I Spy London

 

​London has long been home to real spies and spy catchers, from Francis Walsingham's network of Protestant informers in Tudor times, some 500 years ago, to the brutal radioactive poisonings of recent years.
 

“Truth is stranger than fiction”: Ian Fleming’s WWII incredible intelligence experience gave us iconic agent Commander James Bond and a massive British cultural phenomena. Who will ever forget actor Daniel Craig striding  through Buckingham Palace with the late Queen before she "parachuted" into the 2012 London Olympic Opening Ceremony. Fleming was responsible for several daring and successful operations during WWII including Operation Mincemeat.

Fictional spy-catchers John le Carré’s George Smiley and Mick Herron's Jackson Lamb track traitors and enemies of the state in the capital's corridors and streets. These fictional spies have become much loved on the page and screen.

 

The highest stakes are still at play in this murky and dangerous world as shown by the murders of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Ivanov Markov near Somerset House by a ricin-tipped umbrella in 1978 and Russian Alexander Litvinenko by polonium in a central London hotel in 2006.

​