Spymaster

Spymaster is Helen Fry’s biography of Thomas Joseph Kendrick, a British intelligence officer whose career placed him at the centre of European espionage before and during the Second World War. As SIS station chief in Vienna he managed intelligence networks under diplomatic cover and, after the Anschluss, worked amid the crisis confronting Austrian Jews seeking escape from Nazi rule. His arrest and interrogation by the Gestapo threatened wider British networks.

Back in Britain, Kendrick became a leading organiser of the covert listening programme that secretly recorded German prisoners and extracted intelligence from conversations they believed were private. First published as Spymaster: The Secret Life of Kendrick and later substantially republished as The Man Who Saved MI6, the work connects Kendrick’s personal biography with the institutional history of British intelligence.