Autobiography recreated from memory of one of British Intelligence's greatest deception operators, which successfully fooled Hitler into using his authority over the military to act in a way bad for the Axis but good for the Allies at a critical juncture.

The British covert community is famously stuffy about asserting state secrecy very expansively, including over historical issues that reveal how and why covert activities should be done, even though these details are already public knowledge sometimes. For instance, a photograph of WW II era "Camp "X" in Canada has been referred to as a "top secret document" in yet other British Intelligence doings, despite Camp X by then being notorious in publicly available literature as a place where US covert operators were trained by British Intelligence. This is unfortunate as sometimes it is only works like Mr. Popov's that disclose the dissembling and treachery of others, such as in this case that of J. Edgar Hoover in misrepresenting to the American public what the FBI's acts regarding Mr. Popov were.

The book has been called a manual for "tradecraft", the various things done by a covert operator. (Not that I nor Thee would know, naturally). For this reason the copyright to the book has been purchased to prohibit any reprints and "they" try to reduce access to copies of it as much as possible. Buying a copy of the mere paperback can run hundreds of dollars.