Father seldom mentioned his past, but he once claimed to me that he was sent to Scandinavia to collect Maria Theresa thalers from Comintern agents who had brought the silver bullion coins from Leningrad. His role was to risk his life smuggling them on to comrades in Nazi Germany. His control would issue him with a false passport. Once in Berlin he would go to a tobacconist off the Alexanderplatz. Wearing a red rose in his buttonhole and carrying a rolled copy of The Times, he would ask the owner if he sold Turkish cigarettes. "Yes, sir," came the reply. "But there is little demand. So we keep them in the back room. Follow me." There father made his drops. So what are we to make of the red roses, rolled copies of The Times and Turkish cigarettes? An espionage buff who knows her Hollywood says those details are too close to scenes in several classic spy movies. Yet father was valuable precisely because he could play the part of a stereotypical English gent - a useful cover. And other Soviet agents including nuclear scientist/spy Alan Nunn May and Kim Philby used The Times as a way of identifying themselves. Finally, why would father undermine an otherwise convincing account of his brave actions by telling comic untruths?

By late 1936 the Gestapo was so effective that it was too dangerous for him to continue. And Russia had started using banks and front companies to fund German comrades. Yet, according to my father, he then became more active until disillusion set in three years later. He was, he said, the courier charged with carrying secret instructions and documents between his then friend Harry Pollitt, general secretary of the CPGB, and Palme Dutt, Stalin's close ally, the senior Comintern man in Europe. (Though British, Dutt lived mainly in Belgium.) But no visits to Belgium appear in father's passport. Interestingly, the file quotes Belgian security sources saying that he had paid a secret visit to Belgian Communist Party leader Raphael Joseph de Wolf, in 1935 to receive "instructions". No details of that trip appear in his passport either.

After the shameful Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939, father claimed he simply walked away from the Comintern. His claim is supported by a bugged telephone call from party headquarters in London. On November 30, Pat Devine, an underground Comintern boss, phones a London party official to denounce my father. "He's violently against the [pro-Hitler] line. It's unbelievable," a furious Devine says. Torode would be disciplined. But then Devine warns: "I know he is in your jurisdiction . . . but he is actually one of ours." Some months later, phone taps reveal David Springhall urgently seeking my father. Springhall was a key figure organising Soviet espionage. In 1943 he was sentenced to seven years hard labour for arranging the theft of military secrets and sending them on to Russia. Why was he wasting valuable spying time chasing my father?