Spying on the Kremlin details the background and unintentional turning points in what has been an eventful life. Mike Murtagh has had a gun stuck in his face, been seconds from a mid-air collision, been struck by lightning in an aircraft, made two emergency landings, had a sniper-sight trained on him, been the target of at least one honeytrap, nearly bled to death in India, been threatened by people working for the Azeri Mafia, worked on a movie with three Oscar-winners and may have inadvertently eaten someone. It's a memoir of a working-class boy in an unlikely life journey from austere 1950s South Wales to the political theatre of The Kremlin and beyond via service as an RAF Officer and as a Diplomat. His experiences of living and working in Russia has given him valuable insights into the Russian psyche, as well as the workings and capabilities of the Russian military which still have currency and relevance. Given his humble origins, none of this was ever supposed to have happened to him and could not have been predicted. Such opportunities were almost unavailable to working-class boys at the time. However, sometimes in an almost accidental fashion, he grasped the opportunities that came his way. AUTHOR: Mike Murtagh was born in Swansea in 1953 joining the Royal Air Force as a commissioned officer serving both at home and overseas, learning Russian along the way and serving in the military intelligence across 16 years of service. After leaving the RAF, Mike went on to work as a Security Officer on a Foreign Office contract for the new British Embassy in Moscow and became a member of the Diplomatic Service serving for 10 years in the UK and India before retiring to Lincoln in 2009. 55 b/w illustrations
