I was sent to prevent the Bolshevik Revolution and to keep Russia in the war,” wrote Somerset Maugham in the preface to Ashenden, or the British Agent (1928). “The reader will know,” he continued drily, “that my efforts did not meet with success.”
In 1915-16, already a successful novelist and playwright, Maugham worked as a British spy in Geneva after being recruited by an intelligence officer he met at a dinner arranged by his future wife Syrie. Maugham found his work “as orderly and monotonous as a city clerk’s”, a drab routine punctuated by moments of danger. He recognised that his life could be at risk and carried a small revolver. This was certainly the case when, after being sent to the South Pacific to gather information about German activity in Samoa, he was despatched to Russia, arriving in Petrograd in September 1917.
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