Defense Media Network

Nigel West

Nigel West is considered the dean of intelligence writers. He often speaks at intelligence seminars and has lectured at both the KGB headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square and at the CIA headquarters in Langley, where he once lectured on counter-intelligence to an audience that included the Soviet spy Aldrich Ames. He now teaches members of the intelligence community at the Counter-Intelligence Centre in Washington DC.

His recent books include Crown Jewels, based on files made available to him by the KGB archives in Moscow; VENONA, which disclosed the existence of a GRU spy-ring operating in London throughout the war; The Third Secret, an account of the CIA’s intervention in Afghanistan; and Mortal Crimes, which investigates the scale of soviet espionage in the Manhattan Project. In 2005 he edited The Guy Liddell Diaries, a daily journal of the wartime work of MI5’s Director of Counter-Espionage. He also published a study of the Comintern’s secret wireless traffic, MASK: MI5’s Penetration of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and a counter-intelligence textbook, The Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence.

He is on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence and World War II Quarterly. In 2003 he was awarded the U.S. Association of Former Intelligence Officers’ first Lifetime Literature Achievement Award.