
Source for both views of the address book: Churchill Archives Center, Churchill College, Cambridge
Harford Montgomery Hyde Papers, “Cynthia” File number 2
There is something especially interesting and odd about Madame Brousse’s address book. Curiously, virtually every name entered into her “little black book” is written (it was actually brown and wallet-sized) —
in the same pen, the same green ink and the same hand, suggesting that all the names and addresses were compiled at once. That is unusual. No one uses an address book in that way. Because of its uniformity and because Brousse was working at the time (circa 1961) with British intelligence agent and author H. Montgomery Hyde to produce articles, books and movies, it must be assumed that she compiled the book for the purposes of her memoir. Certainly, no spy would carry such a book. That would be unthinkable. If he or she were captured, a little book like that could become a killing machine, a tool to hunt down and eradicate an entire network of accomplices. The little book contains virtually every social and political contact she met in the course of a career that began during the Spanish Civil War and migrated across pre-War Europe and finally concluded in the United States, around 1943, seven years of conspiracies.

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