The drunk driver who accidentally exposed a major Russian spy ring

How just two lines in the Daily Express ultimately led to the biggest expulsion of KGB agents in history... and a turning point in the Cold War, as revealed in a thrilling new book

- By Richard Ashmore

On a rainy night in London on August 30, 1971, a handsome moustachioed gentleman was driving an attractive young blonde woman down Tottenham Court Road heading towards the raucous nightlife of Soho.

But the romantic outing in a Hillman car just after midnight quickly took a wrong turn when police officers pulled over the couple after becoming suspicious of the way the vehicle “wobbled” and had its lights turned off.

Likely squinting through a wound-down window into the nighttime drizzle, the man behind the wheel “shouted and swore” at the officers before he was made to kill the engine. The car door slammed as the spooked good-looking passenger was allowed to leave the scene and hail a cab in the rain as the law dealt with her mysterious foreign beau. Cuffed and bundled into the back of a police car, the defiant Russian driver took the liberty of resting his feet on the back of Constable Charles Shearer's seat.

Taking up the story in his fascinating new Cold War history which reads like a spy novel, author and award-winning filmmaker Richard Kerbaj writes that Shearer later said: “Before we drove off he was lying back in the seat with his feet up on my shoulder. I turned round and said, ‘What are you playing at? Take your feet off the back of my seat.' And he replied, ‘You cannot talk to me, you cannot beat me, I am a KGB officer’.”

Shearer dismissed the rantings of his inebriated suspect as he was well acquainted with drunks “claiming all sorts of things”.

But Kerbaj’s new intrigue-packed book reveals how a humble court report about this case, published only in the Daily Express the day after the man’s arrest, set in motion events which would lead to one of the biggest espionage cases in British history.