Paul Henderson, 72, began his career in 1969 when he left Stepney Green Comprehensive to join the East London Advertiser as an apprentice reporter at the paper’s former offices in Mile End.
He later moved onto the national press and covered events like the world tour by Charles and Diana in the 1980s before ending up as editor of the Sunday Mirror.
Paul’s break was covering the 1989 trial of an art dealer caught red-handed as a Soviet spy in a raid on a flat in Friern Barnet.
The spy was transmitting messages to Moscow on a shortwave radio set.
Now, 36 years on, Paul was back on home turf to launch his book about the case, A Spy in the Family, at Bard Books in Roman Road.
“Coming back here was giving a nod to the East End,” Paul told the Advertiser. “This is where I started my career that has taken me all over the world.
“I owe a lot to the people I worked with at Mile End, learning my trade in journalism.”
Paul, who also worked on the Newham Recorder, wrote the book with David Gardner, a colleague from Fleet Street who had begun his career on the Ilford Recorder.
The two researched how a Dutch woman was duped for 13 years by the spy, who pretended to be her son to stay undercover.
They eventually managed to reunite the woman with her real son who had been left at an orphanage as a baby in German-occupied Europe during the Second World War.
The book launch turned into a reunion of Paul’s old colleagues from the 1970s like Arthur Edwards, now 85, Fleet Street’s famous royal photographer who also began on the Advertiser.
Other Advertiser names from the past were boxing correspondent Len Whaley, now 87, and retired sports reporters Jeff Ives and John Smith.
National crime reporter Jeff Edwards, who began on the Stratford Express, also turned up, along with showbiz reporter Baz Bamigboye who had worked with Paul in Fleet Street in the 1970s.
A Spy in the Family is available in bookstores and online.
