Poretsky Elisabeth Preface Deakin (1 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Fair. 1st Edition. First UK edition, first impression. Some edge wear, chipping, creasing and rubbing to top and bottom of largely black, turquoise and purple jacket and spine, corners rubbed with small loss, folds rubbed, not price clipped (£2.10, 42s), no inscriptions, internally clean tight and square, overall a vg copy for its age. 278pp. Ignace Reiss (b. Nathan Markovich Porekji, 1899-1937), also known as 'Ignace Poretsky', and among other pseudonyms 'Walter Scott' (an officer of the U.S. military intelligence), was one of the 'Great Illegals' or Soviet spies who worked in third party countries where they were no nationals, in the late 1920s and 1930s. Born in what is now Ukraine, he was known as a nevozvrashchenec ('unreturnable'). He was the author's (Elisabeth Poretsky 1898-1976), husband, married in 1920. Ignace was murdered on Stalin's orders, in Switzerland. Sir Frederick William Dampier Deakin DSO (1913-2005), was a British historian, World War II veteran of S.O.E., literary assistant to Winston Churchill and the first warden of St Antony's College, Oxford. A scarce book.