She sorted and sequenced these, and buried them in a large carefully sealed tin under the strawberry patch beside the apple tree in the garden at the family home where her widowed mother still lived.

[1] Two marriages and time spent in the espionage community left Hilde Purwin with an unusually wide range of names by which she may be identified in sources.

The family later moved to a house alongside the elegant Belvederer Allee in Weimar, twenty or so minutes (by train) to the east of Erfurt.

[7] She completed her schooling in 1937 and went to Dresden to take a "Pflichtjahr" (a form of mandatory gap year[6]) working as a childcare helper for the Madaus family who were the owners of a major pharmaceuticals company.

She was transferred in July 1940 from the provincial mail room in Weimar to "Amt VI" (literally "Office 6"), the department in Berlin that dealt with political foreign intelligence.

In this respect she was therefore already being required to apply certain analytical skills and judgements alongside the basic clerical and organisational tasks commonly associated with a secretarial role.

Hilde "Felizitas" Beetz returned to Berlin to work for Wilhelm Höttl, the newly appointed head of the "Amt VI Italien-Referat".

Following the Grand Council vote of 24 July 1943 in which Ciano joined with the majority and opposed his father-in-law, voting to invite King Victor Emmanuel III to "resume his full constitutional powers", and the ensuing political take-over by General Pietro Badoglio, Ciano was on the receiving end of a vicious press campaign, deprived of a passport, and kept under virtual house arrest at his home in Italy.

[4] While Ciano was held, at this stage with his wife and children, under elegant house arrest in a lakeside villa in the hamlet of Allmannshausen, south of Munich, the security services assigned "Felizitas" Beetz to act as his "translator-hostess".

This reflected a concern on the part of the German intelligence chief, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, that Hitler might have misgivings about a high-profile prisoner of the Italian puppet state being released beyond the confines of the Axis powers.

[4] Beetz had already met with her immediate superior, Wilhelm Höttl, in Berlin on 4 December 1943 to discuss an idea for saving Ciano and obtaining the treasure-trove of his papers.

[6] Directly after Ciano's killing Hilde Beetz was involved, together with Emilio Pucci, in helping Edda disappear over the mountains beyond Como into Switzerland.

[4] Aware that she had shown a greater degree of "initiative" than was necessarily compatible with her status, Beetz became concerned that if she were to be condemned or scapegoated for her activities as a possible "double agent" it might damage her husband or younger brother, and indeed create problems for her widowed mother.

However, Hilde Beetz had somehow got hold of two volumes of Ciano diaries that had been left by Edda while a patient at the "La Ramiola" clinic at Parma shortly before her husband was executed.

In 1948 an English-language version was published in London in a volume, which also included diary extracts from the early 1940s, entitled "Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers",[13] edited by the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge who provided a characteristically sanctimonious introduction, and translated by Stuart Hood[14] who had spent the war years as a British intelligence officer in Egypt and Italy.

From subsequently declassified intelligence documents it is clear that by the middle of June 1945 she had already been questioned in some detail, probably in Munich, under the direction of Lt. Col. Andrew H. Berding of the Twelfth United States Army Group.

"[18] Henry Hecksher, who in 1946 became head of OSS counterintelligence in Berlin, described Beetz approvingly as "probably one of those extremely rare Germans who understand and are sympathetic to Democracy.

It was proposed that she should obtain a secretarial job through a local employment agency and join the Roman Catholic Church in order to provide suitable cover.

In a vetting recorded on 12 October 1945 Beetz herself insisted she had always been a "reluctant Nazi" and that she had stopped paying her party membership fees during her time working for the German government in Rome.

The mission, which became known as "Project Sitting Duck" was intended to determine the extent of suspected Soviet penetration of the American military command in Berlin.

She was introduced as an "intern" into the office of Arno Scholz, a longstanding member of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and now editor in chief of the "Telegraf" (newspaper), based in the British occupied sector of Berlin.

CIA operational use of Agent "Camise" fizzled out after 1950, however, when the newspaper promoted her to headship of its office in Frankfurt am Main where the intelligence situation was less frenetic and Soviet political and espionage activity was less overtly ubiquitous.

[2] Her husband was Carl Heinz Purwin, a trades unionist and journalist who at this point was identified as editor of "Welt der Arbeit" (loosely, "The world of labour").

In 1979 Thomas Polgar, her former handler on behalf of US intelligence (and for many years a good friend), held several meetings with her and reported that she had become "a living encyclopaedia of political and personality information".

When they had crept through to his study Wehner explained that the men were two East German escapees who had turned up exhausted at his front door the previous evening.

"[1] She achieved a notable scoop in the late Autumn of 1959 when Chancellor Adenauer delivered an off-the-record background briefing to a small circle of selected conservative Press club journalists.

[20] The "old man" (by now well into his ninth decade) was in such good form that she risked a very direct question: "Why, Chancellor, do you hold such a low opinion of your Economics Minister, Vice-chancellor Erhard?".

She was not permitted to take notes, but she was armed with her excellent memory, and the chancellor told her at some length why he thought that Ludwig Erhard was totally unsuitable to replace him.

An interview with Adenauer under these circumstances would have been a rare opportunity for any journalist, and Purwin took her chance and asked him about other issues, such as his policy in respect of East Germany.

[1] Hilde Purwin made a number of television appearances in her capacity as a political commentator, notably with stalwart moderator-presenters Werner Höfer and Reinhard Appel.