It was mid-afternoon when I turned a typewritten foolscap page from 1939 and found the name I had been searching for: Detective Sergeant Mischenko. The report was a pretty banal cry for resourcing. Poor Mischenko was doing the work of two detectives in Japanese-occupied Shanghai and desperately needed some assistance. On turning the page, I felt like Archimedes himself (though running through the US National Archives yelling ‘Eureka!’ might have been a touch dramatic). My journey to the suburbs in the middle of a clammy Washington DC summer had held no guarantees of finding this.

Feeling like Kafka’s Josef K., I had been sent from the second floor of the National Archives’ sterile concrete building to the fourth, then the fifth, and back again. I waited hours while these boxes from the CIA’s record collection were located, only to find that I wasn’t booked into the correct room. Without a staff member named Randy – who assured me with a kind wink and an ‘I got you’ that he could wrangle me a seat – I might have given up and headed back to my hotel for room service. My hopes of striking archival gold deflated with each obstacle. But here he was: Vladimir Mischenko, as real as one can be in black ink on yellowing paper.

Why so much effort for a few old files? I had been part of a working party consulting with the Australian Dictionary of Biography, the online encyclopedia of the lives of notable Australians. We were looking at their listings for migrants: what significant people, who were not white men of Anglo origin, were missing? I was researching the Petrov Affair at the time, so Vladimir Mischenko – also known as Bill Marshall – sprang to mind. The trouble was that I knew relatively little about him: the information was usually classified. Mischenko was one of ASIO’s earliest recruits, from the late 1940s. But he was also a recent migrant and a refugee.