When Battersea journalist Jimmy Burns started researching his father's life for a new book, he had no idea the secrets he was about to uncover.

In the 1930s Tom Burns was a rising start of British publishing before joining the propaganda wing of the secret services, the Ministry of Information, when war was declared in 1939.

He went on to be posted as press attache to the British Embassy in Madrid in a job straddling intelligence and propaganda aimed at keeping Franco neutral and out of the war, a post that became more and more complicated as time went on.

Jimmy, a prominent journalist who is a member of the Friends of Battersea Park and works for a Wandsworth charity raising funds for youth projects, started the journey of discovery into his father five years ago and was intrigued by what he found.

"In a sense I wanted to do it because it's the one part of my father's life that he didn't talk about which I thought was the most interesting," says the 56-year-old.

"I was his youngest son and he was a father that I loved very much and hero worshipped but this process has very much been a process of bringing him down to earth.

"It's not a hero worship book, it's my father warts and all and the world he lived in.

"I didn't know very much about his war years in the sense the very nature of what he got up to wasn't something he really talked about.

"A lot of the book is based on digging I had to do since he died in 1995, looking through records that have been disclosed to me and private letters and interviews.

"There were moments of total panic when I thought 'is this book going anywhere?' but then came two critical points that made the book for me.

"I discovered a pile of letters which my father had written to a cousin to the Queen Mother, Ann Bowes-Lyon, whom he had had a very intensive affair with in the run up to the war and during it.

"The other one was two huge MI5 files which I received when they were made available for the first time in 60 years.

"They were full of information on what my father had been up to in the Second World War and they gave me a lot of meat to work with."

Papa Spy, which hit shops two weeks ago, is Jimmy's seventh book, a back catalogue which includes a biography of the now very much under pressure Argentina football national coach Diego Maradona.

"If Argentina do not qualify for the World Cup this could be the final chapter in the history of Diego Maradona," he says.

"It will be a national disgrace and it will be blamed on Maradona.

"You can't blame the players in the squad as they have some of the best players in the world.

"This could be a point when Diego Maradona falls down with a bump."

Burns will also be one of two authors taking part in a Fathers & Sons talk at Waterstone's in Putney on Tuesday.

He will be joined by Tom Carver, a former BBC correspondent who has also just written a book about his father in World War Two called Where The Hell Have You Been?

Exchange Centre, High St, October 6, 6.30pm. Call 020 8780 2401. Visit jimmy-burns.com.