Baghdad's Spy: A Personal Memoir of Espionage and Intrigue from Baghdad to London

by Corinne Souza (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2003

  $3.25

  Baghdad's Spy is the story of Britain's Secret Intelligence Services (SIS) - often referred to as MI6 - as told from the unique perspective of a senior SIS spy's daughter. Souza breaks the last taboo of British esponiage - namely, the impact that Crown Service can have on a spy's family - and describes the thrill and spills of espionage as a way of life.Beginning with the murder of the 'Boy King' of Iraq in 1958, the year her father was recruited, and following through to her personal experience of an SIS fiasco prior to the Gulf War after her father's death, Souza depicts how the SIS attempted to silence her father for a number of years. Recalling the extravagant arrangements the Crown made for her father upon returning to London from Iraq, Souza tells in chilling detail how things turned sour as he struggled to balance loyalty to the Crown with the increasingly amoral demands of what had become a renegade service. The murky world of lobbying in Thatcher's Britain is re-visited as Souza explains how she became a lobbyist and was expected to inherit her father's career by spying on Labour MPs (an inheritance she rejected). We learn of the Labour MP who came to her aid, the former senior Conservative Secretary of State who assisted her, and of the journal editor who enabled her to tell her story. The SIS no longer has senior spies capable of penetrating key diaspora and Souza argues that, as a result, it was unable to assist the CIA in preventing the horror of 9/11. Explosive and touching in equal parts, Baghdad's Spy is an autobiography with a difference that should not, and will not, be missed.