The Zinoviev Letter

Gill Bennett MA, OBE, FRHistS is a senior Associate Fellow of RUSI. She was Chief Historian of the Foreign Office from 1995-2005, and senior editor of its official history of British foreign policy, Documents on British Policy Overseas. As a historian in Whitehall for over forty years, she provided historical advice to twelve foreign secretaries under six prime ministers, from Edward Heath to Tony Blair. In 1998, in her role as Chief Historian of the Foreign Office, she was commissioned to write a report into the Zinoviev Letter affair for the Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook. A specialist in the history of secret intelligence, Gill published a ground-breaking biography, Churchill's Man of Mystery: Desmond Morton and the World of Intelligence (Routledge, 2006). Her book, Six Moments of Crisis: Inside British Foreign Policy, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013.

In 1998, Chief Historian of the Foreign Office Gill Bennett was commissioned by Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to get to the bottom of a mystery that had haunted the Labour Party--and British politics more generally--for over seventy years. This is the story of what she discovered.

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