Book description
A principled adventurer and a staunch supporter of Soviet dissidents like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, Nicholas Bethell travelled to remote Afghan villages to meet the mujahedin and then to Pollsmoor prison in 1985, bringing back the first substantial interview with Nelson Mandela for twenty years. He campaigned tirelessly to deprive "Sir Dracula Ceausescu" of his honorary kinighthood, to establish Soviet responsibility for the Katyń Massacre of 1940 and British complicity in repatriating thousands to Russia just after the War. Such bold "freelance" initiatives often irritated the Foreign Office almost as much as the KGB, yet they were the actions of a man willing to challenge cruelty, complacency and aggression wherever he finds them.
