The Long Engagement

John Peet, Chief Reuters Correspondent in West Berlin, defected to the East in June 1950, the culminating act in a lifelong commitment to the ideals of communism. Recruited as a "sleeper" agent by Moscow during the Spanish War, he refused, after his defection, to be party to Russian Intelligence plans for him and so continued to move freely between East and West until his death in 1988. He was a witty and skillful jounalist, whose post-war reports about the re-arming of West Germany inspired Frederick Forsyth's "The Odessa File" and whose acute sense of the ironies of war and politics are never absent from these honest memoirs.