Congratulations to Inside Croydon contributor Peter Gillman, who yesterday saw his latest book, Murder In Cairo: Solving a Cold War Spy Mystery, given a front-page promotion by his former employers, while extracts were published as this week’s cover story in The Sunday Times Magazine.
Gillman was a long-time staffer at The Sunday Times, and an original member of its Insight investigations team under then Editor, Harry Evans.
Before he died in 2020, Evans told Gillman that the newspaper’s failure to solve the case of the murder of its chief foreign correspondent, David Holden, was the biggest regret of his career.
For the past five years, Gillman, together with current Sunday Times reporter Emanuele Midolo, has undertaken effectively a cold case investigation into a 48-year-old murder mystery in a last effort to crack the case.
On a December night in 1977, Holden was murdered in Cairo. His body was found dumped on a dusty roadside. He had been shot with a single bullet through the heart.
Who killed Holden? And why?
For a year, the Sunday Times Insight team, their work overseen by Evans, tried to uncover what the Egyptian authorities seemed uninterested in pursuing. There was intrigue and betrayal, false leads, and strong suspicions of MI5 and CIA involvement.
Holden’s story stretched back to his days at Cambridge University, through to his reporting on the Suez Crisis, right up to Middle East peace negotiations over the West Bank and Syria in the 1970s. After Holden’s murder, suspicions turned to The Sunday Times office in London, where important, confidential documents were stolen.
If Holden was a spy, Evans told Gillman, The Sunday Times must be the first to reveal it.
This week’s Sunday Times Magazine provides an account of how Gillman and Midolo finally found their way through “the wilderness of mirrors”, a world of spooks and espionage.
- Click here for The Sunday Times Magazine’s somewhat eclectic online presentation of this week’s cover story – The spy in the newsroom (£££ behind a paywall)
- Murder In Cairo: Solving a Cold War Spy Mystery by Peter Gillman and Emanuele Midolo, is published later this month by Biteback (£20).
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