In August 1933 the passport shows he suddenly took off for a couple of days to Austria, moving on briefly to Switzerland. I assume he was being "activated". Page after page of passport visas and stamps show he then started on a three-year orgy of Scandinavian travel, involving some 20 rushed but very expensive trips from London into and out of the region. Every couple of months, he scurried round the same few cities in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. On occasion he went by plane, something way beyond his means. Tourism it wasn't. And these were not business trips - he had no business. What did my mother think he was up to? Another woman, perhaps? Or did she know only too well?    

I had never seen a security file and it was with trepidation that I started with my father's. It turned out to be a dusty manila folder containing hundreds of flimsy, fading documents - instructions to operatives, reports from Special Branch and MI5 agents, and periodic analyses. The revelations prompted more questions. For example he had travelled secretly to Russia in August 1931 with mother, then his girlfriend. She was older than him, highly intelligent, better educated and a long-time Marxist. There is no evidence of this visit in his passport. Neither of them ever mentioned it, though mother talked enthusiastically about her earlier trips. Perhaps she was his Comintern recruiting sergeant and they were visiting headquarters using false papers. Was she the "known Communist" he had "come into contact with", thus triggering the security file?

The scale of surveillance was surprising and rather frightening. In England, his letters and parcels were opened. Phones were tapped and conversations recorded. He was often followed. There were occasional Carry On moments. For example, father moved from his parents' home in the East End to St Andrew's Road in nearby Ilford. A telephonic "bugger" mistranscribed the new address as Guildford. Cut to memos showing an increasingly urgent search for the missing Soviet agent in a non-existent street in Surrey. And some years later a smarmy Special Branch man reports "Torode is known in the Ilford district for his Communist views which he propagates at every opportunity, and because of this habit neither he nor his family is very popular in the St Andrew's Rd district." And I thought the neighbours liked us!

More seriously, every one of the trips to Scandinavia was recorded in detail. He was followed, and searched every time he went in or out of the country. Abroad, Swedish security became involved, plotting to trap him with what are described as "the goods". There is growing frustration over failed efforts to catch him red-handed at a British port. My guess is that the Brits failed because they were blinded by their belief he was carrying money and/or information between Comintern agents he met in Scandinavia and the CPGB. In fact he was doing something much more dangerous.