SPIRO, EDWARD• 515Spedding retired from SIS at the end of August 1999, just two
weeks before the publication ofThe Mitrokhin Archive, a book that
was to plunge the service into controversy. Always a heavy smoker,
Spedding suffered from cancer throughout his short retirement and
finally succumbed to it in June 2001, at the age of 58.SPIRO, EDWARD.Before World War II, Edward Spiro worked as a
freelance journalist for several British newspapers in his native Aus-
tria, and it was this connection which saved his life when he was ar-
rested by the Gestapo and incarcerated in Dachau and then
Buchenwald. Diplomatic pressure was brought to bear on the Nazi
authorities and in 1939 he was released to start a new life in England.
Spiro’s connection with theSecret Intelligence Service(SIS) had
begun in Austria after he graduated from Vienna University and be-
came political editor of the city’s evening paper. In 1936 he was re-
cruited by Captain Thomas Kendrick, the SIS head of station, as a
source, and this was the lever that was subsequently used to obtain
his freedom and bring him to England.
Spiro arrived in London a penniless refugee but, like so many of
his Jewish countrymen forced to flee to England, he made a great
success of his second career. However, before joining theDaily Tele-
graphas a lobby correspondent in the House of Commons or achiev-
ing distinction with his works of nonfiction, he operated as a stool
pigeon for the Security Service by infiltrating groups of suspected
Nazis who had been interned under the wartime emergency regula-
tions. Spiro’s task was to test the loyalties of the German inmates and
report those whom he believed to be active party members or poten-
tial enemy spies.
Following a stay at Cookham in Berkshire, Spiro changed his
name to E. H. Cookridge and was later employed on propaganda
work for theMinistry of Economic Warfare, the government’s de-
partment of dirty tricks, which broadcast ingeniously prepared radio
programs to Germany. After the war he wrote extensively on the sub-
ject of espionage, publishing biographies ofKim PhilbyandGeorge
Blake. By coincidence he had first met Philby as a Cambridge under-
graduate in Vienna in the summer of 1933 when both had been active
in the anti-Fascist underground and Philby had met and married his
first wife,Litzi Friedman. In his book on Philby, Cookridge, who