Fans of the Pulitzer-winning novel The Sympathizer surely enjoyed the recent miniseries adaptation from HBO, which follows a Vietnamese communist spy lurking undercover in the United States. Truth, however, can be much, much stranger than fiction. Look no further than the story of Lai Teck, an infamous triple agent who rose to become secretary-general of the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM)—all while actually an informant for the British.

“He led an extraordinarily colourful life of political intrigue and adventure as a secret agent,” writes former Special Branch officer Leon Comber, “and, although many aspects of his activities are still shrouded in mystery, he was probably one of Asia’s best-known spies, and without doubt the most important agent ever run by the Singapore Special Branch.”

The man later known as Lai Teck was born in colonial Vietnam, reportedly in 1903. Different sources give his original name as Nguyen Van Long, Hoang A Nhac, or Pham Van Dac, but he would adopt many more aliases in the course of his career. One of them, Wright or Light, punned on the Cantonese pronunciation of Lai Teck and “led many to believe, especially as he was fair-skinned, that he was a Eurasian,” writes Comber.

For decades, Lai Teck’s disappearance in 1947 was a mystery to historians.

Now, Comber—a former British intelligence agent who was married at one point to the leftist physician and author Han Suyin—explains Lai Teck’s gruesome fate.

As a young man, Lai Teck joined Ho Chi Minh’s Indochina Communist Party. He was arrested by the authorities at age twenty-two and, to save his skin, agreed to spy for the French on the communists.

Notes Comber, “This was to be the established ‘pattern’ of his treachery throughout his political life: transferring his allegiance from one side of the fence to the other, without having any qualms in doing so about reneging on his former comrades.”

Lai Teck spent the late 1920s and the early 1930s traveling to the Soviet Union and China. He may have been sent to Moscow for training by Ho Chi Minh, as other young Vietnamese cadres were. In fact, he would eventually win the nickname “Malaya’s Lenin” because of “his impressive knowledge of communist theory,” as notorious communist guerrilla Chin Peng later told Comber.

During this same period, Comber surmises that the French intelligence service also introduced Lai Teck to the Singapore Special Branch chief, René Onraet, who occasionally visited Saigon. Comber writes that it’s “quite likely” that Onraet offered Lai Teck’s services to the Singapore Special Branch, to be used “at a later date.”

That time came in 1935, when Lai Teck entered Singapore via Hong Kong, on the pretext of having been sent by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to assist their troubled counterparts in Malaya.

“[T]here was no one in Singapore who could disprove what he said,” Comber remarks, and

there is little doubt that his very “foreignness,” and the fact that he was a Vietnamese-Chinese who had been involved in communism on an “international” scale, would have given him considerable prestige in the eyes of the more parochial CPM members.

Little did his new comrades dream that he was infiltrating them on behalf of the British.

“The Special Branch made good use of the information Lai Teck supplied after he joined the Party to arrest several leading members of the CPM and have them banished to China,” writes Comber.

Despite his duplicity, Lai Teck was elected secretary-general of the CPM in 1939. Yet his fortunes would soon change with the fall of Malaya in World War II. The much-feared Japanese military police, or kempetai, captured Lai Teck in Singapore in early 1942. To stay alive, he agreed to work clandestinely for the country’s new masters. A valuable asset, he provided the kempetai with a complete organizational chart of the CPM in Malaya, “which would otherwise have taken them years to build up,” according to Comber.

In all, the information he passed reportedly signed the death warrant for more than 100 comrades. In fact, when CPM member Li Ying Kang uncovered his duplicity, Lai Teck “arranged with the Japanese for Li to be released, accused him of being a Japanese collaborator, and was able to convince the Party members that Li was a traitor, and had him buried alive.”

But, after the war, Lai Teck faced mounting suspicions about his collaboration with the kempetai.

Events came to a head in 1947, when he was summoned to a meeting with the top ranks of the CPM. Lai Teck never showed up. Instead, he went on the run—along with a hefty chunk of party funds in gold, Japanese currency, and Straits dollars—and was never heard of again.

Of course, speculation about his fate ran rampant. One British source would even claim that Lai Teck “was evacuated by the Special Branch … and resettled with a new identity in Hong Kong.”

Only in 1998 did Chin Peng, who succeeded Lai Teck as CPM leader, reveal the truth: Lai Teck had fled first to Hong Kong and then to Bangkok, with his former comrades hot on his heels. Not long after he made it to Thailand, he was confronted by communist cadres there.

“According to Chin Peng’s account, Lai Teck was inadvertently strangled to death when he put up a fierce struggle to avoid being apprehended,” writes Comber. “He added that Lai Teck’s body was placed in a large gunny sack and thrown into the Chao Phya River.”

He muses, “Lai Teck’s career as a transnational spy still raises complex questions of loyalty and collaboration which have even not yet been satisfactorily settled, but it is clear that his extraordinary masquerade of identities, loyalties and deceit … in the end caught up with him.”

But one last, tantalizing mystery remains: The cash and gold that Lai Teck stole have never come to light.

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