The Guy Liddell Diaries Vol.II: 1942-1945

WALLFLOWERS is the codename given to one of the Security Service’s most treasured possessions, the daily journal dictated from August 1939 to June 1945 by MI5’s Director of Counter-Espionage, Guy Liddell, to his secretary, Margo Huggins. The document was considered so highly classified that it was retained in the safe of successive Directors-General, and special permission was required to read it. Liddell was one of three brothers who all won the Military Cross during the First World War and subsequently joined MI5. He initially first served in the Metropolitan Police Special Branch at Scotland Yard, dealing primarily with cases of Soviet espionage, until he was transferred to MI5 in 1931. His social connections proved important because in 1940 he employed Anthony Blunt as his personal assistant and became a close friend of both Guy Burgess and Victor Rothschild, and was acquainted with Kim Philby. Despite these links, when Liddell retired from the Security Service in 1952 he was