Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence

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name from the text. Then he moved on to Czechoslovakia and re-

mained there until February 1934, when he was transferred to Latvia.

His eventual withdrawal to London in 1940 followed the Soviet occu-

pation of Riga. His lengthy journey home took him via Moscow,

Vladivostok, Japan, and Canada. For much of the rest of the war, he

remained atBroadway, until he was sent to Bucharest to open up a

new station in 1945. Although Nicholson tactfully concluded his

story at that sensitive point, SIS was outraged, all the more so be-

cause another wartime colleague, CaptainHenry Kerby, who had

operated in Sweden in 1940 and was then the Conservative MP for

West Sussex, had contributed a short foreword. In addition,Malcolm

Muggeridgehad given his endorsement to the book in an introduc-

tion.

The British edition of Nicholson’s memoirs was censored heavily

and he was dissuaded from writing a sequel. Instead he volunteered

a mass of information to Ladislas Farago, an American journalist of

Hungarian origin, who wroteGame of the Foxes, arguably the most

detailed account of wartime intelligence operations yet published.

Unfortunately Farago was later discredited because of his more sen-

sational newspaper stories, not the least of which was the revelation

that he had found Martin Bormann alive in Argentina. Desperately

disappointed, Nicholson died in New York, penniless, in 1973.

NIVEN, DAVID.Hollywood star David Niven returned to England in
1939 to rejoin the army and commanded A Squadron ofPhantom
before being posted to General Dwight Eisenhower’s staff at theSu-
preme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. He played a pe-
ripheral role incopperhead, acting as a cover for Gilbert Lennox
ofMI5to interview Lieutenant Clifton James of the Pay Corps in
1944 to audition him for the role of General Bernard Montgomery.

NKVD.Created in 1934 as the successor to theOGPU, the NKVD
(Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennykh Del, or People’s Commissariat
for Internal Affairs) was the principal Soviet foreign intelligence ser-
vice and adversary of British Intelligence. Run fromMoscow Cen-
ter, the Foreign Intelligence Directorate was an elite organization
that deployed its personnel overseas as members of either ‘‘legal’’
rezidenturasattached to diplomatic missions or ‘‘illegal’’ networks