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but they were stuck in France. She tried to join the Free French forces gathering around the exiled Charles de Gaulle, but was told she was unsuitable. She did a little translating for the BBC, and found it dreary. She complained, to anyone who would listen, that she could not get an interestElvira de la Fuente Chaudoir ing job because she was Peruvian. One of those who happened to be listening, one night at Hamilton’s, was an RAF officer, who told a friend in military intelligence, who passed her name on to someone in MI6. And so it was that Elvira Chaudoir now found herself, at the age of twenty-nine, in the grill room of the Connaught Hotel, sitting across the table from a middle-aged man in a rumpled suit with a bristling white moustache and the eyes of a hyperactive ferret. He had introduced himself as ‘Mr Masefield’. His real name was Lieutenant Colonel Claude Edward Marjoribanks Dansey, also known as ‘Haywood’, ‘Uncle Claude’ and ‘Colonel Z’. He was assistant chief of MI6. Claude Dansey was witty, spiteful and widely disliked by his fellow spies. Hugh Trevor-Roper, the waspish historian who worked in wartime intelligence, considered him to be ‘an utter shit, corrupt, incompetent, but with a certain low cunning’. Dansey was a most unpleasant man, and a most experienced spy. They made an odd couple: Elvira, tall and over-dressed, with a sweet, rather innocent face, her auburn hair arranged into a question mark over her forehead; Dansey, small, bald,
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