in Barcelona, using "Sam Russell" as his byline and covering the Republicans' retreat at the border town of Figueres. Barcelona was at the time under attack from Benito Mussolini's forces (which had a base in Majorca), who, Lesser wrote, bombed our area of Barcelona, and I shall never forget the smell there when I went outside. There was one wonderful row of lime trees – a beautiful scent when they're in flower ... The gutter was literally flowing with blood, and the smell of the blood of these poor people was mixed with the smell of the lime trees. He left Barcelona the day before the city fell to the Nationalists in January 1939. Lesser was the Daily Workers correspondent in Paris and Brussels, leaving Paris after the banning of the Communist Party following the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and fleeing Belgium after the Nazi invasion in May 1940. He returned to Britain, where the wounds he had received in Spain prevented him from serving in the British Army. Instead, he worked for four years as an inspector in a Napier & Son aircraft factory in west London, also serving as a shop steward. He rejoined the newspaper in the final months of the war and in 1945, following the lifting of the government's ban on publication of the Daily Worker, he flew in a Royal Air Force Avro Lancaster bomber dropping food supplies in the Netherlands. Moscow correspondent and foreign editor Writing for the Daily Worker, Lesser visited Jersey following its occupation, covered the 1952 show trial of Communist Party of Czechoslovakia general secretary Rudolf Slánský, and witnessed Nikita Khrushchev's rise to power. Living in the Soviet Union as the ''Daily Workers Moscow correspondent from 1955 until 1959, he became friends with spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two of the Cambridge Five, and travelled from Moscow to report on the Soviet invasion following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Lesser replaced Peter Fryer in Budapest after Fryer resigned in protest at his reports, which supported the rebellion, having been rewritten by the paper. Though Lesser's first despatch from Budapest, headlined "Kadar reveals the facts", was sympathetic to Soviet-installed Prime Minister János Kádár, his attempts to report on the realities of everyday life led the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to request his withdrawal from Moscow, which was refused by the British party. Having been tipped off regarding the content of