alexander Hill's account of perilous adventure in pre- and post-Bolshevik Russia, where he ran missions as an agent in the employ of Britain's nascent secret services. Far from the covert, technology-driven intelligence gathering of the modern espionage world, Hill's was an age of swashbuckling, swordsticks and secret assignations with deadly woman spies. Originally published in 1933 and out of print for many years, Hill's rip-roaring narrative is more reminiscent of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps than of the world of gloomy secrets occupied by John le Carre's George Smiley and is a portrait of an age unfathomable to those growing up against a backdrop of Prism, Wikileaks and cyber espionage.
"A splendid book both as a ripping read and an important historical document in its own right." Steve Earles
GEORGE ALEXANDER HILL worked for the British secret service in the Balkans and Russia during the First World War and in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. He operated alongside Sidney Reilly, the so-called 'Ace of Spies', collecting intelligence and sabotaging both German and Bolshevik operations. Kim Philby, who worked alongside him during the Second World War described him as 'jolly George Hill' and said he was 'one of the few living Englishmen who had actually put sand in axle boxes'.