In Lying Eyes: The Spy Who Broke a Mother’s Heart, investigative journalists Paul Henderson and David Gardner reveal the incredible untold story of the mother who lost her son twice. They reveal:
- Johanna’s part Jewish father was a Nazi collaborator who was jailed for fraternizing with the Gestapo, according to transcripts of his arrest and interrogation.
- The DNA breakthrough that exposed the shocking truth that a Czech spy had stolen the identity of Johanna’s abandoned son.
- How the authors helped Johanna, now 99, find her real son, who is now married with children and grandchildren and living close to the orphanage in Bohemia where she left him in 1945.
- Iron Curtain secrets from 10,800 pages from the spy’s personal Czech intelligence files, including directives about girlfriends, espionage targets and how to treat Johanna.
- Why Britain’s first female head of MI5 dressed up in a fake wig and disguise to give evidence at the Old Bailey.
- The real identity of the agent - Vaclav Jelinek - who was freed from prison and sent back to Prague in a deal struck with the British government by the Czechs who considered him an embarrassment after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
David Gardner is an author, journalist, and a former editor with Newsweek. He also worked for the Daily Mail as a crime writer and senior foreign correspondent, filing dispatches from war-torn Beirut, covering the first Gulf War – where he was the first British print journalist into Baghdad – and travelling around the world on assignments for the award-winning newspaper. He founded an international news agency in New York and moved to California as the Mail's Los Angeles correspondent, which saw him cover five presidential elections and all the biggest US stories of the pas...
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Paul Henderson worked on nine UK national newspapers as an investigative journalist, royal correspondent, news editor and editor. He covered foreign tours by Prince Charles and Princess Diana in the Middle East, Australia, Japan, the United States, Canada, and Europe. As Daily Mail Chief Investigative Reporter he tracked down and exclusively interviewed in Tripoli, Libya the men accused of the Lockerbie bombing which killed 270 people; entered Albania as the only news journalist sending despatches on the uprising against Enver Hoxha’s repressive Stalinist regime; investigated Rose and...
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