Today, I’m continuing the series I began earlier this month, with a look at Jane Archer, who inspired the character of Eve in THE TRAITOR’S GIRL.

I’ve always been fascinated by the story of the Cambridge Spies, a group of students who were recruited as intelligence agents by the Soviet Union while these men were still at Cambridge University. With considerable forethought, the Soviets decided to play the long game. They chose intelligent, well-connected young men and steered them toward prominent positions in the media and in the intelligence and diplomatic services in Britain.

Perhaps the most famous of these spies was Kim Philby, who worked for the Security Services and supplied the Soviets with a stream of important intelligence throughout World War II and for much of the Cold War, as well. He was recruited in 1934 and defected to the USSR in 1963 after he was finally unmasked.

I was reading Philby’s autobiography, MY SILENT WAR: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SPY, when I came across a mention of Jane Archer. When told she might join his intelligence section, Philby said, “This suggestion gave me a nasty shock, especially as I could think of no plausible reason for resisting it. After Guy Liddell, Jane was perhaps the ablest professional intelligence officer ever employed by MI5.”

I was hooked! Who was this woman, the only person Philby mentioned in the entire autobiography to have given him serious cause for disquiet?

A former barrister, skilled in the art of cross-examination, and in Philby’s words, “tough-minded and rough-tongued”, Jane Archer had debriefed the defector and former Red Army intelligence officer General Krivitsky, and her masterly extraction of intelligence from the general became a textbook example of the skill.

Jane had discovered from Krivitsky that there was a mole in British Intelligence, a man the Soviets had sent to Spain (reportedly to try to assassinate Franco) during the Civil War when he was a young journalist. This young journalist was, of course, Philby himself.

Philby made a point of keeping Archer too busy to look over his shoulder, or to follow up on this tantalizing lead. Unfortunately, I was unable to find out much more about her or her reaction to Philby’s eventual defection. I burned to know whether she ever suspected Philby, or whether she discounted the vague and unsubstantiated tidbit from Krivitsky as so many others had done.

And if she had suspected Philby, what would she or could she have done in the face of the overwhelming support he seemed to have secured from the Establishment?

In THE TRAITOR’S GIRL, Eve, also a barrister and MI5 officer, teams up with another unlikely spy–the glamorous Carrie Granger, whom she defends on a murder charge and subsequently rescues from Holloway Prison–to try to catch a Soviet mole.