Prime Minister Was a Spy, The

AUSTRALIANA On the morning of 17 December 1967, Harold Edward Holt, Australia’s seventeenth prime minister, walked into the sea near his holiday home at Portsea, Victoria. He swam through turbulent surf, then suddenly disappeared a short distance offshore. Despite prolonged sea and air searches no trace of his body was ever found. The mysterious circumstances of his disappearance bred rumours that he had committed suicide; other wilder stories claimed that his body had been found with a bullet in it, that he had been assassinated by foreign frogmen. None of this speculation, however, has ever been substantiated and the official police report of 1968 that he drowned accidentally has never been seriously challenged in public. But now this book, based on meticulous research carried out over a ten-year period in Iraq, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Britain, and Australia, offers for the first time a comprehensive alternative explanation to the mystery-and the story it tells is one of the most sensational in the annals of modern espionage!
vii, 232 p., [8] p. of plates ; 20 cm. #120522 (Only an “Fair to Poor Reading Copy”!)