Churchill's Mole Hunt

Winston Churchill, reappointed as First Lord of the Admiralty in September 1939, suspected there was a mole operating at the heart of the Admiralty during the first months of World War II. Did he leak critical information about naval defenses at the Royal Navy’s British base at Scapa Flow that lead to the sinking of the Royal Oak and the loss of 836 men in an audacious raid by a German U-Boat?

And how was this German spy linked with US Embassy spy Tyler Kent and Anna Wolkoff, an fanatical anti-Bolshevik Russian émigré who made dresses for the Duchess of Windsor and sold the best caviar in London in her family’s South Kensington Tea Room, who conspired to smuggle secret correspondence between President Roosevelt and Churchill to the Nazis?

Scotland Yard chief inspector Nicholas Ridgeway’s dogged investigation of a murder in a Whitehall back street leads him to the aristocratic Nazi sympathizers in the Right Club and to play a key role in the surprising sting that exposes the mole in the Admiralty.

We’ll never know all the facts about treachery in London in those early months of the War because the Navy burnt tons of sensitive papers in 1945. John Tilston’s historical novel postulates what might have been, weaving known fact and historical characters in a rich tale that captures the mood of that bleak winter of 1940, the coldest in living memory. Along the way we meet Churchill, US Ambassador Joe Kennedy, Ian Fleming, MI5's notorious Maxwell Knight, and sultry MI5 agent Joan Miller.