The Second World War had been won, but relationships between the
Western allies and the Soviet Union were becoming increasingly
strained, as the nuclear arms race made world peace precarious. It
was vital that Britain knew the Soviets' intentions and military
capabilities, both offensive and defensive. As a Military Attache
in Sofia, and Commandant of an Intelligence Centre in the Balkans,
it was SIS officer Colonel John Sanderson's job to find out.
Sanderson handled agents who operated secretly behind the Iron
Curtain at the height of the Cold War and organised hidden arms
depots for stay-behind agents in case of a Red Army invasion. Based
on Sanderson's letters and personal accounts of his time with MI4
and MI6, we learn how he was sent to observe sessions of the Paris
UNO Security Council in 1948 and to recruit emigres for
infiltration behind the Iron Curtain, into Communist Bulgaria.
Fluent in French and Bulgarian, in 1949 Captain Sanderson was
posted to Sofia as a Press Attache with diplomatic immunity,
reporting on the Communist show trials. Colonel Sanderson returned
there twelve years later as the Military, Naval and Air Attache. In
1961, having been tasked by London with photographing the latest
MIG fighter, he was driven at night to Sofia airport's perimeter by
a CIA colleague. Closely followed by the Bulgarian secret police,
he parachute-rolled, unobserved, out of the car with his camera.
Arrested at daylight, he escaped to the border and drove across
Europe, still pursued by the ruthless Bulgarian Security Services.
John Sanderson's early service life was equally challenging, from
helping defend Britain's coastline in 1940, picking up shot-down
pilots around Dover on a motorbike during the Battle of Britain, to
fighting the Japanese in the Burmese and Indian jungles, before
returning to London to join the Secret Intelligence Services. In
parallel with Sanderson's SIS career, living with Russian emigres
in Paris, posted to SIS headquarters in the Berlin Olympic stadium,
and later working together in the Intelligence Division of NATO
headquarters Paris during the Cuban Missile Crisis, was his SIS
friend RAF Squadron Leader John Aldwinckle, a veteran of SOE
wartime operations in Halifax bombers. All Aldwinckle's agents were
betrayed by the traitor George Blake, as were all Sanderson's by
Kim Philby. In John Sanderson's biography we get the detailed
inside story of the Berlin Air Lift, the Suez Invasion, the Cuban
Missile Crisis, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. We see the results
of Philby and Blake's treachery and the effects which the
courageous actions of the two 'Olegs', the Russian Colonels
Penkovsky and Gordievsky, had on the international politics of
Khrushchev, Kennedy, Gorbachev, Thatcher and Reagan - and the
consequences their decisions had for the course of world history.
For over thirty years, John Sanderson worked for the British Secret
Services - with his last mission, aged 74, as exciting as his
first, being helicoptered into Sarajevo with an SAS team at the
height of the Balkan War.
General
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