Nikolai Khokhlov was a KGB spy whose exploits rival any of the models on which Bond was based. In 1953, Khokhlov was ordered to kill a prominent anti-Soviet Russian e’migre’ in Berlin, but instead he defected to the West, bringing with him an extraordinary array of murderous gadgetry, including two guns, housed in metal smoke cigarettes cases, which could fire up to four hollow steel bullets, and a miniature revolver that fired poisoned bullets. Khokhlov’s defection was a sensation, but perhaps still more astounding was the Soviet riposte: in 1957, while attending a conference in Frankfurt, Khokhlov drank a cup of coffee that had been laced with radioactive Thallium. His face erupted in black, brown and blue lumps, and his hair fell out in handfuls, but astonishingly, he survived. A copy of his remarkable book In the Name of Conscience inevitably found its way on to Fleming’s bookshelves, and from there into his fiction. The gun concealed inside a copy of War and Peace and wielded by the Soviet assassin Red Grant in From Russia with Love owed its inception to the Khokhlov haul of lethal gadgetry.