In 1979 the art historian was outed as one of the Cambridge spies recruited by Stalin. Shocking new evidence suggests he may also have passed deadly secrets to the Nazis, Robert Verkaik reports
This is not the story I intended to tell. I set out to write a book about a distant relative, Eddy Verkaik, who had fought in the Dutch resistance during the Second World War. Eddy had helped alert the British to the treachery of a fellow Dutch resistance fighter — a terrifying giant of a man known as “King Kong”: Christiaan Lindemans.
Lindemans had betrayed Operation Market Garden, the ambitious and ill-fated Allied airborne mission that dropped thousands of paratroopers into the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, the 80th anniversary of which falls this September. Had it succeeded, it would have kicked open the door to the heart of Germany and brought the conflict to a speedy end. In the event the Allies lost more than 17,000 men in what was to be their final defeat of the war.
