Daniela Richterova
Daniela is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Intelligence Studies in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, where she is also Director of the MA in Intelligence and International Security, and Co-Director of the King’s Centre for the Study of Intelligence. She is the author of Watching the Jackals: Prague’s Covert Liaisons with Cold War Terrorists and Revolutionaries (Georgetown University Press, 2025), described by Michael Morell, former acting CIA director, as ‘a must-read’, and by Professor Christopher Andrew as ‘path-breaking and pioneering’, as well as being positively reviewed in the Guardian, Spectator and New York Times. Daniela regularly appears on podcasts including True Spies, Spycraft101, Cold War Conversations and The War Studies Podcast. OUR MAN IN PRAGUE is her first book for a general readership.
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News
Daniela Richterova is currently working on her newest project, OUR MAN IN PRAGUE, to be published by Ballantine Books.
Books
Our Man in Prague
In 1970s Prague, Miroslav Kroča was a decorated veteran of the Czechoslovak State Security Service (StB). As an ambitious young recruit, he had even been selected for advanced training in Moscow and cooperation with the KGB. His fellow intelligence officers knew him as a successful operative and a loyal apparatchik, an expert in running counterintelligence against the British. What they did not know: Kroča was an MI6 spy, code-named FREED. A double agent for almost a decade, his unmasking, upon his death in 1976, would bring the KGB’s most valuable satellite service to its knees and change the course of the Cold War in Europe with repercussions in the US as well.
OUR MAN IN PRAGUE is the incredible untold story of Miroslav Kroča and his betrayal of the StB, but it is also the story of how British intelligence penetrated the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War, detailing with unparalleled access the hidden work of the men and women who ran one of MI6’s longest serving and most trusted double agents – among them Richard Dearlove, Kroča’s last handler, who later rose to become SIS Chief.
(Ballantine, 2028)