What do you think?
Rate this book
Murder in Cairo: Solving a Cold War Spy Mystery
On a warm night in December 1977, David Holden, chief foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times, landed in Cairo to report on crucial peace talks between Egypt and Israel, an epochal moment in global politics. Shortly after dawn, 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? These were the questions pursued for a year by the newspaper’s Insight team, overseen by legendary editor Harold Evans. Before he died in 2020, Evans said that their failure to solve the case was the biggest regret of his long career.
Now, a member of the original Insight team has joined forces with a young investigative journalist from today’s Sunday Times to resume the quest. Their search leads them into a world of intrigue and betrayal, exposing the fatal crossovers between journalism and spying.
Meticulously researched and grippingly told, Murder in Cairo reveals the truth of one of the most enigmatic cold case mysteries of the past fifty years.
WITH A FOREWORD BY TINA BROWN
Who killed Holden and why? These were the questions pursued for a year by the newspaper’s Insight team, overseen by legendary editor Harold Evans. Before he died in 2020, Evans said that their failure to solve the case was the biggest regret of his long career.
Now, a member of the original Insight team has joined forces with a young investigative journalist from today’s Sunday Times to resume the quest. Their search leads them into a world of intrigue and betrayal, exposing the fatal crossovers between journalism and spying.
Meticulously researched and grippingly told, Murder in Cairo reveals the truth of one of the most enigmatic cold case mysteries of the past fifty years.
WITH A FOREWORD BY TINA BROWN
464 pages, Hardcover
Published March 20, 2025
14 people are currently reading
273 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 28, 2025
A captivating read that was so difficult to put down! Highly recommended.
June 15, 2025
The Cold War, man. What a time. When the most powerful and subversive piece on the geo-political chessboard was the gay spy, who because of kompromat or just an insane ability to put on a front after a lifetime of being closeted, proved invaluable to intelligence agencies. But be careful, because these lil cheekies love a double or even triple cross 💅 The book is illuminating as to how delicately intelligence connections are formed, shining a light on the obvious but unprovable. The sprawling, entangled tentacles of these institutions seem to touch everything. And within them, people are willing to traverse this wilderness of mirrors, sometimes willing to sacrifice reputation and legacy for their cause in ways that only a select few will ever know.
April 26, 2025
A gripping tale of spies and journalists that reads like a Le Carrè novel but it is the result of investigative journalism at its finest. Highly recommend for fans of fiction and non-fiction alike!
October 29, 2025
1.5 stars.
I’m a spy obsessive. Espionage fiction and nonfiction have long been two of my favorite genres. I thought I would never encounter a Cold War spy nonfiction book I didn’t find gripping. Murder in Cairo proved me wrong.
I went into this book highly inclined to like it. The premise sounds so interesting, the cross-generational collaboration aspect admirable! I even chose it as a book club selection.
Within the first hundred pages, I knew I had made a mistake. The book needed a harsh editor because it is 100-150 pages too long and goes on tangents only loosely relevant to the topic at hand: David Holden, who he was, his allegiances and alleged espionage, and why he was obviously professionally assassinated. There were also glaring errors like at one point early in the book saying “In September 1939, shortly after the start of the First World War.” I am sure this was an accidental typo and no one thought WWI started in 1939 but it is glaring! An editor should have caught it.
Holden is the gaping hole at the center of the book. In 412 pages I never got a true sense for who he was or why I should care much about him. Sure, he was a closeted gay man and a suspiciously successful journalist always in the right place at the right time. But beyond that, there was shockingly little. Mostly people seemed pretty indifferent to him, and those who had strong opinions seemed polarized. Even his closest surviving friends, friends close enough he dedicated his book to them, speak of him in generic terms. He usually wasn’t funny, but on occasion he was very funny? Are there many people who that description could not fit? Despite being a writer, he appeared to leave little meaningful personal correspondence the authors retrieved, at least, and of course after 50 years almost everyone involved is dead. I think this is a sad fact about this book: many of the people who could have provided color for Holden’s nature are dead and the few still living are burdened by failing memory or age.
I also am not convinced the circumstantial evidence presented is enough to convince me beyond doubt that Holden was a double CIA or MI6 and KGB agent. The case for CIA or MI6 agent (getting out of places just in time, being absolutely surrounded by CIA personnel last he was seen alive, strangely fast promotions, and writing anti-Allende articles for a CIA propaganda outlet) is stronger than KGB, though I do think there is an awful lot of circumstantial stuff suggesting it for sure. Him knowing Kim Philby at a time when both were nominally hard-drinking foreign correspondents in Damascus, a thirdhand report of the FBI spotting Holden with a KGB contact in Washington, a boyfriend who was a KPD member in the 1930s, spending time in Mexico and lying about it, a left-wing academic telling his friend as he was dying that Holden told him he was a secret Marxist: what does it all amount to? Not nothing, and it does put me on the fence about his working for two agencies, but I so wish the authors had anything at all slightly more definitive than this.
I thought the authors featured too heavily, probably as a consequence of having little of Holden and the investigation being so central. While the authorial experiences in the initial investigation were interesting, it was too comprehensive and should have been summarized. The paranoia in Egypt in the second part was also quite interesting but discussed for too long.
Other characters featured too heavily too in my opinion: Sadat and Angleton, for two. I found the insinuations that Angleton, Philby, and McCarthy were bisexual or gay, and that Holden and his gay colleague were perhaps in a relationship because they were friends and both gay men, grating. Far be it to defend any of these three, but in Angleton’s case with Philby, men can be close friends and the betrayal of a close friend can be devastating without sex and romantic love being required. Perhaps Midolo knows more than he puts on the page, but I suspect it is just speculation without any real foundation.
I did not like that Silberman’s letters were translated from German via Google Translate; for archival research I strongly believe that is fraught, though I don’t doubt he was a communist extolling his love for Stalin.
Overall, my main takeaway is that regardless of what Ben Macintyre says, foreign correspondent is the perfect career for the spy. While not as many foreign correspondents are likely spies as during the Cold War, I am confident there are still many spooks in the profession. My second takeaway is Egypt is incredibly repressive, but one only needs to read the news to know that.
I’m a spy obsessive. Espionage fiction and nonfiction have long been two of my favorite genres. I thought I would never encounter a Cold War spy nonfiction book I didn’t find gripping. Murder in Cairo proved me wrong.
I went into this book highly inclined to like it. The premise sounds so interesting, the cross-generational collaboration aspect admirable! I even chose it as a book club selection.
Within the first hundred pages, I knew I had made a mistake. The book needed a harsh editor because it is 100-150 pages too long and goes on tangents only loosely relevant to the topic at hand: David Holden, who he was, his allegiances and alleged espionage, and why he was obviously professionally assassinated. There were also glaring errors like at one point early in the book saying “In September 1939, shortly after the start of the First World War.” I am sure this was an accidental typo and no one thought WWI started in 1939 but it is glaring! An editor should have caught it.
Holden is the gaping hole at the center of the book. In 412 pages I never got a true sense for who he was or why I should care much about him. Sure, he was a closeted gay man and a suspiciously successful journalist always in the right place at the right time. But beyond that, there was shockingly little. Mostly people seemed pretty indifferent to him, and those who had strong opinions seemed polarized. Even his closest surviving friends, friends close enough he dedicated his book to them, speak of him in generic terms. He usually wasn’t funny, but on occasion he was very funny? Are there many people who that description could not fit? Despite being a writer, he appeared to leave little meaningful personal correspondence the authors retrieved, at least, and of course after 50 years almost everyone involved is dead. I think this is a sad fact about this book: many of the people who could have provided color for Holden’s nature are dead and the few still living are burdened by failing memory or age.
I also am not convinced the circumstantial evidence presented is enough to convince me beyond doubt that Holden was a double CIA or MI6 and KGB agent. The case for CIA or MI6 agent (getting out of places just in time, being absolutely surrounded by CIA personnel last he was seen alive, strangely fast promotions, and writing anti-Allende articles for a CIA propaganda outlet) is stronger than KGB, though I do think there is an awful lot of circumstantial stuff suggesting it for sure. Him knowing Kim Philby at a time when both were nominally hard-drinking foreign correspondents in Damascus, a thirdhand report of the FBI spotting Holden with a KGB contact in Washington, a boyfriend who was a KPD member in the 1930s, spending time in Mexico and lying about it, a left-wing academic telling his friend as he was dying that Holden told him he was a secret Marxist: what does it all amount to? Not nothing, and it does put me on the fence about his working for two agencies, but I so wish the authors had anything at all slightly more definitive than this.
I thought the authors featured too heavily, probably as a consequence of having little of Holden and the investigation being so central. While the authorial experiences in the initial investigation were interesting, it was too comprehensive and should have been summarized. The paranoia in Egypt in the second part was also quite interesting but discussed for too long.
Other characters featured too heavily too in my opinion: Sadat and Angleton, for two. I found the insinuations that Angleton, Philby, and McCarthy were bisexual or gay, and that Holden and his gay colleague were perhaps in a relationship because they were friends and both gay men, grating. Far be it to defend any of these three, but in Angleton’s case with Philby, men can be close friends and the betrayal of a close friend can be devastating without sex and romantic love being required. Perhaps Midolo knows more than he puts on the page, but I suspect it is just speculation without any real foundation.
I did not like that Silberman’s letters were translated from German via Google Translate; for archival research I strongly believe that is fraught, though I don’t doubt he was a communist extolling his love for Stalin.
Overall, my main takeaway is that regardless of what Ben Macintyre says, foreign correspondent is the perfect career for the spy. While not as many foreign correspondents are likely spies as during the Cold War, I am confident there are still many spooks in the profession. My second takeaway is Egypt is incredibly repressive, but one only needs to read the news to know that.
June 1, 2025
This is not a book the Egyptian Tourist Board would wish one to read and makes one question why as a journalist one would wish to spend any time there whatsoever even today -- the brutal murder of the Italian student Giulio Regeni by the Egyptian police features as a modern reminder of their viciousness.
That though is a side issue to this engrossing, extremely sinister and scary investigation into the murder of the then Sunday Times chief foreign correspondent David Holden in Cairo, on his way in from the airport. Resolving it became the number one obsession of the legendary Sir Harry Evans, and although he has died one of the original Insight investigators Peter Gillman and a much younger Sunday Times journalist Emanuele Midolo have fulfilled his wishes in style and with some courage and loads of hard headed determination.
Holden enigmatic, charming when he wanted to be, gay and a great writer...but his espionage activities did for him in the end...from CIA to KGB who was he acting for ..the latter it appears by journey's end and hence the Egyptians executed the wishes of probably the CIA or perhaps MI6.
"We did it," the (Egyptian) police chief said. "They asked us to do it. Holden was working for the KGB."..as to who they was.....
Even with many of the main protagonists dead, from Philby to James Jesus Angleton, the then Cairo station chief Jim Fees to shady Turkey-born Saudi intelligence chief Kamal Adham, Holden's agent Patrick Seale -- who is deemed to be a KGB agent -- Mustafa Amin, a legendary Egyptian journalist, who along with his twin Ali founded Akhbar el-Yom, but who was suspected of being in the pay of the CIA, and Frank Giles the snobbish firstly foreign editor of the ST then its editor when the paper was ridiculed over the Hitler Diaries. Allusions are made as to whether Giles was responsible for stealing telexes sensitive to the initial enquiry and indeed Holden's travel plans. Evans suspected him for one.
Some who are still alive would not be people to ask for a reference for Holden. The iconic photographer Sir Don McCullin in particular, who was left high and dry in Uganda when working with Holden, the latter having taken flight. McCullin and other western journalists were rounded up and thrown into an horrendous jail, witnessing the first evening the sledge hammering to death of a Tanzanian border guard -- Milton Obote had crossed over with a rebel army into Uganda.
"They beat him to death right in our cell, in front of us. It was the most dangerous moment of my life.I suppose I have David Holden to thank for that." (McCullin..that says something given the wars he has covered throughout his remarkable career).
The final word should go to the late Mohammed Heikal, editor of Al Ahram and Minister of Information under Nasser, and for four years after the latter's death the closest confidant to the successor Anwar Sadat.
Heikal espied one night by Michael Adams, BBC's Middle East correspondent and who was close to Holden, was pursued to the lift in a hotel by the journalist. Adams according to his widow Celia was obsessed like Evans about getting to the bottom of the affair.
"Look, I do want to talk to you," Michael told him (Heikal).
"I'm late, sorry I can't talk," Heikal said.
"Ok, just tell me, who killed David?" Michael asked.
"We did," Heikal replied and looked down, as the doors of the lift closed. Michael never saw him again.'
That though is a side issue to this engrossing, extremely sinister and scary investigation into the murder of the then Sunday Times chief foreign correspondent David Holden in Cairo, on his way in from the airport. Resolving it became the number one obsession of the legendary Sir Harry Evans, and although he has died one of the original Insight investigators Peter Gillman and a much younger Sunday Times journalist Emanuele Midolo have fulfilled his wishes in style and with some courage and loads of hard headed determination.
Holden enigmatic, charming when he wanted to be, gay and a great writer...but his espionage activities did for him in the end...from CIA to KGB who was he acting for ..the latter it appears by journey's end and hence the Egyptians executed the wishes of probably the CIA or perhaps MI6.
"We did it," the (Egyptian) police chief said. "They asked us to do it. Holden was working for the KGB."..as to who they was.....
Even with many of the main protagonists dead, from Philby to James Jesus Angleton, the then Cairo station chief Jim Fees to shady Turkey-born Saudi intelligence chief Kamal Adham, Holden's agent Patrick Seale -- who is deemed to be a KGB agent -- Mustafa Amin, a legendary Egyptian journalist, who along with his twin Ali founded Akhbar el-Yom, but who was suspected of being in the pay of the CIA, and Frank Giles the snobbish firstly foreign editor of the ST then its editor when the paper was ridiculed over the Hitler Diaries. Allusions are made as to whether Giles was responsible for stealing telexes sensitive to the initial enquiry and indeed Holden's travel plans. Evans suspected him for one.
Some who are still alive would not be people to ask for a reference for Holden. The iconic photographer Sir Don McCullin in particular, who was left high and dry in Uganda when working with Holden, the latter having taken flight. McCullin and other western journalists were rounded up and thrown into an horrendous jail, witnessing the first evening the sledge hammering to death of a Tanzanian border guard -- Milton Obote had crossed over with a rebel army into Uganda.
"They beat him to death right in our cell, in front of us. It was the most dangerous moment of my life.I suppose I have David Holden to thank for that." (McCullin..that says something given the wars he has covered throughout his remarkable career).
The final word should go to the late Mohammed Heikal, editor of Al Ahram and Minister of Information under Nasser, and for four years after the latter's death the closest confidant to the successor Anwar Sadat.
Heikal espied one night by Michael Adams, BBC's Middle East correspondent and who was close to Holden, was pursued to the lift in a hotel by the journalist. Adams according to his widow Celia was obsessed like Evans about getting to the bottom of the affair.
"Look, I do want to talk to you," Michael told him (Heikal).
"I'm late, sorry I can't talk," Heikal said.
"Ok, just tell me, who killed David?" Michael asked.
"We did," Heikal replied and looked down, as the doors of the lift closed. Michael never saw him again.'
October 2, 2025
A really fantastic book and tale of investigative journalism. I first came across this book (like a lot of others) when Midolo was on True Anon Podcast.
I found the book riveting, and hearing about the investigation in the 70s and then in the 2020s. There were lots of characters popping up that I knew of, such as Kim Philby and James Angleton. I also learnt there was much I don't know that I need to read up on, about Philby and others.
I did find the book jumped around a lot, explaining characters not entirely relevant but were useful to set the scene. I also often had trouble remembering characters and events when they came up again.
This was an exceptionally well researched piece that was great to read, and whilst the case wasn't 'concrete', I believe their conclusion and that is likely what happened.
I found the book riveting, and hearing about the investigation in the 70s and then in the 2020s. There were lots of characters popping up that I knew of, such as Kim Philby and James Angleton. I also learnt there was much I don't know that I need to read up on, about Philby and others.
I did find the book jumped around a lot, explaining characters not entirely relevant but were useful to set the scene. I also often had trouble remembering characters and events when they came up again.
This was an exceptionally well researched piece that was great to read, and whilst the case wasn't 'concrete', I believe their conclusion and that is likely what happened.
December 2, 2025
This is not a book the Egyptian Tourist Board would wish one to read and makes one question why as a journalist one would wish to spend any time there whatsoever even today -- the brutal murder of the Italian student Giulio Regeni by the Egyptian police features as a modern reminder of their viciousness.
That though is a side issue to this extremely creepy, sinister and scary true story and investigation into the murder of the then Sunday Times chief foreign correspondent David Holden in Cairo, on his way in from the airport. Resolving it became the number one obsession of the legendary Sir Harry Evans, and although he has died one of the original Insight investigators Peter Gillman and a new addition Emanuele Midolo
That though is a side issue to this extremely creepy, sinister and scary true story and investigation into the murder of the then Sunday Times chief foreign correspondent David Holden in Cairo, on his way in from the airport. Resolving it became the number one obsession of the legendary Sir Harry Evans, and although he has died one of the original Insight investigators Peter Gillman and a new addition Emanuele Midolo
June 10, 2025
Fascinating murder mystery of UK journalist David Holden. Dense with questions of was he a KGB agent, or MI6 or CIA? Years of research by successive teams of investigative journalists. A cast of extraordinary characters. Mystery Solved in the end, but some questions remain murky.
November 30, 2025
Great book. An impressive investigation that dives deep into many fascinating characters and a world I wasn’t all too familiar with. Really grabs hold after the first few chapters. 100% worth a read.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews