The Heretic: The Life and Times of Josip Broz-Tito (1957)

Churchill chose Fitzroy Maclean to lead a liaison mission to central Yugoslavia in 1943. As Maclean wryly put it, his mission was "simply to find out who was killing the most Germans and suggest means by which we could help them to kill more." At the time of Maclean's deployment to Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito and his Partisans were emerging as a major irritant to the German control of the Balkans.

Little was known at the time about Tito: some suspected this was an acronym for a committee or that he might in fact be a young woman. Maclean got to know Tito well, and would later produce two biographies of him. Maclean's relationship with Tito's Partisans was not always easy, partly because they were Communist, while he came from an upper class Scottish background, and had witnessed Stalinism in action. His biography of Tito reveals the admiration he held for the Yugoslav leader and the Yugoslav Communist-led anti-fascist struggle.