Free The Bedbug by Peter Day

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
W hat started out as a simple task – to turn the assorted reports of Klop Ustinov’s espionage exploits into a coherent story – has escalated into an epic journey from the tropical heat of Ethiopia in the nineteenth century through the Russian Revolution and two World Wars to the icy tundra of the Cold War. As it grew in scale and complexity it became ever more difficult to keep track of the many characters that flitted in and out of the narrative, not to mention the incomprehensible military and intelligence acronyms. To aid navigation a glossary of principal characters and organisations has been included towards the end of this book.
Inevitably much of the preliminary research was done at the National Archives at Kew where the staff were, as ever, patient and knowledgeable. I relied heavily, too, on the resources of the London Library and the British Library and, to a lesser extent, on the Imperial War Museum, Churchill Archives and Cambridge University Library.
I was drawn to the United States by the meticulous investigations of Professor Richard Breitman and the InterAgency Working Group who supervised the release of around ten million pages of documents under the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act and distilled them into a single volume of essays. Some former members of the team were among the enthusiastic research advisers and assistants who guided me through a couple of fruitful weeks at the US Archives at College Park, Maryland.
Despite the best endeavours of the language teachers at the Goethe Institute in London, my command of German would not have been adequate to the task without the generous time and effort of Günter Scheidemann and his colleagues in the reading room of the German Foreign Office archive in Berlin; and likewise Marco Birn and colleagues at the Baden-Württemberg state archive in Stuttgart. Thanks also to the licensing department of the archives in Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg for permission to reproduce photographs. Other photos were provided by The National Archives, the Imperial War Museum, Getty Images, Mrs Elizabeth Head, and under Crown copyright from Government records. The publishers, Macmillan, authorised the use of extracts from Klop and the Ustinov Family by Nadia Benois.
My thanks to all those at Biteback who contributed to the book’s publication, particularly commissioning editor Mick Smith and editors Hollie Teague and Olivia Beattie. Various individuals weighed in with advice and support during the research stage, among them Ustinov family friends Cathy Bazley, Emily Beanland, Owain Hughes, June Lewis-Jones and Liz Head, née Brousson, who was incredibly generous with her time and hospitality. Special thanks are due to Klop’s grandson, Igor Ustinov for permission to use previously unseen sketches from Nadia Benois’s notebooks and for his encouragement and thoughtful insights.
All of these people have helped me get closer to the truth about an elusive subject but cannot be held responsible for errors and misapprehensions. It has always to be borne in mind that the original source for much of what follows was two world champion raconteurs, Klop and his son Peter, and they may, just occasionally, have been guilty of that failing so often attributed to journalists – not letting the facts get in the way of a good story.

CHAPTER 1: MAGDALENA
N obody wants to be known as a bedbug. Except Klop Ustinov. The Russian diminutive was more fun than doleful Jona, the name his parents gave him. He looked the part: only 5ft 2in., his head slightly too big for his body; his protruding grape-green eyes shamelessly undressing any attractive woman who crossed his line of vision. What’s more, he shared the tiny parasite’s capacity to turn up, not exactly uninvited but quite surprisingly, in more than a few of their beds. He was a real-life spy with more lovers than James Bond. Like Bond, he was a man who appreciated fine food and wine. But he was no 007, licensed to kill.