How We Uncovered A Russian Spy Working At The Sunday Times

On a December night in 1977, David Holden, chief foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times, was murdered in Cairo. His body was found dumped on a dusty roadside and he had been shot with a single bullet through the heart. Who killed Holden and why? These were the questions pursued for a year by this newspaper’s Insight team, overseen by the paper’s editor Harold Evans. Before he died in 2020, Evans told Peter Gillman, a member of the original Insight team, that their failure to solve the case was the biggest regret of his career. Gillman joined forces with the current Sunday Times reporter Emanuele Midolo in a last effort to crack the case. Here, they reveal how their investigation led them into a world of espionage, intrigue and betrayal, and how they finally found their way through “the wilderness of mirrors”.