The Shadow Man

James Klugmann appears as a shadowy figure in the legendary history of the Cambridge spies. As both mentor and friend to Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and others, Klugmann was the man who manipulated promising recruits deemed ripe for conversion to the communist cause. This perception of him was reinforced following the release of his MI5 file and the disclosure of Soviet intelligence files in Moscow, which revealed he played a key part in the recruitment of John Cairncross, the ‘fifth man’, and had a pivotal war-time role in the Special Operations Executive, helping shift Churchill and the allies to support Tito and the communist partisans in Yugoslavia. In this book, Geoff Andrews reveals Klugmann’s story in full for the first time, uncovering the motivations, conflicts and illusions of those drawn into the world of communism – and the sacrifices they made on its behalf.

Author Biography

Geoff Andrews is an historian and biographer who has written widely on the history of political ideas and movements and twentieth century British and Italian politics. He is Senior Lecturer in Politics at The Open University and author of The Shadow Man: At the Heart of the Cambridge Spy Circle (2015) and Not a Normal Country: Italy After Berlusconi (2005).