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Copyright © 2005 by Nigel West

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The hardback version of this book was cataloged by the Library of Congress as follows:

West, Nigel.

Historical dictionary of British intelligence / Nigel West.

p. cm.—(Historical dictionaries of intelligence and counterintelligence; no. 1)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Intelligence service—Great Britain—History—Dictionaries. 2. Military intelligence—Great Britain—History—Dictionaries. I. Title. II. Series.

JN329.16W473 2005

327.1241’003—dc22

2004029961

9780810870284

ISBN 978-0-8108-7028-4 (ebook)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Editor’s Foreword

It seems only fitting that the volume on British Intelligence should be the first in this new series of Historical Dictionaries of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. After all, it is the oldest organized structure of its kind, although there were admittedly countless earlier precedents of states spying on other states (while trying to keep those other states from spying on them) and historically there were also simpler, more rudimentary arrangements within what became the United Kingdom before modern intelligence emerged. It was the British who developed most of the basic aspects, refined most of the essential techniques, and put together the most intricate organization. For the longest time they were the paragons as regards imagination, effectiveness, and cunning, although they are now outpaced by the Americans on technical gadgetry and could never quite match the Soviets in terms of sheer ruthlessness. This does not mean that the British got everything right; they most definitely did not, and British Intelligence is still a work in progress, having gone through repeated reforms and doubtlessly headed for more further down the road. But, and not every other intelligence organization can say the same, the successes clearly have outnumbered the failures and, what is even more important, Her Majesty’s team repeatedly beat the bad guys and lived to tell the tale (or keep it secret, as they preferred).

This volume provides considerable insight into the history and operations of British Intelligence. The entries cover a vast and varied cast of characters, the spies and their handlers, the moles and defectors, the political leaders, the top brass, and many further down. Other entries explain the techniques and jargon. And still others describe the many different offices and operations, whether MI5, SIS, or GCHQ (which are fortunately also listed with the acronyms for those whose memory is not infinite). The chronology shows how this all evolved over time while the introduction puts things in context. The bibliography should not be forgotten, certainly not in this sort of book, because that is where readers can find clues to the constantly increasing literature on what is one of the most fascinating of fields. Admittedly, this Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence cannot be read like a novel, but that does not really matter since there are so many of those around. It does something far more important: it provides rather quick and direct access to the information on which the many books are based and helps readers not only to figure out what is going on but also to estimate just how far the authors (whether of nonfiction, fiction, or some indeterminate middle ground) can be trusted.

This historical dictionary was written by probably the ideal author for the task, Nigel West. Already interested in intelligence and security issues while at university, he soon began writing on the subject, producing about 20 notable works of nonfiction so far with more doubtlessly to come. Most deal with the British operations, while some focus on Soviet and other varieties. Most cover the periods of World War II and the Cold War, but others go further back. Taken together, there is nothing quite like it and Nigel West is widely regarded as one of the (or perhaps the) foremost authorities on British Intelligence. Indeed, in 1989 he was voted the Experts’ Expert by a panel of spy writers selected by the Observer. In 2003 he was awarded the U.S. Association of Former Intelligence Officers’ first Lifetime Literature Achievement Award. Aside from that, Nigel West has lectured widely and been a member of the House of Commons. As stated, probably the ideal person for the job.

Jon Woronoff

Series Editor

Acronyms and Abbreviations

AI | Air Intelligence
ANA | Arab News Agency
ASIO | Australian Security Intelligence Organisation
BBC | British Broadcasting Corporation
BCCA | British Control Commission for Austria
BCCG | British Control Commission for Germany
BCRA | Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (Free French intelligence service)
BfV | Bundesamt fur Verfassungsschutz (Federal German security service)
BJ | Black Jumbo
BMEO | British Middle East Office
Brixmis | British Military Mission
BRUSA | British-United States Security Agreement
BSC | British Security Coordination
BSSO | British Services Security Organisation
BUF | British Union of Fascists
C | Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service
CAZAB | Canadian, American, New Zealand, Australian, and British (counterintelligence liaison)
CB | Companion of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath
CBE | Commander of the Order of the British Empire
CBME | Combined Bureau Middle East
CHIS | Covert Human Intelligence Source
CIA | Central Intelligence Agency (U.S.)
CICI | Combined Intelligence Centre Iraq
CID | Committee of Imperial Defence
CIFE | Combined Intelligence Far East
CIG | Current Intelligence Group
CIS | Combined Intelligence Service
CMG | Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George
CPGB | Communist Party of Great Britain
CRPO | Combined Research and Planning Office
CSDIC | Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre
CSO | Composite Signals Organisation
D/F | Direction finding
DGIA | Defence Geographic and Imagery Intelligence Agency
DGSS | Director-General of the Security Service
DIAS | Defence Intelligence Analysis Staff
DIS | Defence Intelligence Staff
DISC | Defence Intelligence and Security Centre
DMI | Director of Military Intelligence
DNI | Director of Naval Intelligence
DORA | Defence of the Realm Act
DSO | Defence Security Officer; Distinguished Service Order
DST | Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (French security service)
DWS | Diplomatic Wireless Service
EAM | Greek National Liberation Front
EDES | Greek Antimonarchist Resistance Front
ELAS | Guerrilla wing of the Greek National Liberation Front
EOKA | Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston (National Organization of Cypriot Combatants)
FBI | Federal Bureau of Investigation (U.S.)
FECB | Far East Combined Bureau
FRU | Force Research Unit
FSB | Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (Russian security service)
GC&CS | Government Code and Cypher School
GCHQ | Government Communications Headquarters
GCMG | Knight Grand Cross of the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George
GHQ | General Headquarters
GPO | General Post Office
GRU | Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noe Upravlenie (Soviet military intelligence service)
HFDF | High-frequency direction finding
HVA | Hauptverwaltung Aufkrarung (East German intelligence service)
IIC | Industrial Intelligence Centre
IPI | Indian Political Intelligence Bureau
IRA | Irish Republican Army
IRD | Information Research Department
ISLD | Inter-Services Liaison Department
JARIC | Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Centre
JIB | Joint Intelligence Bureau
JIC | Joint Intelligence Committee
JSC | Joint Security Control
JSG | Joint Services Group
JSIC | Joint Signals Intelligence Committee
JSRU | Joint Speech Research Unit
JTAC | Joint Terrorist Assessment Centre
JTLS | Joint Technical Language Service
KCMG | Knight Commander of the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George
KGB | Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti (Soviet intelligence service)
KPD | Kommunist Partei Deutschland (German Communist Party)
MBE | Member of the Order of the British Empire
MCIS | Ministerial Committee on the Intelligence Services
MEIC | Middle East Intelligence Centre
MI5 | British Security Service
MI6 | British Secret Intelligence Service
MI(R) | Military Intelligence (Research)
MP | Member of Parliament
MPSB | Metropolitan Police Special Branch
MRF | Mobile Reconnaissance Force
NATO | North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NCIS | National Criminal Intelligence Service
NCTSO | National Counterterrorism Security Office
NID | Naval Intelligence Division
NKVD | Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennykh Del (Soviet intelligence service)

Chronology

1883 | The Special Irish Branch of the Metropolitan Police is established.
1884 | The War Office intelligence division is established at Queen Anne’s Gate.
1885 | Khartoum falls.
1886 | Central Asia Intelligence is established at Meshed by Colonel C. S. Maclean.
1887 | The post of director of military intelligence (DMI) is created.
1888 | First Official Secrets Act is passed. General Sir Henry Brackenbury is appointed the first DMI.
1889 | Ten intelligence officers are sent to South Africa “on special service.”
1891 | General Brackenbury is appointed director of the Indian Intelligence Department.
1892 | The Walsall bomb factory is raided.
1894 | Thomas Beach publishes Twenty-Five Years in the Secret Service. The Royal Observatory plot is foiled. Sir John Ardagh is appointed director of intelligence.
1895 | Lord Wolseley as commander-in-chief reforms the army and introduces an Intelligence Branch.
1898 | The Field Intelligence Department is created at the War Office.
1899 | The Pigeon Service is established in South Africa.
1901 | The Committee of Imperial Defence is established.
1902 | The post of DMI is abolished in a War Office reorganization.
1903 | John Littlechild and William Melville retire from Special Branch.
1905 | Communists Vladimir Uljanov and Leib Bronstein (Lenin and Trotsky) speak in an Islington pub.
1909 | Patrick Quinn is appointed head of Special Branch. The Secret Service Bureau is established.
1910 | Funeral of King Edward VII.
1911 | The Official Secrets Act is enhanced. An official census reveals 42,000 adult Germans and Austro-Hungarians resident in the United Kingdom. The Sidney Street Siege leaves two dead in London.
1912 | Eric Holt-Wilson joins Sir Vernon Kell’s Special Intelligence Bureau. Dr. Arngaard Graves is arrested.
1914 | Carl Gustav Ernst is arrested. Kell’s MO5 has a staff of nine officers. The Intelligence Corps is established under Major T. G. Torrie.
1915 | MO5 is redesignated MI5, and MI1c is redesignated MI6.
1916 | The post of DMI is reintroduced.
1917 | The Zimmerman Telegram is decrypted.
1918 | MI5 has grown to 84 officers at headquarters.
1919 | Fourteen Combined Intelligence Service members are massacred in Dublin. The Directorate of Intelligence is established at Scotland Yard.
1920 | The British government publishes Soviet intercepts. A new Official Secrets Act is passed.
1921 | The Directorate of Intelligence at Scotland Yard closes.
1922 | J. Walton Newbold is elected as the first Communist party MP.
1923 | Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair succeeds Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming as chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).
1924 | The Soviet government is recognized by the United Kingdom. The Zinoviev Letter is intercepted and published just before the general election.
1925 | Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) headquarters are raided; 12 members are subsequently prosecuted.
1927 | The All-Russia Co-operative Society’s offices are raided. The Soviets change ciphers after they are compromised by a British government white paper.
1928 | Georg Hansen and Wilfred Macartney are arrested.
1929 | The Meerut conspiracy is broken up by arrests in Bombay. The Intelligence Corps is disbanded.
1930 | Olga Gray is recruited by Max Knight.
1931 | The Invergordon Mutiny takes place. The Treaty of Westminster allows MI5 to absorb Scotland Yard’s civilian staff.
1933 | Ernest Oldham commits suicide.
1934 | The Government Code and Cipher School begins to read MASK traffic. Edith Tudor Hart recruits Kim Philby.
1935 | “Jonny X” (Johann De Graaf) wrecks the Brazilian Communist revolution.
1936 | The Joint Intelligence Committee and Industrial Intelligence Centre are established.
1937 | Mrs. Jessie Jordan is arrested. MASK traffic is terminated.
1938 | Bletchley Park is purchased as the SIS’s War Station. CPGB official Percy Glading, George Whomack, and Albert Williams are arrested in connection with the Woolwich Arsenal espionage case.
1939 | John King is arrested. Two SIS officers are abducted in the Venlo Incident. The Intelligence Corps is reestablished.
1940 | Tyler Kent and Anna Wolkoff are arrested. Senior Soviet military intelligence defector Walter Krivitsky is interrogated. The Special Operations Executive is established.
1941 | The XX Committee is created.
1942 | Three Nazi spies are executed in London.
1943 | The U.S. Army’s Signal Security Agency begins work on Soviet traffic. Ormond Uren and Douglas Springhall are arrested.
1944 | A deception campaign ensures the success of D-Day.
1945 | Igor Gouzenko defects.
1946 | Sir Percy Sillitoe is appointed director-general of the Security Service (DGSS).
1947 | Allan Nunn May is arrested. Allan Foote defects.
1948 | Grigori Tokaev and J. D. Tasoev defect. The Joint Intelligence Bureau is established.
1949 | Foote’s Handbook for Spies is published.
1950 | Klaus Fuchs is arrested. Bruno Pontecorvo defects.
1951 | Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean defect.
1952 | Alan Moorehead publishes The Traitors.
1953 | William Marshall is arrested.
1954 | Otto John defects. Operation LOG CABIN commences in Norway. Vladimir Petrov defects.
1955 | Publication of Burgess and Maclean White Paper.
1956 | Lieutenant Commander Lionel Crabb disappears. Operation STRAGGLE to seize Suez is initiated.
1957 | Communist party member Hor Lung defects in Malaya.
1959 | Cyprus settlement is assisted by Operation SUNSHINE.
1960 | Oleg Penkovsky contacts Greville Wynne in Moscow.
1961 | George Blake, Konon Molody, Morris and Lona Cohen, Harry Houghton, and Ethel Gee are arrested. MI5 tries to entrap Eugene Ivanov.
1962 | John Vassall and Barbara Fell are arrested.
1963 | Kim Philby defects.
1964 | The Defence Intelligence Staff is established. John Cairncross confesses. Anthony Blunt accepts immunity. The Security Commission is created.
1965 | Molody is swapped for Wynne. Alfred Roberts and Geoffrey Conway are acquitted. Martin Furnival Jones is appointed the DGSS.
1966 | Frank Bossard is arrested. Blake escapes.
1968 | Philby’s My Silent War is published. Douglas Britten is arrested.
1969 | Czech intelligence agents Josef Frolik and Frantisek August defect.
1970 | Morris and Lona Cohen are swapped for Gerald Brooke.
1971 | Will Owen is arrested. Oleg Lyalin defects. Operation FOOT expels Soviet rezidenturas. Sirioj Abdoolcader, Kyriacos Costi, Leonard Hinchcliffe, Constantinos Martianon, and Nicholas Prager are arrested.
1972 | Michael Hanley is appointed DGSS.
1973 | David Bingham is arrested. A Mobile Reconnaissance Force team is ambushed.
1974 | The Prevention of Terrorism Act is passed.
1975 | Civil Contingencies Committee is created.
1976 | “The Eavesdroppers” is published in Time Out.
1977 | Philip Agee is deported. John Berry and two others are arrested in connection with the Time Out article.
1978 | The Zircon satellite project is compromised. Georgi Markov is assassinated.
1979 | Blunt is exposed publicly. Howard Smith is appointed DGSS.
1980 | The Home Secretary publishes telephone intercept statistics.
1981 | John Jones is appointed DGSS. Colin Figures is appointed chief of the SIS (“C”).
1982 | The United Kingdom and Argentina fight the Falklands War. Vladimir Kuzichkin defects.
1983 | Publication of the Franks Report. Hugh Hambleton and Geoffrey Prime are arrested. Oleg Bitov defects.
1984 | Michael Bettaney is arrested.
1985 | The trial of Cyprus signals intelligence personnel ends in acquittals. Oleg Gordievsky is exfiltrated from Moscow. Antony Duff is appointed DGSS.
1986 | John Bothwell is arrested.
1987 | Peter Wright’s Spy Catcher is published. Patrick Walker is appointed DGSS.
1989 | Colin McColl is appointed C.
1990 | Iraq invades Kuwait.
1991 | Operation DESERT STORM liberates Kuwait and defeats Iraq. Mikhail Butkov defects in Norway.
1992 | Matrix Churchill is raided. Stella Rimington is appointed DGSS. Viktor Oshchenko defects. Michael Smith is arrested.
1993 | The first MI5 report is prepared on Vasili Mitrokhin’s information.
1994 | David Spedding is appointed C.
1995 | The first Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee Report is released.
1996 | The Scott Report on the Paul Henderson trial is published. Stephen Lander is appointed DGSS.
1997 | David Shayler leaves MI5 and publishes disclosures.
1998 | Richard Tomlinson is released from prison.
1999 | The Mitrokhin Archive is published. Richard Dearlove is appointed C.
2000 | Eliza Manningham-Buller is appointed DGSS.
2002 | The September Dossier, regarding the justification for the war against Iraq, is published. GCHQ moves into new Benhall site.
2003 | Operation IRAQI FREEDOM removes Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.
2004 | The Hutton Inquiry and the Butler Report are published.

Introduction

By repute, British Intelligence is the oldest, most experienced organization of its kind in the world, the unseen hand behind so many world events, glamorized by James Bond. The French have always complained about perfidious Albion, the Germans acknowledge having being outmaneuvered in two world wars by Britain’s professional intelligencers, and in 1942, as the transatlantic intelligence relationship was in its infancy, beguiled Americans were the neophytes invited into the brothel to learn the secrets of clandestine operations. Despite the change in role, from a global power controlling an empire that covered much of the world to a mere partner in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union, the country’s famed security and intelligence apparatus continues largely intact and is recognized as “punching above its weight.” Feared by the Soviets, admired and trusted by the CIA, British Intelligence has provided the hidden dimension to the conduct of domestic and foreign policy, with the added mystique of Whitehall secrecy, a shroud that for years protected the identities of the shadowy figures who recruited the sources, broke the codes, and caught the spies.

Any glance at history, from the plots mounted against Queen Elizabeth I to the military expeditions to the Sudan, from the Crimean War to the guerrilla campaign waged by the Boers in South Africa, from the trenches of Flanders to the Battle of El Alamein, and perhaps most starkly during the Cold War, reveals the essential role of intelligence, often covert activities channeled through a myriad of agencies, branches, bureaus, and covers. Even when the contribution made by the secret world is hard to discern or has been concealed behind years of official obfuscation and “plausible denial,” there remains the suspicion that there was a sub rosa component to all major Cabinet decisions, every military deployment, and most political triumphs. In recent years, greater transparency, the declassification of official papers, and the relaxation of the rules of total confidentiality have allowed the public to learn more about the influence of the men known by the initials “C,” “K,” and “M.” Far from turning out to have been faceless, colorless bureaucrats, some of these characters prove to have been larger than life, with the first “C” being a one-legged admiral whose naval career had been curtailed by seasickness, “K” an asthmatic infantry officer who had been the Daily Telegraph’s war correspondent during the Boxer Rebellion, and “M,” hardly 007’s ruthless chief, later the presenter of a children’s nature program on the BBC.

Certainly stranger than any fiction, the true stories of these remarkable spymasters have yet to be disclosed in any detail. Nevertheless, their impact on events, albeit behind the scenes, is hard to exaggerate. For example, most historians agree that World War II was shortened by at least two years through the skilful exploitation of the signals intelligence derived from the Anglo-American cryptographic operation conducted at Bletchley Park, which successfully solved many of the Axis machine ciphers, including those generated on the Enigma. In addition, the cryptanalysts broke dozens of other codes and read the German Foreign Ministry’s traffic and that of Japanese military attaches across the world. The scale of the effort, amounting to 25,000 codebreakers, linguists, and intercept operators, was matched only by what they accomplished in the military and diplomatic fields.

Interception of Axis future plans, current dispositions, fuel and ammunition stocks, availability of reserves, and even the complete enemy order of battle was but one part of the total picture that encompassed wholesale deception by the manipulation of controlled double agents, as well as the dissemination of false rumors, bogus wireless signals, and fake newspaper reports and the preparation of imaginary armies to mislead the enemy’s aerial reconnaissance. The intelligence techniques developed by the British helped save tens of thousands of lives, persuaded the enemy units launching rockets that their weapons were overshooting London, convinced Hitler that the D-Day landings would take place in the Pas-de-Calais, and bottled up several German divisions in Norway until the end of hostilities, where they surrendered with scarcely a shot being fired. Intelligence and deception played key roles in winning the Battle of the Atlantic against the U-boats, pushing the Afrika Korps from the Libyan Desert, and destroying Nazi panzers at Kursk in the biggest tank battle of all time.

During the postwar era, and particularly in the Cold War, espionage and counterintelligence became the chosen weapons of the Great Powers in a largely unseen struggle that was fought away from the headlines. Indeed, secret wars were conducted in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South America, sometimes for years, before details of the conflicts made the newspapers. And even after some sketchy disclosures had been made, it would sometimes be decades before authoritative information reached the public about the fierce counterinsurgency battles that had raged in such distant lands as Borneo, Belize, and Oman. Similarly, in the war against terrorism, it may be a long time before the full details are learned of how the Provisional IRA was penetrated or the Irish National Liberation Army was coaxed into self-destruction. But although the results of clandestine operations may manifest themselves only in cease-fires, amnesties, and commitments to peace, the cognoscenti know all too well that such events are most likely achieved after a heavy investment in covert activities.

Of course, not everything is quite what it seems in the conflict between spies and counterspies, and any assessment of British Intelligence has to take account of the disasters, failures, security lapses, and examples of hostile penetration. Some of the most celebrated names associated with British Intelligence are notorious traitors, such as the infamous “Cambridge Five,” Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross. Together they hemorrhaged classified documents from most of Britain’s secret departments before, during, and after World War II. They compromised British personnel, identified agents operating overseas, and wrecked innumerable schemes, including those to infiltrate partisans into postwar Albania and the Baltic states. These Cold War stratagems were effectively neutralized by the intervention of Philby and his network, which exercised an influence at the very highest level of British Intelligence. But while the KGB’s recruits, such as George Blake, Leo Long, and Michael Bettaney, sought to wreak havoc from their trusted positions within British Intelligence, what about the less well-known figures, such as the two Special Branch detectives who sold out to Moscow, or the Communist secretary who obtained a job in the heart of M15’s innermost sanctum, the Security Service Registry? Few such names appear in the many books written about British Intelligence, but they are, nonetheless, vital participants in what Rudyard Kipling called “the great game.”

The history of British Intelligence can be traced back at least 400 years, although it has been institutionalized only in relatively recent times. There is, nevertheless, a distinct strand that can be followed from the days of Sir Francis Walsingham, stopping those who sought to usurp the Crown, to the modern experts in “transnational threat,” who mount complex electronic surveillance operations to eliminate 21st-century terrorists and cybercriminals. Originally the conspirators hoped to seize the country and place a coreligionist on the throne, whereas in today’s era of global terrorism the atrocities are committed by religious fanatics who are opposed to Western society, its culture, and its values.

British Intelligence is a generic term to cover all the many official agencies which have collected, collated, and distributed information for Whitehall. Although the modern organizations of the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) date back only to August 1909, the first director of military intelligence (DMI), General Sir Henry Brackenbury, was appointed in June 1887. Looking farther back, there are records of payments for “secret service” dating to the Economic Reform Act of 1782, and it is known that Henry VIII took a close interest in the reports of his agents.

Although MI5 and SIS (occasionally known by its cover military intelligence designation of MI6) are probably the best-known of Britain’s many intelligence agencies, with a history dating back to their formation together in 1909 as the Secret Service Bureau, neither is as large as Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the code-breaking agency that developed from the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS), itself a direct descendent of the celebrated Admiralty cryptographers of Room 40 who were absorbed into GC&CS in 1919. Whereas MI5 was charged with defending the interests of the Empire and continues to post representatives abroad, Britain’s main overseas intelligence-gathering was, and is, conducted by SIS. In parallel, GCHQ collects signals traffic across the globe from a network of intercept stations and circulates its product to Whitehall. Information from MI5, SIS, and GCHQ is distilled by the Assessment Staff of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), which also relies on reports and imagery from a fourth agency, the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS), which is dependent upon attaches posted to foreign capitals, open sources, and technical intelligence gleaned from satellite surveillance and overhead reconnaissance platforms. Together, these four agencies supply the JIC’s independent analysts with the raw material that they skillfully craft into their weekly assessments.

The Joint Intelligence Committee, at the apex of the intelligence pyramid, consists of the directors of the four intelligence-producing agencies, the consumers (being the senior civil servants from the Home Office, Treasury, and Foreign Office), the chief of the Defence Staff and the intelligence coordinator to the Cabinet. Chaired by a senior diplomat, the JIC manages it own independent Assessment Staff, subdivided into Current Intelligence Groups (CIGs) and organized on either a regional or topical basis, assembles the relevant data, and drafts reports for consideration at the weekly JIC meeting. Latin America, Africa, and the Far East have their own geographic CIGs, and additional groups will be formed to deal with particular events, such as a crisis in Kosovo, Afghanistan, or Iraq. Created in 1936, the JIC provides a focus that scrutinizes all the pieces of the intelligence jigsaw and sets objectives for the agencies.

In the military intelligence (MI) establishment, the various MI departments have corresponded to their Military Operations (MO) equivalents, with the exception of MI5 and MI6 (MO5 is assigned to future plans). Thus, MI1 is the department of the director of military intelligence, and MI2 deals with Europe, MI3 with Germany, MI4 the Middle East. MI8 is the designation of the Radio Security Service (RSS), MI9 the escape and evasion branch of SIS, and MI19 the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC). Within these branches are alphabetic subsections; for example, one of the little more obscure military intelligence units, MI4(b), was responsible before World War II for the preparation and printing of maps across the Middle East from Turkey to Aden.

In the modern world, the military intelligence establishment coexists with the civilian agencies of MI5 and SIS, and until the reorganization of the Ministry of Defence in 1964, when the Defence Intelligence Staff was created by the amalgamation of the Naval Intelligence Division and the Air Ministry’s air intelligence staff, was dominated by the Joint Intelligence Bureau, the intelligence branch of the War Office. Since the amalgamation, the DIS has been responsible for all armed services intelligence, and it manages its own analytical staff, which filters its product to the JIC.

In the world of intelligence, the British version has always been unique, in terms of both the remarkable personalities drawn into it and the part it has played, and continues to perform, in British life, from the controversy surrounding the Zinoviev Letter to the more recent suicide of Dr. David Kelly, the Defence Intelligence analyst. Alphabetically, the list of historic events founded in intelligence runs from the Abdication Crisis to the Zulu Wars, and all can be found in the pages that follow. Inevitably, because of the traditional reliance on intelligence, and the pervasive nature of British secrecy, there is almost always another dimension to major historical episodes, even if only hints of the truth emerge 30 years later when official papers are released under the terms of the Public Records Act. Very often it takes many more decades for the full story to emerge and for the hidden hand of one of the secret agencies to be revealed.

However, when the details are disclosed—for example, by the acknowledgment in 1974 that the Allied cryptographers of World War II read much of the most vital Axis strategic communications and thereby shortened the war by an estimated two years—the public’s perception of history can be altered radically. Certainly Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and Bernard Montgomery were impressive tacticians, but in neither of their autobiographies did they refer to the stunning advantage they enjoyed over their adversaries, namely, the ability to know their entire order of battle, future intentions, current plans, and the status of their armored and Luftwaffe support. Thus the source codenamed ULTRA proved to be a trump card, and in the decades that followed, other cryptanalytical successes, including VENONA and the comprehensive eavesdropping on Warsaw Pact forces in Eastern Europe, enabled NATO to preserve a balance of deterrence with vastly inferior numbers. While VENONA allowed the counterintelligence authorities to identify Klaus Fuchs and Donald Maclean as long-term Soviet moles, the monitoring of Soviet wireless and cable traffic gave the West a reliable trip wire that acted as an early-warning system to prevent the possibility of a surprise attack.

MI5 and SIS achieved worldwide reputations, partly because of writers such as Ian Fleming, Somerset Maugham, Len Deighton, and John le Carré, but also because of a series of embarrassing espionage cases, not the least of which was the scandal of the Cambridge Five, which cast a shadow over the supposed efficiency of the Security Service for decades. Thus Britain’s best-known security and intelligence agencies, while seeking to retain an element of secrecy about their personnel and operations, were to be handicapped by the fact that many of their officers were writers and self-publicists, and some others turned out to be traitors working for the Soviets.

Although MI5, SIS, and GCHQ were to play pivotal roles in Britain’s Cold War history, the heads of those organizations went largely unknown and unrecognized and completed their careers in anonymous obscurity, protected by D Notices to discourage newspaper revelations and a convention of almost Trappist silence adopted by the staff. This was all the more remarkable considering the extraordinary personalities that were drawn into the intelligence world. Politicians, authors, musicians, playwrights, and scoundrels have participated in what to some might seem like a long, continuing drama, not unlike a family saga; many of those involved knew each other well, in many cases being related, having served together in the forces, or having attended the same universities and schools.

From literature came Graham Greene, John le Carré, Somerset Maugham, Compton Mackenzie, and dozens of others. The historians included Bob Carew-Hunt, Hugh Trevor Roper, and Roger Fulford. From the armed forces came many hundreds decorated for valor; the universities provided some of the country’s greatest intellects, their powers applied to cryptography; and politics gave cabinet ministers such as Sam Hoare, Richard Crossman, David Ennals, and Roy Jenkins.

The Parliamentary benches were to seat John Buchan, Dick Brooman-White, Niall Macdermot, Stephen Hastings, Julian Amery, Tom Normanton, Henry Hunloke, Airey Neave, Hugh Gaitskell, George Cockerill, Billy McLean, Peter Smithers, Douglas Dodds-Parker, Sir Reginald Hall, Admiral Morgan Morgan-Giles, Walter Fletcher, Aubrey Jones, Bill Allen, Sir Frank Nelson, Henry Kerby, Rod Richards, Kenneth Younger, and Paddy Ashdown. The House of Lords produced the hereditary peers Tennyson, Ashley, Harcourt, Selborne, Sandhurst, Glenconner, Cottenham, Asquith, Rea, and Rothschild, who were joined by the life peers Meta Ramsay, Rex Fletcher, Kenneth Keith, Gladwyn Jebb, Daphne Park, Henry Hopkinson, John Cuckney, Bernard Ballantrae, and Cranley Onslow.

The law provided Old Bailey judges, such as Sir Helenus Milmo, Sir Edward Cussen, Sir Blanshard Stamp, and John Maude; an Appeal Court judge, Sir John Stephenson; and a host of barristers and solicitors recruited for wartime duties. Diplomacy offered Sir Peter Ramsbotham, Sir Peter Hope, Sir Brooks Richards and his son Sir Francis, Sir Robin Hooper, Sir Peter Wilkinson, Dame Barbara Salt, Baroness Ramsay, and Sir Alan Urwick. Among the bankers were Sir Robin Brook, Sir Charles Hambro, Sir William Wiseman, Harry Sporborg, and Louis Franck. Hollywood lent David Niven, Christopher Lee, and Sir Anthony Quayle, and the theatre gave Noel Coward and Paul Dehn. The world of intelligence drew in the queen’s dressmaker Hardy Amies and the king’s gamekeepers from Sandringham. Even Britain’s traitors were exotic, among them Sir Roger Casement, Sir Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Leo Long, and John Cairncross.

The list from Fleet Street is an equally breathtaking cast: Malcolm Muggeridge, Derek Verschoyle, Alan Hare, Wilfred Hindle, Stephen Watts, Derek Tangye, Sir Geoffrey Cox, and dozens of others, not to mention the role played by Reuter’s, the international news agency actually bought and run with a secret government subsidy. The Secret Intelligence Service and Special Operations Executive were interested in explorers of the caliber of Andrew Croft; travel writers, including Archie Lyall, Xan Fielding, and Sir Paddy Leigh-Fermor; and experienced foreign correspondents such as Frederick Voight and Tom Sefton Delmer.

The paradox is that few of the historians or journalists, who made their living from writing, ever revealed the true nature of their clandestine occupations. Accordingly, much of what is in the public domain concerning British Intelligence comes either from works of fiction or from the pens of Kim Philby, George Blake, and John Cairncross, all self-confessed traitors, hostile to the Crown and determined to undermine its secret institutions. Even Henry Landau and Leslie Nicholson, both disappointed SIS professionals who released their memoirs from a legal refuge from the Official Secrets Act in the United States, could not be described as fair or unbiased commentators on British Intelligence; talented though they were, their decisions to write about their experiences, in defiance of a ban almost universally respected by their colleagues, were prompted by an ulterior motive of striking back at an organization they believed had slighted them. The picture that emerges, therefore, from such tainted sources, is far from balanced, and the equilibrium can only be restored by taking a broader look at all the various facets of the British intelligence community.

The varying talents of philosophers, artists, and reporters were drawn to British Intelligence in a way unmatched by any other country, and the result is a rich tapestry of skill, innovation, and improvisation accommodated by an equally diverse set of organizations ranging from the Admiralty’s Room 40 cryptanalysts of World War I to modern agent-handlers of the Security Service seeking to penetrate terrorist groups. In between, MI5, SIS, and GCHQ, the country’s three main intelligence agencies, have been able to rely on active assistance and support from their counterparts in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Hong Kong, India, Malaya, the Persian Gulf, a score of former colonies in Africa, and a dozen dependent territories. In addition, they have developed strong, formal ties with their American allies, to the point that the CIA station chief in London sits on the JIC as an ex officio member and GCHQ is fully integrated into the worldwide matrix of”National Security Agency listening posts. Indeed, the need in recent years to combine against the common foe of terrorism has brought closer cooperation with even the Spanish, French, and Russian intelligence and security services and has seen the creation of dedicated intelligence exchanges, in Brussels and Bern, where information from delicate sources can be swapped in conditions of secrecy.

Historically, the scale of British Intelligence has been extraordinary, ranging from clandestine bodies devoted to propaganda through to the more familiar covert bodies of today. In 1931 Sir Eric Holt-Wilson addressed a conference called to consider empire security and boasted that MI5’s staff of 600 officers, officials, and technical experts could call upon 7,000 detectives and more than 100,000 police, “all of whom were working in instant response to guidance from the headquarters of the Security Service.” In September 1940, when offering his services to the U.S. Embassy as a security adviser following his dismissal by the prime minister, Holt-Wilson explained that at the time of his retirement he could call upon “some 250 chiefs of Police at home and 50 more in British Territories overseas.” Many of Holt-Wilson’s subordinates had served what had amounted to an apprenticeship abroad, learning their craft with the Indian Political Intelligence bureau in Delhi, or with the Special Branch in Shanghai, and the scale of what they achieved is hard to underestimate. Certainly for decades a mere handful of expatriate intelligence experts kept the government of India well informed on the threat from Communist sedition, and the Combined Intelligence Centre Iraq, traditionally managed by Royal Air Force personnel, maintained order in prewar Baghdad on a level that has gone unsurpassed since.

Over the years, the various components of British Intelligence became a veritable alphabet soup, including the OIC, SIME, BSC, ISLD, PWE, MEIC, SOE, CIFE, STS, JIC, SWG, CSO, and FRU. Together they covered the globe, supporting British rule over a quarter of it, from running intercept stations in the Northern Territory of Australia to the administration of Special Branch in Hong Kong, from MI5’s counterespionage operations in London to countersubversion activities in prewar Bombay. British Intelligence manned outposts in Cyprus, Masira, Singapore, and St. Helena and continues to send declared representatives to Washington, D.C., and Moscow, with others in undercover roles in Belgrade, Buenos Aires, and Basra.

Over the years, these differing groups have had a measurable impact on British public life and politics, and a brief overview of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership illustrates the point, with her administration dogged by one intelligence or security incident after another seizing the newspaper headlines. She had scarcely been elected in 1979 before the former keeper of the queen’s pictures, Professor Sir Anthony Blunt, was exposed as Soviet mole who had penetrated MI5 and was stripped of his knighthood. There followed the intelligence failures that led to the invasion of the Falklands, the Zircon satellite affair, the arrests of Geoffrey Prime and Michael Bettaney, Matrix Churchill, the suspicions over Roger Hollis, several telephone tapping scandals, the banning of trade unions at GCHQ, the Cyprus signals base arrests, the SpyCatcher saga, and as a finale and backdrop to her departure from Downing Street, the unanticipated invasion and occupation of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein. The common thread running through all these events is the involvement of the security and intelligence agencies, demonstrating not only their capacity to cause ministerial embarrassment but also the consistency with which they can be relied upon to create problems for all governments.

The difficulties that beset Mrs. Thatcher were far from unique. Anthony Eden was infuriated when Buster Crabb disappeared on a clandestine mission in 1956, and Harold Wilson came close to paranoia in his suspicions over plots he was convinced had been orchestrated by members of the Security Service. Harold Macmillan’s loss of power was in part due to the Profumo affair, and Ted Heath was infuriated to learn that his army minister had been visiting call girls at a flat used by an MI5 surveillance operation, leading to the resignation of Lord Lambton and another minister, Lord Jellicoe. John Major’s government survived a Commons division on the Matrix Churchill fiasco by just one vote. Similarly, Tony Blair’s government failed to find the weapons of mass destruction so confidently described and predicted by the Joint Intelligence Committee, which then had its performance scrutinized by an independent inquiry conducted by Lord Hutton in January 2004. Although the government escaped censure, the JIC did not need to be reminded of the dangers of being sucked into the policy process or participating in what amounted to political pamphleteering and was obliged to endure further scrutiny from a panel of privy councilors headed by the former cabinet secretary Lord Butler.

In the final accounting, whatever the result of any profit-and-loss calculation that assesses the contribution made by British Intelligence to the country’s history, there can be little doubt that the part played by the various organizations has had a major influence on events, strategy, and the public’s perception of each.

The Dictionary

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A BRANCH. The MI5 department responsible for administration and support after the postwar reorganization. Subdivided into A1, A2, A3, etc.

A DIVISION. The MI5 department responsible for administration prior to the postwar reorganization of the Security Service, subdivided into A1, External Services; A4, Internal Services; A5, Special Sections (dealing with telephone intercepts); A6, Scientific and General Post Office liaison; and A7, Cipher Section.

“A” FORCE. Cover name for the World War II deception unit in the Middle East headed by Colonel Dudley Clarke and accommodated in a flat above a Cairo brothel. The officially approved war establishment for “A” Force was three officers, an Auxiliary Service personal assistant, 10 other ranks, one car, and four trucks. The unit became the acknowledged experts in building dummy tanks and gliders, camouflaging tanks as trucks, generating bogus engine noise, and simulating fake tracks and erasing authentic ones.

ABBASSIA. The secret intercept site outside Cairo during World War II responsible for linking the Combined Bureau Middle East at Heliopolis to Bletchley Park via Whaddon Hall. Known as “the Cottage.” Abbassia interception duties were shared with another War Office Y Group station at Sidhi Bishra, near Alexandria, Egypt.

ABDEL. Code name for a nominal agent in World War II, supposedly a businessmen in Damascus supplying political information to PESSIMIST Y.

ABDICATION CRISIS. During the history of MI5, very few constitutional crises have occurred during which the director-general of the Security Service has expressed concern about whether he should accept instructions from the prime minister. Sir Vernon Kell had not harbored any reservations when asked to investigate the background to the Cato Street Conspiracy and the corrupt behavior of Maundy, but in the period leading up to the abdication of King Edward VIII in December 1936, he consulted widely to be satisfied that Stanley Baldwin had demanded that MI5 tap the telephone of the king’s mistress, Wallis Simpson, and to place her and her social contacts under surveillance. MI5 and Special Branch ultimately reported that she was simultaneously conducting an affair with a Group Captain Trundle but was not engaged in espionage.

ABDOOLCADER, SIRIOJ HUSEIN. A junior civil servant working in the Motor Licensing Department of the Greater London Council, 30-year-old Sirioj Husein Abdoolcader was the son of one of Malaysia’s most distinguished advocates, Sir Husein Abdoolcader. He had come to England in 1957 to read for the bar at Lincoln’s Inn, but opted to stay after he failed his law exams. As a clerk, Abdoolcader had access to the registration details of specially flagged MI5 surveillance vehicles, and he was recruited by Vladislav Savin of the KGB’s London rezidentura in March 1967. He was betrayed by a KGB defector, Oleg Lyalin, and was arrested in September 1971 at his office in County Hall. When searched, Abdoolcader was found to be carrying a list of MI5 car index numbers on a postcard addressed to Lyalin. He pleaded guilty in 1972 to breaches of the Official Secrets Act and was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment.

ABEAM. Code name for a deception scheme undertaken in the Middle East over six months in 1941, intended to promote the idea that there were airborne troops based in Egypt planning to launch an attack behind the lines in Italy. Devised by Colonel Dudley Clarke, the plan was to exploit Italian fears, known from intercepted enemy wireless traffic, of just such a surprise. In support of it, Clarke invented a nonexistent First Special Air Service Brigade and used ingenious methods to persuade the enemy it was training in parachute and glider techniques in the Transjordan desert. Captured enemy documents suggest that ABEAM succeeded.

ABWEHR. The principal German intelligence agency, and therefore the main adversary of British Intelligence during World War II. Headed by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris until his dismissal in 1944, the Abwehr (meaning “defense” in German) was not centrally organized, although the main headquarters was in Berlin’s elegant Tirpit-zufer. Individual abstellen, or regional offices, were located within Germany’s military districts; the Hamburg abstelle was responsible for collecting intelligence against Great Britain.

Information about the Abwehr’s structure, staff, and operations came from the interrogation of captured spies, who were questioned at MI5’s detention center, Camp 020; from the interception of the organization’s communications, known as ISK and ISOS; and from defectors, among them Otto John and Erich Vermehren.

ADAM STREET. Located just off the Strand, Adam Street accommodated one of the Secret Intelligence Service’s front addresses between 1919 and 1925. The location was compromised by surveillance mounted on the building by detectives working for William Ewer’s spy ring.

AD/B. Special Operations Executive (SOE) symbol for the head of the SOE mission in Gibraltar during World War II.

ADMINISTRATION DIRECTORATE. The Administration Directorate of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) was created in 1945 as part of the postwar reorganization and was initially headed by Captain Frank Slocum (designated DO/Admin). He was responsible for SIS’s administration policies, supervised the administrative machinery, and chaired the Selection Committee and the Permanent Committee for Registry and Archives. He also managed organizational development, oversaw administrative inspection of overseas stations, and ran the W Department, which handled the production of forged papers. His personal assistant was Miss M. Porter Hargreaves. The Administration Directorate was later to be placed under Mr. Musson, one of the joint directors for finance and administration.

Slocum’s deputy (designated “A”) was Commander B. A. P. Davis, responsible for management training and secret seaborne operations. The directorate included the following departments:

A1 (Captain H. P. Taylor) was responsible for the training of SIS’s operational personnel and for liaison with universities, the Ministry of Labour, and other organizations that supplied candidates for recruitment, such as the Civil Service Selection Board. Al’s duties included the preparation of personnel dossiers, vetting, medical examination of new recruits, and running language proficiency exams.

A2 (Major G. D. Hiles) was responsible for officers’ entitlements; sickness and family emergency leave; retirements and dismissals; issuing references and service records; pensions and emoluments; organizing training courses; organizing medical, dental, and optical services; and accommodating staff in London when necessary.

A3 (Major L. D. J. Wallerstein) was responsible for officers’ postings, filling vacant positions, questions of salary, documentation of officers’ marriages, payment of travel expenses, naturalization, and the granting of ex gratia payments and rewards.

A4 (Commander Pearse) was responsible for expense advances; messing allowances and expenses; living allowances; funds for equipment and clothing, including clothing coupons; compensation for loss of effects; and drawing up the Administration Directorate’s annual budget.

A5 (Captain F. A. Quinn) was responsible for support staff (porters, guards, messengers, lift attendants, etc.), including their recruitment, training, and enrollment; financial aid; transfers; regular and early retirements; processing of marriages; and payment of pensions and gratuities. The problems of the passport control officer staff, such as passports and statistical monitoring, were handled by Miss Middleton. Other matters handled by A5 included drawing up the organizational structure, financial issues, salary scales, headcounts, control of identification cards, maintenance of files on station and section personnel, compilation of regular staff lists, and running the daily staff movements register.

A6 (Colonel F. W. Niall) was responsible for the development of postwar conditions of service, the preparation of background papers to be used for advice on recruitment, and maintenance of the staff lists by rank, as well as acting as secretary of the A Advisory Selection Board (which dealt with senior appointments) and sitting as a member of the C Advisory Selection Board. A6 also handled a number of Head Office staff administrative functions and liaison with the controllers for advice on Germany and Austria.

ADMIRAL GRAF SPEE. A German pocket battleship that sought refuge from the Royal Navy’s “A” Force in the harbor at Montevideo, Uruguay, early in World War II. In what was to be one of the first major deception operations of World War II, the Kriegsmarine had been persuaded by the transmission of bogus wireless signals that a much larger group of British ships was lying in wait for the Atlantic raider to venture out of Uruguay’s neutral waters. The operation had been masterminded by the local Secret Intelligence Service head of station, Rex Millar, who also arranged for the British naval attaché, Captain Henry McCall, to make an ostensibly indiscreet telephone call to Buenos Aires over a line known to be tapped by the enemy. Convinced that the Graf Spee stood no chance and was heavily outgunned, Captain Hans Langsdorff blew up his own ship in December 1939 on a direct order from Hitler and later committed suicide.

ADYE, SIR JOHN. Director of GCHQ from 1989 to 1996. Adye joined the organization from Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1962. In 1972 he was posted to Washington, D.C., as the special United Kingdom liaison officer for two years.

AERIAL INTELLIGENCE. A key component of the British Intelligence matrix, aerial observation originated in the ability to “see over the other side of the hill” and to direct artillery using tethered, manned hydrogen balloons and later developed into airborne reconnaissance using biplanes equipped with wireless during World War I. Prior to World War II, Sidney Cotton was employed by the Secret Intelligence Service to fly photoreconnaissance flights along the Maginot Line for the French, and both Fred Winterbotham and Cyril Mills undertook clandestine missions over German territory.

In the postwar era, the Royal Aircraft Establishment participated in an Anglo-American program of overflight or “ferret” penetrations of Soviet airspace, intended to test radar defenses, provoke fighter interceptions, and induce signal traffic for collection and analysis. In addition to utilizing aircraft in the conventional Royal Air Force for these assignments, collection of air samples—to detect the frequency and composition of atmospheric nuclear tests—was conducted by aircraft of the nationalized airline converted to carry special air filters.

In 1982 for the Falklands conflict, aerial intelligence collection in South America was enhanced by the deployment of three Canberra PR-9s from 18 Group, No. 1 Photographic Reconnaissance Unit from RAF Wyton, and two signals intelligence-modified Hercules to Punta Arenas, Chile, in Chilean Air Force livery (but NATO standard camouflage).

AGABEKOV, GEORGES. An OGPU officer based in Turkey, Georges Agabekov fell in love with his English teacher, Isabel Streater, and defected to Paris in 1930, where the following year he published his memoirs, OGPU: The Russian Secret Terror. His true name was Arutyanov but he adopted the new identity when he was assigned to Constantinople as the illegal rezident, a task he had fulfilled previously in Tehran. After they were married, the couple settled in Brussels, but in July 1937 he was lured to the Franco-Spanish frontier in a scheme involving smuggled artworks looted during the Spanish Civil War. He was never seen again and it is presumed that he was assassinated by the NKVD. His wife returned to England and died in New York in November 1971 while working for the British Mission to the United Nations.

AGAR, AUGUSTUS. In the early summer of 1918, Lieutenant Augustus Agar was given command of a flotilla of fast 40-foot coastal motor boats (CMBs) and sent to the remote island of Osea in Essex. He assumed that his role would be one of coastal protection until he was invited to London to meet Admiral Mansfield Smith-Cumming, who asked him to take two of his high-speed craft to Finland. Their purpose was to ferry British agents across the Baltic, and in particular give a means of escape to “ST 25,” the Secret Intelligence Service’s star agent in Russia, Paul Dukes. Agar’s clandestine missions proved so successful that the admiral requested him to mount a surprise night raid on Krondstadt, across the Gulf of Finland, where the menacing Soviet fleet was anchored. Operating from an abandoned yacht club at Terrioki, Agar’s CMBs sped over the water at speeds of up to 40 knots and launched their torpedoes against the Russian cruiser Oleg, which sank soon afterward, a feat for which Agar was decorated with the Victoria Cross and the Distinguished Service Order.

Agar remained in the Royal Navy until his retirement in 1943, when he was appointed commodore of the Royal Naval College at Greenwich. He stood for the Greenwich constituency in the 1945 general election but lost. For the remainder of his life, until his death in December 1968, he grew strawberries on his estate at Alton in Hampshire. Agar’s first volume of memoirs, Footprints in the Sea, was published in 1959, followed by Showing the Flag in 1962 and Baltic Episode: A Classic of Secret Service in Russian Waters in 1963.

AGEE, PHILIP. A career Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer and a graduate of Notre Dame University, Agee spent 12 years with the CIA’s Latin America Division, serving in the Directorate of Operations in Ecuador, Uruguay, and Mexico. In 1967 he was posted to Mexico City, where his marriage broke down. He resigned two years later and became a source for the KGB and Cuban Intelligence. In 1971 he left the United States for London to write a controversial exposé, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, which revealed the identities of more than 2,000 CIA officers and their agents, thus virtually paralyzing the CIA’s operations in the region. He also contributed to a radical magazine, Counter-Spy, which named Richard Welch as the CIA’s chief of station in Athens. Soon afterward, Welch was shot dead outside his home by Greek terrorists. Undeterred, Agee continued to campaign against the CIA and wrote Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe and Dirty Work 2: The CIA in Africa.

Agee’s unwelcome activities in London resulted in his deportation in June 1977 after lengthy legal hearings, and thereafter he was expelled from France, the Netherlands, and Germany. Agee’s U.S. passport was withdrawn in 1979, but he was allowed to return to the United States in 1987, using a Nicaraguan passport, to promote his book On the Run and was never prosecuted. He now runs a successful, Web-based travel information company promoting tourism in Cuba.

AGENT OF INFLUENCE. Whereas a spy requires access to classified information or undertakes clandestine assignments for an espionage network, agents of influence concentrate on peddling propaganda without overtly declaring their commitment to a cause. Accordingly, the activities of an agent of influence do not usually constitute a criminal offense.

AGENT PROVOCATEUR. The widely used French term for a penetration agent deployed to collect information, often with a view to prosecution. Because of their dubious legal status, MI5 traditionally has been reluctant to employ agents provocateurs. In 1940 Harald Kurtz was compromised when he was deployed against Benjamin Greene in an attempt to obtain incriminating evidence of his supposed Fifth Column activities, and in 1943 it proved impossible to prosecute a self-confessed German spy, Ernesto Simoes, after an attempt had been made to entrap him. Strict, classified guidelines are issued to all case officers setting the conditions under which agents may be allowed to encourage, but not incite, an illegal act.

AIR BUBBLE. Code name for an MI5 investigation initiated in January 1964 into Dr. Jean-Paul Soupert, a French industrial chemist run by the Belgian Sureté as a double agent against the East Germans. Soupert had received proprietorial information from two Kodak employees, Alfred Roberts and Geoffrey Conway, and although no classified material was compromised, the two Communist Party of Great Britain members were prosecuted for offenses under the Prevention of Corruption Act. They were acquitted, following some trenchant remarks from the judge about Soupert’s reliability as a witness.

AIR INTELLIGENCE (AI). The intelligence branch of the Air Ministry, directed during World War II by Air Commodore Archie Boyle and then Charles Medhurst. Its sections reflected the conventional military intelligence designations. AI was subdivided into various branches: AI1(e to deal with signals intelligence collection; AI1(f) with the examination of crashed aircraft; AI1(k) with the interrogation of captured Luftwaffe aircrew at Trent Park, Cockfosters; AI3 with enemy order of battle; and AI3(b) with the analysis of signals intelligence.

AKHMEDOV, ISMAIL G. A career GRU officer, Ismail Akhmedov defected in May 1942 in Ankara, Turkey, where he was operating under press attaché cover as “Lieutenant Colonel Grigori Nikoyev” at the Soviet consulate. Although he initially approached the British, Akhmedov opted for the protection of the Turkish Security Inspectorate and remained in Turkey until 1948. There he was debriefed by the local Secret Intelligence Service station commander, Kim Philby, who discounted his value and reported everything he said to his Soviet contacts. Akhmedov subsequently went to Europe, and finally to the United States, where he still lives, having written his memoirs, In and Out of Stalin’s GRU, in 1984. In 1953 he gave evidence, using the name Ismail Enge, to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary.

ALBANIA. The Albanian subsection of Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Cairo established a forward base, designated Force 266, at Bari, Italy, in 1944 to run operations into Albania. The country had been under Axis occupation since Easter 1939 when Mussolini’s troops had invaded, forcing King Zog and his family to flee to Greece. After that, Julian Amery had plotted from Belgrade for Section D, and Fanny Hasluck had formed the nucleus of an Albanian Section by teaching a handful of volunteers about the country and its fiercely tribal people. Since the German invasion of Yugoslavia and the loss of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) station in the British Legation in Belgrade, there had been no news from Tirana, Albania’s capital.

The first mission to Albania was CONSENSUS in April 1943; in which Billy McLean and David Smiley parachuted into northern Greece intending to walk across the frontier; they were accompanied by Lieutenant Garry Duffy of the Royal Engineers, who was a demolition expert, and a wireless operator, Corporal Williamson. Their interpreter, an Albanian named Elmaz, decided at the last minute to abandon the mission. Despite this setback, CONSENSUS landed safely in Epirus, linked up with John Cook of SOE’s Greek Section and then undertook a trek across the mountains into Albania where, on the second attempt late in June 1943, contact was made with Enver Hoxha, the Communist leader of the local partisan guerrillas. Once relations had been established with him, by a series of airdrops to equip his men, permission was granted for the installation of a British Military Mission.

The main British military liaison officer, Brigadier Trotsky Davies, parachuted into Albania with a full headquarters team, dropped from two aircraft based at Benina, to a reception committee organized by CONSENSUS; a couple of nights later, Alan Hare arrived with the remainder of the contingent. In July 1943, two Royal Air Force (RAF) officers, Tony Neel and Andy Hands, were dropped, and in August four teams were launched on the same day in two Halifaxes from Derna: SCULPTOR, led by Major Bill Tilman; SCONCE, by Major George Seymour; SAPLING, by Major Gerry Field; and STEPMOTHER, by Peter Kemp. Together these missions, attached to large mixed bands of Communist irregulars, Italian deserters, and Bulgarian stragglers harried the occupying forces by setting ambushes and organizing raids on local enemy garrisons. Although none of the actions by itself led to any general collapse of the occupation, the Germans were obliged to waste precious resources at a critical time by strengthening an area that had virtually no strategic value.

McLean and Smiley were extracted in November 1943 by motor torpedo boat from the coast to Bari, and by that time SOE’s presence in Albania was considerable. Richard Riddell and Anthony Simcox were flown in to replace McLean and Smiley, and John Hibberdine was dropped in December with Lieutenants Merritt and Hibbert. By the end of April 1944, Smiley was back, on CONSENSUS II, this time accompanied by Julian Amery. These operations were not achieved without casualties. Two Halifaxes crashed in Albania while approaching their drop zones, killing their crews and two entire SOE missions. Major Field blew himself up with high explosives while fishing, and Colonel Arthur Nicholls died of gangrene. SCONCE’S wireless operator, Bombardier Hill, was killed by enemy action and Trooper Roberts of STEPMOTHER died of exposure after he had been captured and then managed to escape. Brigadier Davies was also captured, in January 1944, along with Jim Chesshire, Captain F. Tray-horn, and his RAF sergeant, a former rear gunner named Smith. Another significant loss was Philip Leake, killed in a German air raid six weeks after he landed in May 1944.

SOE personnel sent to Albania endured appalling privations, but perpetuated the strategic fiction that the Balkans was the likely target for an Allied thrust straight into Germany. This scenario, ever popular with Winston Churchill, was never a likely prospect, but the German High Command failed to appreciate the strength of opposition articulated by the chiefs of staff and the Americans. In consequence, a disproportionate number of Axis units was kept tied up in southeast Europe by what amounted to a tiny group of Allied liaison officers attached to a rather larger number of guerrillas who, it must be recognized, spent almost as much of their time fighting each other as engaging the common enemy. SOE failed to persuade the disparate factions involved from participating in what amounted to a civil war in Albania and Yugoslavia. In both countries, SOE’s logistical support contributed to eventual Communist supremacy.

Predictably, SOE’s experience in Albania included friction with both the SIS and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Smiley and McLean fell out with a representative of the former, a Greek who called himself Tony Corsair, when one of their supply drops was hijacked. Perhaps unwisely, they had confided their signal system to Corsair, who intercepted the containers “and used the weapons for his own purposes.” Relations with the Americans were strained because SOE “refused to cooperate with OSS agents unless they accepted British command and used British communications” ; the OSS was unwilling to accept these conditions, so no special operations teams were ever dispatched to Albania. Instead, some five SIS missions were sent, the first of which, TANK, arrived in November 1943 by an SIS-sponsored motorboat from Italy and based itself in a cave by the sea. This team was obliged to withdraw three months later following enemy activity in the area and the ill health of the group’s three members. They were replaced in March 1944 by BIRD, which provided a reception committee for three further OSS secret intelligence (SI) teams, all of which remained with the Communist guerrillas until Tirana was liberated. The OSS’s official historian had some harsh words for the lack of British enthusiasm for the SI Division’s efforts: “The principal difficulty encountered by SI/Albania was its lack of control over transportation.... Support of U.S. teams by the Balkan Air Force (British) was unreliable throughout. After months of waiting had beset several missions, the head of the Albanian desk unsuccessfully proposed, as had sections chiefs in other areas, the establishment of an OSS air unit to obviate such delays.”

Several of those who emerged from Albania subsequently wrote about their experiences: Amery in Sons of the Eagle, Kemp in No Colours or Crest, Smiley in Albanian Assignment, Davies in Illyrian Adventure, and Anthony Quayle in A Time to Speak. Xan Fielding, himself a member of SOE’s Greek Section, recounted McLean’s adventures in One Man in His Time. Squadron Leader Neel’s memoirs, though written, have yet to be published. All have a common theme of mismanagement at SOE headquarters in Cairo and Bari, and they display great affection for the guerrilla bands with whom they lived and fought.

After the war, SIS misinterpreted the loyalty expressed by some former comrades-in-arms and employed some former members of SOE’s Albanian subsection to subvert Hoxha. Hare, Hibberdine, Smiley, Kemp, Amery, Anthony Northrop, and Dayrell Oakley-Hill all played active parts in mounting an ill-fated clandestine offensive against Tirana in 1949. Blame for the debacle has often been attributed to Kim Philby’s duplicity, but the reality is that SIS’s postwar planners underestimated the determination of the Albanians to defend themselves, and even a despotic government, from external interference. The first three missions sent into Albania by SIS overland from Greece or across the Adriatic suffered only minimal casualties, and it was not until the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) embarked upon large-scale airdrops, employing émigrés trained at a major camp in Germany, that the Communists inflicted a really heavy toll on the infiltrators. Most were captured and then subjected to show trials in Tirana that ended in executions or long terms of imprisonment. The prospects of those that completed their missions and tried to leave the country were not much better. Both the Yugoslav and Greek authorities were hostile to the scheme and refused to cooperate with SIS or the CIA. The whole project was finally abandoned late in 1951, leaving Albania to Hoxha, who ensured that it remained a political and economic backwater for the next half-century.

ALLEN. MI5 code name for Arthur Lakey, a detective sergeant until his dismissal from Scotland Yard in August 1919 during the police strike. Formerly a Royal Navy rating for 11 years, Lakey joined the Metropolitan Police in November 1911. Later he was employed by the Vigilant Detective Agency, which was run by other former police strikers, and supplied information to MI5 about the Soviet espionage network run in London by William Ewer under the news agency cover of Federated Press of America (FPA). The FPA was closed in November 1927 and ALLEN was given a redundancy payment.

ALLEN, WILLIAM. Educated at Eton, Bill Allen was elected the Unionist MP for West Belfast in 1929 but resigned in 1931 and became an ardent supporter of Sir Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF). He was also one of Max Knight’s agents, supplying MI5 with valuable information about the structure, activities, personalities, and funding of the BUF. During World War II, Allen served in the Life Guards in the Middle East and Africa, and in 1943 he was appointed press attaché at the British embassy in Beirut. Later he was to serve as a diplomat in Ankara until 1949. A lifelong friend of Kim Philby, Allen employed Philby to ghostwrite a history of his family’s Belfast-based publishing firm after the suspected traitor had been fired from the Secret Intelligence Service. The book was published in 1957 without any acknowledgment of Philby’s role.

ALLEN, VIC. A Communist Party of Great Britain activist and a founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Professor Vic Allen was born in 1923 and left school at the age of 15 to become a bricklayer. He served in the Royal Air Force during World War II and later studied at the London School of Economics. After gaining his doctorate, he was appointed a lecturer at Leeds University in 1959. According to an examination of the Hauptverwaltung Aufklarung files released after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he was also an agent of influence for East Germany.

ALLEY, STEPHEN. A veteran Russian-speaking Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer, Major Stephen Alley was based in Paris between the wars and worked with Sidney Reilly. During World War I, he had operated for SIS in St. Petersburg and had been evacuated in February 1918. After the war he served in MI5 for three years, and then moved to Paris where he ran a business trading in commodities.

ALLFORD HOUSE. Headquarters of the Russian subsection of the Diplomatic Section of GCHQ in Park Lane, London, headed by Bernard Scott and including John Croft and Felix Fetterlien. A highly secure satellite of the Berkeley Street offices led by Alastair Denniston from 1942, Allford House produced the ISCOT intercepts.

ALLIANCE. Code name of a successful intelligence network, with nearly 2,000 members, run by the Secret Intelligence Service in enemy-occupied France during World War II and headed by Marie-Madeleine Fourcade.

ALL-RUSSIA COOPERATIVE SOCIETY. The All-Russia Cooperative Society (ARCOS) was the principal Soviet trade organization in Britain in the 1920s, during the period when there was no formal diplomatic recognition of Lenin’s Communist regime. It shared premises at 49 Moorgate with the Soviet Trade Delegation. In May 1927, the ARCOS office was raided by Special Branch on the suspicion that a classified Royal Air Force manual had been passed to an employee. The raid failed to recover the missing manual, thought to have been handled by Wilfred Macartney, but did succeed in finding a quantity of interesting documents and lists of Comintern cover addresses overseas. The police occupation of the building lasted 104 hours and resulted in the publication of a White Paper disclosing material seized from the strong rooms and incinerator, together with a selection of wireless traffic intercepted and decrypted by Government Code and Cipher School.

ALPASS, JOHN. A career MI5 officer, John Alpass served as one of Dame Stella Rimington’s two deputy directors-general until 1994, when he was appointed intelligence coordinator to the Cabinet. In 1996 he played a key role in chairing the interdepartmental committee supervising the preparation and publication of The Mitrokhin Archive.

AMERASIA. A pro-Communist journal based in New York. In January 1945 Amerasia published an article based on a British Intelligence assessment of postwar policy on southeast Asia concentrating on Thailand, and when scrutinized it was evident that the content had been drawn from a classified paper written by an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) officer, Kenneth Wells. Fearing a leak and following a complaint from the British, OSS’s security section conducted an investigation into the source of Amerasia’s information and made an illicit search of the editor’s office on Fifth Avenue. Hundreds of classified official documents, from virtually every branch of the government, were found. Surveillance of editor Philip Jaffe and his staff resulted in the June 1945 arrest by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of seven suspects, among them an officer working in the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, Andrew Roth. Jaffe was convicted and fined, but charges against the others were dropped because of OSS’s illegal entry.

AMERY, JOHN. The son of the British Cabinet minister Leo Amery and an admirer of Hitler, John Amery joined the British Union of Fascists and lived in Germany throughout World War II. He was arrested in July 1945 by Italian partisans and charged with having recruited British prisoners of war into the British battalion of the German SS, the so-called Legion of St. George, to fight on the Russian front. He had also made radio propaganda broadcasts into Britain, but after his capture he was diagnosed as suffering from a psychopathic illness by two Home Office psychiatrists, who also acknowledged that he was not insane. To save his family from further embarrassment, Amery pleaded guilty to eight counts of. treason at his trial in November 1945 and was sentenced to death. He refused to appeal and was hanged in December 1945. According to the hangman, Amery said, “I don’t suppose you would shake the hand of a traitor?” to which the hangman replied, “No, but I’ll shake the hand of a brave man.”

AMERY, SIR JULIAN. Having only just come down from Oxford, Julian Amery was touring Albania when Europe was plunged into crisis in 1939. When he arrived in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, he was invited by a contact at the British embassy to join the Secret Intelligence Service’s Section D. Although his knowledge of Albania was limited to the visit he had only recently completed, Amery was represented as an expert on the country, and this was to be his entree into the secret world.

On the basis of his experience in Section D, Amery was appointed deputy head of the Balkan branch of Special Operations Executive (SOE), based in Cairo, and supervised the infiltration of the first British military mission into enemy-occupied Yugoslavia in September 1941. Thereafter, Amery concentrated on SOE’s Yugoslav Section, though he later joined an SOE mission to the Communist guerrillas in Albania.

Amery recalled the solid grounding he had been given in the espionage field by having read the exploits of earlier secret service personnel: “As a young member of those services, I profited a great deal from the memoirs of Paul Dukes and Compton Mackenzie and others who had been through the mill. What they had to say taught me a lot and in a sense was an inspiration.” Thus one generation of intelligence officers gave a lead to another.

After the war, Amery continued his interest in Albania and was one of those consulted when SIS hired David Smiley to train and infiltrate anti-Communist guerrillas into Albania to topple Enver Hoxha’s regime. Amery was elected to the House of Commons as the Conservative member for Preston in 1950 and eventually retired in April 1992. The following month he was elevated to the House of Lords.

AMIES, SIR HARDY. The World War II head of T Section, the Belgian section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Hardy Amies was fluent in French and German, having managed a factory in Germany before the war. He joined SOE in early 1941 from the Intelligence Corps as an instructor on the German Army at Beaulieu. In November 1941 Amies began training T Section, and in August 1943 he succeeded Claude Knight as its head; he was deputy to Philip Johns until the Low Countries Section was created. In September 1944, Amies led SOE’s forward mission into newly liberated Belgium. He remained in SOE until July 1945 when he returned to the world of couturiers, being appointed the queen’s dressmaker and receiving a knighthood in 1989.

ANAND PARBAT. Situated northeast of Delhi, India, Anand Parbat was the location of the Wireless Experimental Station (WES), GCHQ’s regional headquarters during World War II, accommodated in Ramjas College. The WES was headed by Colonel Patrick Marr-Johnson and was divided into five sections: A, Administration; B, Analysis; C, Codebreaking and Translation; D, Traffic Analysis; and E, Radio Interception.

ANDAMAN ISLANDS. One of the most successful strategic deception campaigns of World War II, masterminded by Peter Fleming, resulted in two Japanese divisions being used to defend the Andaman Islands. Fleming persuaded the Japanese that the largely uninhabited atolls, located between Burma and India in the Indian Ocean, were politically significant because they were the only Indian territory occupied by the Japanese during the conflict, and he succeeded in isolating a large enemy force for much of the war. At the end of hostilities, the islands were liberated by a small force with no fighting.

ANDERSON, SIR ROBERT. The assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police until 1901, Robert Anderson had been a civil servant in the office of Lord Mayo, the chief secretary for Ireland, when in 1868 he was appointed as an adviser in the Home Office on political crime. Anderson had employed an agent, Thomas Beach, alias “Major Henri le Caron,” to penetrate the ranks of the Fenian Brotherhood in the United States and foil several plots, including a plan to dynamite Westminster Abbey during the Jubilee service of thanksgiving in 1887. In that year Anderson wrote a series of anonymous articles for the Times describing what had been achieved by undercover operations, but his authorship did not become public until 1910, long after his retirement, when he made more controversial disclosures in Blackwood’s magazine, prompting demands that he forfeit his pension for revealing secrets.

ANDRÉ, JOHN. While serving as adjutant-general to General Sir Henry Clinton, the commander of British troops in New York during the American Revolution, Major John André of the 54th Foot Regiment ran the local intelligence apparatus. He was arrested in September 1780 while meeting one of his agents, Benedict Arnold. André had negotiated the surrender of the fortifications at West Point, New York, but had been caught as he attempted to return to the British lines with a safe-conduct pass signed by Arnold. He was tried and hanged at Tappan, New York, in October 1780, the British having refused to exchange Arnold for him. In 1821 his body was exhumed from a grave at the foot of the gallows and reinterred at Westminster Abbey.

ANGLO-GERMAN FELLOWSHIP. A society with an open membership, the Anglo-German Fellowship was dedicated to the improvement of relations with Germany and in the 1930s was considered a front for pro-Nazi political activity. A banquet held at the Savoy Hotel in July 1936 to honor the kaiser’s daughter, the Duchess of Brunswick, when the organization boasted a membership of nearly a thousand, was attended by Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, Lord Redesdale, and Kim Philby.

ANGLO-TURKISH SECURITY BUREAU. Created in 1941 at the initiative of Commander Vladimir Wolfson of the Naval Intelligence Division, the Anglo-Turkish Security Bureau acted as a conduit to the Secret Intelligence Service for information about wartime travelers to and from the Balkans. This intelligence was collated in Cairo with ISOS material and enabled Section V to monitor the movements of suspected enemy agents.

ANGOLA. In 1943 Special Operations Executive (SOE) established in Angola a network of intelligence agents, mainly reporting on economic topics and the supply of strategic minerals. The agents worked under the commercial cover of the Sogedex Rubber Company. Headed by Colonel A. W. Smith, based in Cape Town, South Africa, SOE recruited the “S Organisation” of Pro-British Portuguese with key positions in the army, railways, and post office. Among its plans was one to seize Axis shipping, which was not pursued.

ANKER GCHQ. Code name for intercepted wireless traffic transmitted from Ankara, Turkey, during World War II relating to the Soviet Union and Britain in the Middle East.

ANTHROPOID. Special Operations Executive (SOE) code name for the mission to assassinate the hated SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich in Prague. The operation was planned for the Czech National Day in October 1941, but bad weather forced two postponements, so the team did not assemble in Czechoslovakia until late December. Eventually, after further delays, a new date was set in May 1942. The plan was to ambush the Nazi leader as he was being driven to Prague from the country mansion he occupied. The trap was set at a sharp bend in the road on the outskirts of the city; as the chauffeur-driven Mercedes slowed to negotiate the corner, two SOE men would step into the road and attack the open-topped limousine. The two SOE assassins were a pair of Czech paratroopers, Jan Kubis and Josef Gabcik, from ANTHROPOID; they were supported by two members of OUT DISTANCE, a three-man team that had arrived in March, Josef Valcik and Adolf Opalka. During the ambush, Gabcik’s Sten gun jammed at the vital moment, but Heydrich was mortally wounded by a Mills grenade thrown by Kubis. The SOE men escaped the scene, only to be betrayed to the Gestapo soon afterward by the third member of OUT. DISTANCE, Karel Curda, who identified his comrades and their hiding place in return for a reward. Curda alone survived the war—to be hanged for treachery.

ANTHROPOID was to prove controversial because of the appalling civilian reprisals taken by the Nazi occupation forces. Thousands perished in a wave of executions, and the populations of whole villages were deported to concentration camps. One village, Lidice, was systematically reduced to rubble; the site remains untouched to this day as a memorial to those who were murdered. More than 13,000 people were arrested in the aftermath of Heydrich’s assassination, prompting many to wonder whether SOE’s Czech Section had been wise to launch such a provocative operation. In fact, however, SOE did little more than give logistical support to ANTHROPOID, for the plan was certainly Czech in origin, having been hatched by the Czech government-in-exile in London, initially with SS-Gruppenführer Karl Hermann Frank, the protektor’s hated state secretary, as the target. The assassins Kubis and Gabcik, who had transferred to the Free Czech Army from the French Foreign Legion, had been trained by SOE in Scotland and at Bellasis (STS 2) and had undergone their parachute course at RAF Ringway, but throughout they were still officially attached to the Czech 1st Brigade at Cholmondeley Castle, near Whitchurch in Cheshire. The Secret Intelligence Service was also a party to ANTHROPOID, as confirmed by the then head of the Czech Deuxième Bureau, Colonel Frantisek Moravec, who recalled that the scheme “was necessarily shared with several officials of the British MI6, who worked with us on the technical side.” ANTHROPOID’s effect was to decimate the number of potential resisters in Czechoslovakia, reduce the willingness of the inhabitants to help parachutists, and ensure that SOE’s Czech Section would play only a peripheral role in the eventual liberation of that country.

THE APOSTLES. Officially known at Cambridge University as the Conversazione Society, the Apostles is an exclusive, private club that dates back to the early 19th century. It acquired notoriety because of the secrecy surrounding its membership and the fact that some of the traitors of the period, including Anthony Blunt, Leo Long, Alister Watson, Guy Burgess, and Michael Straight, had been part of its self-selecting elite in the 1930s. The society had been created to discuss contemporary literature and philosophy, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson was its greatest poet, but in the prewar era it tended to elect Marxists and left-wingers, which was to cause some embarrassment to Lord Rothschild, who had twice delivered papers to the society.

ARDAGH, SIR JOHN. A former private secretary to the viceroy of India, General John Ardagh was appointed director of military intelligence in June 1896. In his first three years in the post, Ardagh supervised the collection and distribution of intelligence relating to 30 wars fought across the globe by British troops, from China to Nigeria to British Guiana. Under his direction, the Colonial Section of the Intelligence Division established links with 40 overseas administrations but was criticized by the Elgin Commission for failing to anticipate the Boer War.

ARKLEY VIEW. Established by the Post Office as a wireless intercept site in 1938, Arkley View, Barnet, became the headquarters of the Radio Security Service (RSS) in October 1940. Headed by Colonel J. P. G. Worlledge, RSS was staffed by 1,500 voluntary interceptors, who were responsible for monitoring the airwaves for the enemy’s illicit signal traffic. Designated Special Communications Unit (SCU) 3, Arkley View was taken over by the Secret Intelligence Service’s Section VIII in 1941, and Worlledge was replaced by Professor F. J. M. Stratton, with Kenneth Morton Evans as his deputy.

ARMOUR. Secret Intelligence Service code name for a well-connected Italian double agent who was part of an Abwehr stay-behind network in Rome in 1944. He was an aeronautical expert who had been employed to penetrate the Abwehr for the Servicio Informazione Militare and had volunteered to work for the British as soon as the Germans withdrew. His wife was also a member of the network, acting as his cipher clerk, and together they conveyed supposedly high-grade political intelligence, some of it derived from contact with Marshal Badoglio, to the Germans until the end of the war.

ARMSTRONG, GEORGE. A Communist Party of Great Britain member, George Armstrong deserted his ship in Boston and in October 1940 was reported by British Security Coordination (BSC) as having attempted to contact the Abwehr in New York using the alias George Hope, offering information about transatlantic convoys. BSC tipped off U.S. immigration authorities, and Armstrong was arrested and deported. He was detained upon his return to Cardiff in February 1941, tried under the Treachery Act in June, and executed at Wandsworth in July.

ARMSTRONG, ROBERT. Later ennobled as Lord Armstrong, Robert Armstrong was Cabinet secretary when Peter Wright published his memoirs in Australia in 1986 and traveled to Sydney to appear as a witness to support the British government’s attempts to suppress SpyCatcher as a breach of the author’s duty of confidentiality to MI5. Armstrong argued that Wright’s book contained information that was highly classified and had not been released elsewhere, but the court found that much of the content had in fact appeared elsewhere, with the implicit consent of the Thatcher administration.

Earlier in his career as a civil servant, Armstrong had been indoctrinated into VENONA and undertook a research project to identify a Soviet spy with access to the White House in 1944, referred to in VENONA texts as “Agent 19.” MI5 subsequently concluded that Agent 19 was probably the Czech prime minister, Eduard Benes.

ARNIKA. Code name for the intelligence supplied by Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, the GRU spy arrested in 1962 and executed the following year. Penkovsky’s access to Soviet missile handbooks provided the Secret Intelligence Service and the Central Intelligence Agency with invaluable insight into Soviet missile strengths and revealed the distinctive trapezoid configuration of surface-to-air missile sites that proved so useful during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

ARTIST. Code name for a Secret Intelligence Service agent, Johann Jebsen, who was an Abwehr case officer based in Lisbon during World War II. Jebsen was responsible for handling a double agent named TRICYCLE but was arrested by the Gestapo in April 1944 and later executed at Oranienberg concentration camp.

ASCENSION. Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) code name for an ingenious UHF communications device developed at Whaddon Hall during World War II by the technicians of SIS’s Section VIII. ASCENSION enabled agents on the ground to use a voice channel to a low-flying aircraft circling in the vicinity.

ASHANTI CAMPAIGN. The first war to be fought with a formal intelligence division was a punitive expedition in 1895. The Ashantis of West Africa had defeated the British commissioner in 1892 and since then had used his skull as a ceremonial drinking vessel. The tribe was so feared that native troops would not approach even the body of a dead Ashanti, so General Sir Garnet Wolseley led a force of three regular battalions, drawn from the Rifle Brigade, the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, and the Black Watch, with the dashing Captain Redvers Buller acting as the head of intelligence. Buller received a comprehensive briefing from Major Charles Wilson of the new Intelligence Branch, then only six months in existence, and succeeded in recruiting a 250-strong Corps of Scouts, which located King Coffee Kalkali and his army. By interrogating prisoners, deploying reconnaissance patrols, and watching the enemy, Buller’s unit laid the foundations for a significant victory at Kumasi in early February 1875, conclusively demonstrating the value of an intelligence branch. Among those serving with Buller was Captain Henry Brackenbury, later the first director of military intelligence.

ASPIDISTRA. Code name of a huge 700-kilowatt radio transmitter located in a bunker deep in the Ashdown Forest at Crowborough, near King’s Standing in Sussex, used to broadcast to Europe during World War II. Purchased from the Radio Corporation of America by British Security Coordination with the personal approval of the prime minister for more than £110,000, ASPIDISTRA was the world’s most powerful radio and used an antenna strung between three specially constructed 115-foot masts. Its signals carried Calais-Sender programs, recorded by the Political Warfare Executive, intended to deceive German troops. It also occasionally participated in DARTBOARD and jammed enemy transmissions on the medium wave suspected of assisting Luftwaffe navigation.

ASPIDISTRA transmissions, supervised by Secret Intelligence Service technicians, began in November 1942 and continued until the end of hostilities. In 1944 an unsuccessful attempt, codenamed SILENT MINUTE, was made to use ASPIDISTRA to jam the guidance systems of V-2 rockets.

At the end of the war, the Diplomatic Wireless Service took over the site; it was later acquired by the BBC World Service. In 1984 the Home Office developed the bunker as a secret nuclear headquarters, but two years later it was handed over to the Sussex Constabulary as a police training facility.

ASSESSMENT STAFF. Since 1968 the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) has had the benefit of a small, independent analytical component. Its personnel are drawn on temporary secondment from the armed services, Whitehall, and the agencies. Organized into Current Intelligence Groups, the Assessment Staff prepares weekly reports for the JIC’s consideration.

ASTOR, LORD. The owner of Cliveden, a magnificent country home overlooking the Thames, Bill Astor served as a naval intelligence officer in the Middle East during World War II, as the Naval Intelligence Division representative on the Thirty-One Committee. He later became embroiled in the Profumo affair when he introduced the secretary of state for war to Christine Keeler one weekend in July 1962.

ATKINS, VERA. Born Vera Rosenberg in Bucharest in June 1908, Vera Atkins was categorized an enemy alien at the outbreak of World War II. Nevertheless, within a year she had joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and been appointed assistant to Maurice Buckmaster, the head of F Section. She played a key role in the development of F Section’s networks in occupied France. At the end of the war, having been promoted to be Buckmaster’s intelligence officer, Atkins searched Germany to learn the fate of 118 missing agents, among them many women, who had been captured by the Nazis. She interrogated Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, and gave evidence against him at his trial for war crimes. Atkins was demobilized in 1947, and until she died in June 2000, she devoted herself to the Special Forces Club in London and the F Section memorial in Valençay, France.

AUGUST, FRANTISEK. Born near Prague in 1928, Frantisek August was the son of an anti-Nazi who survived imprisonment in a German concentration camp after his arrest for helping a resistance group engaged in sabotage. After the war, both father and son joined the Communist party, and after the coup of February 1948 the younger August joined the National Security Corps. Five years of training followed, after which he was posted with a commission as an intelligence officer to a battalion of the Czech Border Guards.

In 1953 August took a course at the Counterintelligence School in Prague and the following year was sent to Moscow for training by the Soviet Ministry of the Interior. Upon his return to Prague in early 1955, he was appointed head of the intelligence department at the Border Guards Brigade headquarters. In January 1958 he was promoted to the British desk of the Czech Intelligence Service (StB) and in December 1961 arrived in London under consular cover for a tour of duty that lasted two years, until October 1963. Later, in July 1966, he served as the StB’s deputy rezident in Beirut, under third secretary cover.

Appalled by what he discovered in the StB’s files concerning the Soviet-inspired coup of 1948, August became a supporter of the reform movement that gained the ascendancy when Alexander Dubcek deposed Antonin Novotny in January 1968. He survived the purge of the StB conducted by Dubcek, which cost the StB’s hard-line chief, Colonel Josef Houska, his job in July 1968, and then from Beirut watched the invasion of Czechoslovakia by 5,000 Warsaw Pact tanks a month later and the reinstatement of Houska. When the news of the invasion first reached his embassy, August unwisely had sent a cable in support of the reformers. In April 1969, while on extended sick leave, he received a tip that he had been judged unreliable and, to force him to return home, his wife and children were to be abducted. Instead, at the end of July, he sought political asylum.

August’s autobiography, Red Star over Prague, was published in 1984, written largely in the third person by David Rees. It contained a detailed breakdown of the StB’s structure and identified dozens of the organization’s personnel. In his memoirs, August described the entrapment of a source he referred to by his StB code name LORA, who was actually Edward Scott, formerly the British charge d’affaires in Prague; Scott was never prosecuted for passing classified information to the Czechs.

AUSTRALIAN SECURITY INTELLIGENCE ORGANISATION (ASIO). British Intelligence has always enjoyed a close relationship with ASIO, which was created in March 1949 as a direct consequence of representations made by MI5 with respect to classified information that was known to have leaked to the Soviets: Several VENONA texts exchanged between Moscow and the Soviet embassy in Canberra indicated that a particular document dealing with postwar defense planning and dated March 1946 had been compromised, and MI5’s Roger Hollis was sent to Australia in 1947 and again in 1948 to assist in the investigation. The evidence in VENONA suggested widespread penetration of the Australian government, and the prime minister, Ben Chifley, was persuaded that a security service based on the British model was required. Accordingly, a respected judge, Geoffrey Reed, was appointed to head ASIO and MI5 lent Robert Hemblys-Scales to assist in developing its research capability. Thereafter MI5’s Far East expert, Courtney Young, was assigned to the British High Commission as the security liaison officer, with responsibility for supervising the pursuit of leads provided by “the source,” VENONA.

The first spies to be identified were Wally Clayton, codenamed CLAUDE, who was a well-known Communist activist, and Alfred Hughes, a police sergeant in the vice squad, codenamed BEN. Uniquely, ASIO was to benefit from almost contemporaneous decryption of the VENONA traffic to Canberra until the Soviets changed their cipher procedures in 1949, thereby terminating the source.

Since 1949 ASIO has developed a close relationship with its British counterpart, in much the same way that the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), created in 1952 with advice from Fergie Dempster of the British Secret Intelligence Service, is exceptionally close to SIS and the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) is bonded to GCHQ. An indication of the depth of the relationship is that the ASIS representative London attends the weekly Joint Intelligence Committee meetings as an ex officio member.

AUSTRIA. The wartime operations of Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Austria, a country designated X/AUS, headed by Miss E. R. Graham-Stamper, were limited to CLOWDER, DUNCERY, GREEN-LEAVES, HAMSPER, and HISTORIAN in the period 1943-45. SOE did have contact with the Free Austrian Movement and the Austrian Centre, but only at a political level.

AUTOMATION. In September 1940, following a Luftwaffe raid on Wormwood Scrubs that severely damaged much of MI5’s Registry, the director-general of the Security Service’s Secretariat consulted a management expert, Reg Horrocks, to advise on the automation of MI5’s vast collection of files and card indices. Hitherto an index search had to be undertaken manually, using an ingenious but labor-intensive system of punched holes and knitting needles. Horrocks was responsible for the introduction of a Hollerith punch-card sorter, and in the 1970s a major computerization program was undertaken.

AUTONOMOUS. Special Operations Executive (SOE) code name for Gardyne de Chastelain’s mission to Romania in November 1943, which ended prematurely when he bailed out over Italy. De Chastelain’s Liberator took off from Tocra, near Benghazi, Libya, but failed to find the dropping zone; it then got lost over Albania, suffered a signals failure, and eventually ran out of fuel over the Adriatic. A second AUTONOMOUS with Ivor Porter and de Chastelain, briefed by Charles Maydwell, was launched in December, but that too failed when contact could not be made with the reception committee. Finally, at the end of December de Chastelain, Porter, and a Romanian agent, Silviu Metianu, dropped into Romania, only to be arrested by the local gendarmerie before they could link up with RANJI. Within days, they were under the Abwehr’s control in Bucharest.

The Germans made the maximum propaganda value of the team’s capture. Mischievous press reports began to circulate that AUTONOMOUS had been authorized to negotiate a separate peace with Marshal Ion Antonescu’s pro-Axis regime, thereby infuriating the Kremlin. This in turn irritated Winston Churchill, who had not been fully briefed about AUTONOMOUS. Perhaps confusing Tom Masterson, the head of SOE’s Romanian section in Cairo who had played an active part in sabotaging the Romanian oilfields during World War I, with Ivor Porter, Churchill wrote Anthony Eden in May:

Why were these two ... important oil men picked? It does seem to me that SOE barges in an ignorant manner into all sorts of delicate situations.... It is a very dangerous thing that the relations of two mighty forces like the British Empire and the USSR should be disturbed by these little pinpricks interchanged by obscure persons playing the fool below the surface.

AUTONOMOUS became a major embarrassment to the government at a very delicate moment, when Edward Boxshall’s father-in-law, Prince Barbu Stirbey, had arrived in Cairo to secretly negotiate an armistice on behalf of Marshal Antonescu, another development that was bound to alienate the Soviets. The solution was to invite the Russians to participate in the secret discussions, and Ambassador Novikov helped settle the terms of the Romanian surrender. These were conveyed to Bucharest over the AUTONOMOUS wireless link, but when Antonescu read the Soviet conditions, he rejected them. De Chastelain dutifully reported this to Cairo but unwisely used rather undiplomatic language, not realizing that SOE’s telegrams were being shown to the Russians as a belated demonstration of good faith. De Chastelain’s candor in supporting Romanian objections to what amounted to a Soviet occupation was not appreciated by the Kremlin, and once again Foreign Minister Molotov berated Churchill, who responded by suspending all of SOE’s operations into the Balkans. In May the Foreign Office instructed de Chastelain to cease transmitting.

The impasse continued until the end of August 1944 when a Royalist coup swept Antonescu from power and the AUTONOMOUS mission found itself released from captivity—and the only British representation in Bucharest. In the absence of any working radio transmitters, de Chastelain was flown to Istanbul by the new regime, of which Rica Georgescu happened to be a leading member, to explain the situation, leaving Porter as the sole British representative in the capital. He was later absorbed into the new British diplomatic staff attached to the Allied High Commission in the capital, as was his wireless operator, Nicolae Turcanu.

Although AUTONOMOUS never quite achieved what was expected, and most of its members experienced a lengthy period of imprisonment, never certain whether they would be handed over to the Gestapo, it was nearly instrumental in organizing a separate peace with the Allies but, for whatever reasons, the link was to prove disastrous. It was also to lead to a further clash between SOE and the Foreign Office, with the Earl of Selborne accusing Foreign Minister Eden, in a memorandum in May 1944, of being too weak in dealing with the Russians, and even of following a policy of appeasement. This stinging criticism led Eden to rebuke Lord Selborne for “gross impertinence.”

AUXILIARY UNITS. Created in 1940 in anticipation of a Nazi invasion of Britain, the Auxiliary Units were trained at Coleshill House in Wiltshire in tradecraft and techniques intended to harass an enemy occupation. They were led by Colin Gubbins and John Holland of MI(R), who trained clandestine patrols and distributed a sabotage handbook, The Countryman’s Diary. Early in 1944, the organization was sworn to secrecy and stood down, with most of its weapons caches returned to the army. The existence of the Auxiliary Units remained secret until referred to in 1957 by Peter Fleming in Invasion 1940.

AYER, A. J. There was certainly no more improbable intelligence officer than Freddie Ayer, who gravitated into Nigel Clive’s section of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) after a series of disappointing postings. His initial efforts to join up were thwarted because his occupation, as an Oxford don, was considered reserved, and his experiences at the Guards depot at Caterham and the officers training course at Sandhurst did little to engender interest in regimental life with the Irish Guards. Instead, with the dubious claim to fluency in Spanish, German, and French, made on his behalf by the enthusiastic daughter of his landlady, Ayer was posted to Headquarters London District with the task of interrogating enemy prisoners of war.

Following the intervention of Robert Zaehner, Ayer was offered a transfer to the Special Operations Executive (SOE) branch in New York, which operated under the cover of British Security Coordination. Ayer arrived in November 1941 and spent 18 months in Manhattan collating agents’ reports from South America. In mid-1943 he returned to SOE’s headquarters in Baker Street in the hope of playing a more active role in the war, but he was instead assigned to SOE’s mission in Accra as transport officer, an appointment not without irony considering that Ayer had never learned to drive. Predictably, this posting proved unsuccessful and Ayer returned to London work in the SOE’s F Section under the regional controller, Robin Brook, “reading and analyzing the wireless messages, reports and other documents that were constantly reaching us from France.” In autumn 1943, Ayer was dispatched to Algiers, where he came in contact with Malcolm Muggeridge, who was in the same city working for SIS.

Late in 1944 Ayer was brought back to London and was switched to SIS. Initially he was placed in the same section as Clive, but in January 1945 he was attached to the SIS station in Paris. This appointment lasted just a few months and, by November 1945, he was back at Oxford to establish his reputation as one of the great philosophers of the century. Although Ayer gave a full account of his activities on behalf of SOE in his autobiography Part of My Life (1977), he never admitted his SIS connections. He died in June 1989.

AYIOS NIKOLAOS. Above the village of Ayios Nikolaos in western Cyprus, perched high in the Troodos Mountains, is a GCHQ intercept site managed by the Composite Signals Organisation. A former Intelligence Corps corporal, John Berry, disclosed its role, monitoring Iraqi wireless traffic, in an article published in Time Out in May 1976, resulting in his prosecution. During the Cold War, about 1,000 civilian and military personnel from 9 Signal Regiment manned the base and its outstation on Mount Olympus.

In June 1985 several young airmen and three soldiers from 9 Signal Regiment were charged under the Official Secrets Act with having disclosed vast quantities of information about the base to Soviet intelligence officers, supposedly entrapped and blackmailed after attending homosexual orgies. The prosecution was almost wholly dependent on confessions extracted by the Royal Air Force provost police, and after a trial lasting 115 days—the longest and most expensive espionage case in English legal history—the jury acquitted all the defendants in October 1985. The defendants were Senior Air-craftsmen Geoffrey Jones, Adam Lightowler, Wayne Kreihn, Christopher Payne, Gwynfor Owen, and Martin Tuffy, and Lance Corporal Anthony Glass. The charges against Signalman Hardman were dropped on medical grounds.

Three inquiries were instituted as a result of the case. The Security Commission, chaired by Lord Griffiths, found weaknesses in personnel management on the base, in that officers and noncommissioned officers took no interest in how the junior ranks spent their free time, and in the handling and destruction of classified documents. A second inquiry, conducted by David Calcutt, QC, pursued the issue of the men’s confessions and found that, while they had been subject to interviews that produced statements which were inadmissible, nothing improper had taken place. The findings of a third investigation, by the Ministry of Defence, were not published.

–B–

B DIVISION. The wartime MI5 subsection responsible for German counterespionage and headed by Guy Liddell. The division included the following departments:

B1 was led by Dick White and comprised B1(a), headed by Major T. A. Robertson, responsible for running double agents against the Germans; B1(b), headed by Herbert Hart, responsible for the analysis of intercepted enemy communications relevant to German double agents; B1(c), headed by Lord Rothschild, responsible for countersabotage; B1(d), headed by Ronald Haylor, responsible for liaison with the Royal Victoria Patriotic School; B1(f), headed by Courtney Young, responsible for the investigation of Japanese espionage; B1(g), headed by Dick Brooman-White, responsible for the investigation of Spanish, Portuguese, and South American espionage; B1(h), headed by Cecil Liddell, responsible for Ireland; B1(k), headed by Mr. Machell, responsible for the investigation of leakages of information; and B 1(1), responsible for the investigation of seamen and airlines personnel, under Richman Stopford

B2, responsible for security on ships and the docks, was headed by Richman Stopford

B3, responsible for communications, was directed by Malcolm Frost and comprised B3(a), headed by Roland Bird, responsible for liaison with the censorship authorities and the investigation of leakages of information; B3(b), headed by Mr. Hughes, responsible for liaison with the Radio Security Service; B3(c), headed by Flight Lieutenant Walker, responsible for the investigation of illicit signals and carrier pigeons; B3(d), headed by Mr. Grogan, responsible for liaison with the censorship authorities; and B3(e), headed by Colonel Sclater, responsible for signal security

B4, covering individual country sections, was led by Major Jock Whyte and included B4(a), responsible for the review of espionage in the United Kingdom and overseas, and B4(b), responsible for the investigation of espionage in industry and commerce, under Mr. Craufurd

B5, the investigation staff, headed by Superintendent Leonard Burt

B6, the wartime MI5 Watcher Service, headed by Harry Hunter

BACKHAND. D Division code name for Mohammed Zahirudden, a triple agent and former Indian Army officer cashiered in 1940 for nationalist agitation. Zahirudden underwent a change of heart and was dropped into Burma in February 1944 with the intention of being run as a double agent by the Japanese. He was indeed accepted by the enemy but was assigned to making propaganda broadcasts, into which he attempted to insert messages to his British handlers. The Japanese were suspicious of him, and he was imprisoned in a camp from which he was liberated when Rangoon fell in 1945.

BAD NENNDORF. The headquarters of the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre in the British zone of occupation in Germany, commanded by Colonel R. W. G. Stephens. After the war, Stephens was accused by his deputy, Major Short, of having maltreated prisoners and was court-martialed but acquitted.

BAD OEYNHAUSEN. Postwar headquarters of British Intelligence in Germany during the Allied occupation after World War II.

BAD SALZUFLEN. Postwar headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service in Germany immediately after the surrender in May 1945, headed by Harold Shergold.

BADEN-POWELL, SIR ROBERT. The founder in 1908 of the international Boy Scout movement, Robert Baden-Powell used his outdoorsman skills as cover for his spying activities. In one famous instance, while posing as an amateur lepidopterist and equipped with only a net and a paint box, he succeeded in climbing to a vantage point over the fortress of Cattaro in Dalmatia and completing an accurate diagram of the citadel’s defenses, drawing the details in a notebook covered with his sketches of butterflies. Similarly, he masqueraded as a fisherman after mountain trout when surveying mountain passes in southern Germany and as a landscape artist when watching troop maneuvers. Another time, he famously pretended to be a drunk when challenged inside a naval dockyard. Baden-Powell’s 1915 memoirs about his clandestine work during the Boer War, Baron: My Adventures as a Spy, served to inspire many and make the occupation of espionage almost respectable.

Born in 1857 and educated at Charterhouse, Baden-Powell had been commissioned into the 13th Hussars and served in Afghanistan, Zululand, and Matabeleland before commanding the Mafeking Frontier Force in 1899. The following year he was appointed inspector-general of the South African Constabulary. He was ennobled in 1922 as Baron Baden-Powell of Gilwell and died in January 1941. His 1903 handbook, Scouting for Boys, remains the world’s best-selling book after the Bible and the Koran.

BAKER STREET. The main headquarters of Special Operations Executive (SOE) was accommodated at 64 Baker Street, and the name of the street became synonymous with the organization, which quickly outgrew the building and spread into neighboring requisitioned offices, including the former head office of Marks & Spencer at Michael House, 82 Baker Street; Norgeby House, 83 Baker Street; 221 Baker Street (SOE’s technical laboratory); Chiltern Court, Baker Street (SOE’s Scandinavian Section); Montagu Mansions in York Street; Bickenhall Mansions in Bickenhall Street; Orchard Court in Portman Square; 1 Dorset Square (formerly the office of Cyril Mills, donated for wartime use by RF Section); and Berkeley Court, Glenworth Street.

BALLOON. Code name for Dickie Metcalfe, a double agent run by MI5 during the World War II as part of TRICYCLE’S network. Metcalfe had resigned his commission before the war and portrayed himself as an embittered ex-soldier who had fallen into debt, a cover story swallowed by the Abwehr.

BALLYGUNGE. Intelligence School “C,” located in the Calcutta suburb of Ballygunge, was GCHQ’s regional headquarters in India during World War II. Concentrating on intercepted Japanese signal traffic, it operated subordinate to GCHQ’s main office in India, the Wireless Experimental Station at Delhi.

BANKNOTES. Tracing the history of individual banknotes can be a useful investigative skill, and MI5 has liaised closely with the Bank of England to monitor the movement of cash. This resource was disclosed in 1920 when the foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, revealed that banknotes found in the possession of a Sikh agitator searched on the Indian frontier had been traced to a joint account in London held in the names of Leonid Krassin and the secretary of the Soviet Trade Delegation, Nikolai Klishko.

In September 1939, £1,000 in Sterling removed from a safe belonging to Helen Wilky was examined and found to have been handled by the Moscow Narodny Bank and transferred to Rotterdamsche Bankverengigen in Amsterdam, where Paul Hardt had passed it to an account in the name of Henri Pieck. As Wilky was Captain John King’s mistress and he had given her the money, this continuity of evidence showed a payment from a Soviet spy to an intermediary, ending up with King.

Similarly, in June 1940 Mathilde Krafft was identified as the source of banknotes mailed anonymously to MI5’s double agent Arthur Owens, codenamed SNOW. On that occasion the cash had been traced by MI5’s banking expert, Sir Edward Reid, to the Selfridge’s department store, where a record of a purchase made by Krafft had been retained.

BARCLAY, SIR COLVILLE. The 14th baronet Colville Barclay succeeded to the title in 1930 upon the death of his uncle and briefly joined Section IX of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in 1944 from the Royal Navy to deal with Italy and Switzerland. He was later in charge of all the Western European work. When his name was proposed, Barclay was investigated by MI5 because his background—Eton, Trinity College, Oxford, and service in the Foreign Office as a diplomat between 1937 and 1941—appeared to coincide with the description of a Soviet spy given by Walter Krivitsky to Jane Archer in 1940. In 1946 Barclay left SIS and became an acclaimed painter.

BARDSEA ISLAND. The Secret Intelligence Service naval facility in Essex where fast motorboats were based during World War I that deployed into the Baltic to ferry agents into Bolshevik territory.

BARKOVSKY, VLADIMIR. Born in Belgorod in 1913, Vladimir Barkovsky began working as a locksmith and in 1935 began a four-year course at Stankin, Moscow’s Institute of Machine Tools. He joined the NKVD upon his graduation in 1939. Barkovsky had intended to become a pilot and had undergone a military induction course in which he had learned to parachute and ride a motorcycle. However, he unexpectedly was ordered to report to a training unit at Starya Ploshchad and in June 1939 embarked on an intense English language course at Malakhovka. He was then assigned to the English Department, which at the time consisted of just three officers and a single typist, because “at that time intelligence had been unbelievably weakened by the repressions and, essentially speaking, had to be completely rebuilt.” Barkovsky also spent “a month’s probationary period at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”

By the end of the year, Barkovsky had been posted to London under his own name, where he would remain until 1946, first as an attaché and later as third secretary, using the code name JERRY. His journey to Liverpool took 74 days, via Japan and Hawaii, and when he arrived in February 1941 he found a tiny rezidentura. “There were only three of us ... but plenty of work.” The others were Anatoli Gorsky and “another greenhorn like myself who had arrived in England in March 1940. A week after my arrival in London I established contact with my first agent,” and this source supplied him with information about British interest in developing an atomic bomb. The original leak, of the Maud Committee report by John Cairncross to Gorsky, was followed in October 1940 by a 17-page report prepared by Barkovsky on the British estimates of achieving critical mass and an account of the difficulties experienced in separating U-235 by gas diffusion. Barkovsky’s sources in England included MOOR, as yet unidentified, and ERIC, Sir Eric Rideal.

In 1946 Barkovsky returned to Moscow. Three years later, he was posted to Washington, D.C., but within a month had been reassigned to the New York rezidentura. He was withdrawn in 1950 following the arrest of Klaus Fuchs, but was appointed rezident in New York in 1956. In 1963 Barkovsky was promoted to deputy chief of the KGB’s Science and Technology Directorate, and in 1970 retired to the Andropov Institute, where he lectured and wrote the KGB’s official history. He retired in 1984 and died in July 2003.

BARNARD ROAD. The location of MI5’s principal garage until 1968, when Vladimir A. Loginov, a member of the KGB rezidentura, was arrested while taking notes of the index numbers as the Watcher Service vehicles came in and out. MI5 officers had spotted Loginov and tipped off the police, who had sent a patrol car to arrest the him and his colleague, Yuri Dushkin, another official accredited to the Soviet Trade Delegation. According to Loginov, there was quite a scuffle, in which the former KGB boxing champion had floored two of the policemen, but they had taken their revenge when he had been confronted at Battersea Police Station. Loginov and Dushkin were both declared persona non grata.

BARNES. The location, on Barnes High Street, of a Marconi Wireless factory that was used by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) during the 1920s as a receiving control for transmissions from overseas stations. The site remained active until 1938, when the radio facilities were moved by Richard Gambier-Parry’s Section VIII to Funny Neuk, with SIS retaining a workshop for the manufacture of agents’ transmitters.

BARON. GRU code name for an unidentified spy active in England between March and August 1941, as disclosed in 10 VENONA decrypts. One decrypt, dated April 1941, referred to Enigma material, suggesting that the source either had access to raw decrypts, and therefore worked at Bletchley Park, or was privy to ULTRA material. The fear that BARON had remained at GCHQ after the war, or had recruited others there as spies, drove Wilfred Bodsworth and Nigel de Grey to continue study of the VENONA traffic long after the Americans had suggested the project be terminated. BARON was mentioned as a member of the Soviet network known as the X Group. The principal suspect was Karel Sedlacek, a Czech Intelligence Service officer who was not known to have had access to ULTRA.

BASKET. Code name for an MI5 double agent, Joseph Lenihan, who landed by parachute near Dublin in July 1941 and made his way to Belfast. There he surrendered to the police and gave up two wireless transmitters, £400, and a quantity of good secret ink. Lenihan, then 35, had a brother Patrick living in Athlone, and before the war Lenihan had served a nine-month prison sentence for membership of the Irish Republican Army and gunrunning. Under interrogation at Camp 020, BASKET explained that he had been caught in Jersey when the Germans occupied the Channel Islands in 1940, and after an unsuccessful attempt to cross the Channel in a boat, he accepted an offer from the Abwehr to return to Eire and spy on the British. The first attempt to fly him to Ireland, in January 1941, had been aborted when the heating inside the aircraft failed and the crew and their passenger suffered severe frostbite. BASKET’S primary mission was to transmit weather reports, but this was considered too helpful to the enemy, so an attempt was made to contact the Abwehr using secret writing, but in the absence of any reply, the case was abandoned.

BAUMGART, JOHANN. Johann Baumgart was an East German railway official who began spying for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in 1951. He was arrested in 1955 and charged with having sold 25 plans detailing the railway system to his SIS handlers.

BAZNA, ELYESA. Codenamed CICERO by the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), Elyesa Bazna photographed documents he took from the safe of the British ambassador in Ankara, Turkey, in 1943. Employed as a valet, Bazna evaded detection and resigned from his post before he was identified as a German spy. After the war, he was imprisoned in Turkey for passing the counterfeit Bank of England notes with which he had been paid. He later wrote his memoirs, I Was Cicero, as did his SD handler, Ludwig Moyszisch (Operation Cicero). His exploits were depicted in the movie Five Fingers, his role played by James Mason. Bazna died in 1971.

BAZOFT, FARZAD. Originally from Iran, Bazoft worked as a freelance journalist for the Observer in England. He was arrested on espionage charges in Baghdad and was hanged on 15 March 1990. Bazoft had been detained after visiting Al-Qaqaa State Establishment at Iskandariya, half an hour south of the capital; there, he had attempted to take soil samples, apparently in an effort to find out what had caused a massive explosion at the site on 17 August 1989, when several hundred people were rumored to have been killed. Saddam Hussein ignored pleas for clemency and Bazoft, who was traveling on temporary British travel documents, was executed, sparking much debate about who had paid for his numerous trips to the Middle East as a freelancer and about his own links with intelligence agencies.

The Iraqi intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, released an extract from Bazoft’s personal address book containing the London telephone number of Yaacov Nimrodi, a legendary Israeli intelligence officer who had spent much of his career running the Mossad station in Tehran. The controversy increased when the British government disclosed that Bazoft had maintained contact with Special Branch, reporting on Iranian refugees and political activists, and had concealed from the Observer his criminal conviction for armed robbery, a sentence he had served at the very time he was pretending to take a course in journalism at Birmingham University.

According to Simon Henderson’s Instant Empire, Bazoft was working for the Secret Intelligence Service and on the day of his arrest at Baghdad airport had successfully delivered the Qaqaa soil sample to the British Embassy, which had promptly dispatched it to London for analysis. There is also some evidence that Bazoft was working for Mossad, citing his expulsion from Tunisia after taking covert photographs of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s headquarters at Hammam ash-Shatt, only days before it was attacked by eight Israeli F-16 fighter bombers on the morning of 1 October 1985. Escorted by a squadron of F-15 fighters, the aircraft flew nearly 4,000 kilometers, conducted several complex midair refueling operations, jammed air defense radars, and dropped their bombs with pinpoint accuracy, without a single loss, leading many to conclude that the Israelis had used local agents, maybe including Bazoft, to undertake the necessary reconnaissance.

BEAULIEU. The estate of Beaulieu in the New Forest, owned by Lord Montagu, was occupied during World War II by Special Operations Executive to accommodate the Group “B” Special Training Schools, among them the Rings (STS 31), Harford House (STS 32a), Saltmarch (STS 32b), Blackbridge (STS 32c), the House on the Shore (STS 33), the Drokes (STS 34), the Vineyards (STS 35), Boar-mans (STS 36), Warren House (STS 37a), and Clobb Gorse (STS 37b).

BEAUMANOR HALL. The estate of Beaumanor Hall in Leicestershire, the ancestral home of the Jerrick family since 1512, was requisitioned in 1939 and taken over in 1942 by the War Office Y Group (WOYG), designated MI8, when Fort Bridgewoods, Chatham, came under attack by the Luftwaffe. By 1944 it accommodated 196 individual intercept desks, operating 24 hours a day and concentrating on the enemy’s Enigma traffic. Beaumanor Hall, with the neighboring 20 acres covered with massive aerial antennas, was staffed by a combination of civilian General Post Office and military Auxiliary Territorial Service operators, and it was connected by a secure teleprinter landline to Bletchley Park. In 1943 Beaumanor Hall also became part of a high-frequency direction-finding network to triangulate enemy stations.

BEEVOR, JACK. Educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, Jack Beevor became a solicitor in 1931 and joined the army at the outbreak of World War II. In 1940 he was transferred to Special Operations Executive (SOE) and in January 1941 posted to Lisbon, but in June 1942 he was compromised by a Secret Intelligence Service source who had been arrested by the notorious Portuguese International Police and had identified his flat as a safe house where he had attended meetings. Beevor was withdrawn to London, where he worked as an assistant to Sir Charles Hambro and later joined the planning staff. At the end of 1943 he was sent to Cairo as a staff officer for General Stawell, then in command of SOE’s Mediterranean operations.

After the war Beevor returned to the law, becoming a successful international businessman, and in his retirement he published SOE: Recollections and Reflections, 1940–1945.

BELFRAGE, CEDRIC. Although Cedric Belfrage never concealed his Leftist sympathies or his prewar membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain, the suggestion that he had spied for the NKVD while working for British Intelligence was only made in August 1945 when Elisabeth Bentley described him to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as having supplied secrets to a Soviet contact. As a former Daily Express journalist, his specialist field was propaganda, disseminated on behalf of the Political Warfare Executive, and at the end of hostilities he transferred to the British Control Commission for Germany as a press officer. However, while he was there, MI5 learned from VENONA intercepts that there had been a leak in British Security Coordination (BSC) and, through the testimony of a defector, some details of the source emerged. He was described as having had access to classified information and as someone who had given a lecture on British surveillance techniques to a clandestine Communist cell. According to a decrypted Soviet telegram, the spy’s first name was either Cecil or Cedric, and he was described as a committed Communist. Then a further clue emerged in some decrypted Soviet signals traffic that referred to the source’s wife having recently published a cookbook. This matched Belfrage, who had once attended a lecture given by a Special Branch detective on keeping suspects under covert observation.

Bentley’s confession to the FBI, encapsulated in her book Out of Bondage, covered her recruitment as a Soviet agent by an NKVD illegal, Jacob Golos, who became her lover. When Golos died of a heart attack in November 1943, Bentley had been asked by her Soviet handler to take over the network. The knowledge that she acquired proved enormously important, and for the next decade she gave sworn testimony regarding her contacts, one of whom was Belfrage:

In the summer of 1943 Yasha wanted to turn over to me a young Englishman who was then working for the British Intelligence Service. Cedric Belfrage had been a Party member in Britain and after coming to this country got in touch with V. J. Jerome, who in turn put Belfrage in touch with Yasha. For some time Cedric had been turning over to us extremely valuable information from the files of the B.I.S., most of which I saw before it was relayed on to the Russians.

Bentley’s “Yasha” was actually Golos, who was convicted of being a Soviet agent, and V. J. Jerome was a leading member of the Communist Party of the United States of America. From the moment in 1950 when Belfrage was informed officially he was to be investigated by the FBI to his eventual deportation five years later, Belfrage conducted a legal battle to remain in the United States. Despite Bentley’s incriminating testimony, Belfrage was never charged because the offenses he had committed against British interests had occurred in America. In 1948 he founded the Leftist National Guardian, the journal whose history he recounted in Something to Guard. He later wrote his autobiography, They All Hold Swords. Among his other books are The Frightened Giant, in which he described his departure from the United States, and Seeds of Destruction, a critique of the American postwar occupation of Germany.

In 1951 Belfrage was called to give evidence to the House Committee on Un-American Activities and was identified by several witnesses as a leading Communist and the organizer of an underground cell. He moved to Mexico, where he continued his journalism and where he died in June 1991.

BELGIUM. British Intelligence has enjoyed a very close relationship with its Belgian counterparts since World War I, when many Belgian patriots, suffering German occupation, participated in Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) networks, among them the WHITE LADY.

During World War II, after the wheelchair-bound Colonel Edward Calthrop and his SIS station had been evacuated from Brussels, SIS’s country section (designated P7) maintained good ties with the Sureté d’Etat, headed by Baron Ferdnand Lepage, and the Deuxième Bureau, led by Henri Bernard and Colonel Jean Marissal. The Belgian government-in-exile, however, had many policy disagreements with T Section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) over the sabotage of economic targets. SOE’s disagreements with the Belgian authorities centered on the HERZELLE mission in 1942, which led to acrimonious correspondence and a breaking of relations. Later SOE was to be accused of attempting to discredit Lepage.

After the war, SIS retained its links to the Sureté d’Etat and the Service General du Renseignement de la Sécurité (SGR) and occasionally mounted joint operations, usually of a technical nature, against Soviet Bloc targets.

BELL, WALTER. Educated at Tonbridge, Walter Bell was called to the bar at the Inner Temple before going to the Secret Intelligence Service’s New York station under consular cover in 1935 as an assistant to the passport control officer, Captain Sir James Paget. In 1940 he was posted to Mexico City as head of station, and the following year returned to New York to join the newly created British Security Coordination. From 1942 until the end of World War II, Bell was in London, but in 1946 he was sent back to the United States, this time to the Washington, D.C., station. In 1948 Bell married the daughter of General Carl Spaatz and transferred to MI5 to go to Nairobi in 1949 as security liaison officer (SLO). In 1952 he was appointed SLO in New Delhi, and then four years later worked for the new director-general of the Security Service, Roger Hollis, as his personal assistant. After only a year at Leconfield House, Bell went to Nassau as SLO, and in 1961 returned to Nairobi until 1967, when he retired to London.

BENNETT, LESLIE JAMES. Having served in the Royal Corps of Signals during World War II—stationed with 101 Special Wireless Section of the Special Wireless Group detachment in Malta, then at Heliopolis in Egypt, and finally Italy as an noncommissioned officer—Jim Bennett joined GCHQ in July 1946. In October 1947, having supervised the absorption of the remnants of the Radio Security Service into GCHQ, Bennett was posted to Istanbul to establish an intercept site inside the consulate general, where Kim Philby was the Secret Intelligence Service head of station. After seven months Bennett returned to England as a section head and secretary of the Counter-Clandestine Committee.

In 1950 Bennett volunteered for a posting as traffic liaison officer at Melbourne, but after a few months was reassigned to GCHQ’s intercept station in Hong Kong, where he married an Australian telegraphist. In 1952 Bennett returned to England as the head of the Middle East Section and then switched to General Search, monitoring Soviet wireless traffic. In March 1954 he emigrated to Canada, intending to join GCHQ’s counterpart, the Communications Branch of the National Research Council, but the expected job offer never materialized so in July 1954 he joined the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as a civilian research analyst and participated in KEYSTONE, the supervision of a KGB double agent codenamed GIDEON.

GIDEON disappeared in Moscow in 1958, betrayed by one of Bennett’s closest friends in the Mounties, Jim Morrison. By then Bennett had been promoted to head of B Branch’s Russian desk, the fulcrum of the organization’s Soviet counterespionage operations, and the director of E Branch, a post he was to keep until he himself came under investigation, in an inquiry codenamed GRIDIRON, as a possible mole. The basis of the GRIDIRON mole hunt, to which MI5 contributed, was a long history of failed operations, frustrated attempts to run technical surveillance on the Soviets, and hard-to-explain coincidences and the embarrassing fact that FEATHERBED, a review of Soviet penetration of the civil service, had turned up no suspects, apart from a Cambridge-educated ex-ambassador, Herbert Norman, who had been identified to MI5 as a spy by Anthony Blunt, but had committed suicide in 1957. Another suspect, John Watkins, a homosexual diplomat who had been honeytrapped in Moscow, died in October 1964 in a Montreal hotel while under interrogation by Bennett.

The GRIDIRON investigation lasted two years; Bennett was interrogated in March 1972 and protested his innocence. He took early retirement from the Security Service in 1972 and emigrated to Perth, Australia, where he still lives. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, evidence has emerged from Moscow that the KGB went to considerable lengths to incriminate Bennett, who had never been a mole.

BENTON, KENNETH. Kenneth Benton exercised considerable discretion over his covert career, which began during the war with an invitation to join the Iberian subsection of Section V of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and a subsequent posting to Madrid. When he was elected chairman of the Crime Writers’ Guild, a coveted accolade that reflected the author’s high standing among his fellow writers, few reading his biography would have known that his long service in the diplomatic corps was actually a cover for a clandestine career.

Benton joined SIS in 1937 after having studied languages at London University and having worked as a teacher in Florence and Austria. It was in Vienna that he was enrolled into SIS and where he worked under Thomas Kendrick, the head of station who was to be arrested by the Nazis in August the following year. The SIS station was then evacuated and Benton moved to Leslie Nicholson’s station in Riga, Latvia, but he was withdrawn again in 1940 after enduring three months of Soviet occupation. His lengthy return to London took him via Moscow, the Trans-Siberian Railway to the Pacific, Tokyo, and Ottawa. After his arrival in London, Benton was transferred to Section V and sent as that department’s representative to Madrid. In Spain Benton was embroiled in numerous adventures, including the bribery of the private secretary of Alcazar de Velasco, a notorious German spy who operated in London as the press attaché at the Spanish embassy.

Benton was also involved in the mysterious disappearance of a Vichy French naval officer, Capitaine de Corvette Lablache-Combier, from Lisbon. Formerly the commander of L’Impassible, Lablache-Combier volunteered to work for de Gaulle’s Free French intelligence service, the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action, and was sent to Lisbon with the identity of Paul Lewis-Claire. However, once in the Portuguese capital, he underwent a change of heart and offered his services to the naval attaché at the Vichy embassy, Admiral Delaye. This approach was instantly reported to SIS by Delaye’s assistant, Jean Boutron, and arrangements were made to abduct the defector. Lablache-Combier was invited on a pretext to the British embassy, where he was seized by Benton and J. M. Langley, drugged, and then driven in a car boot to Gibraltar. Upon his arrival on the Rock, having been smuggled across the Spanish frontier, he was discovered to be dead.

After two years in Madrid, Benton moved to Rome, but returned to London for a headquarters post in 1948. He was back in Italy in 1950, and in 1953 returned to Madrid. Soon after the Suez crisis of 1956 Benton moved back to London, and then in 1963 went to Peru to be head of station in Lima. In 1966 Benton served as SIS head of station in Rio de Janeiro, his final assignment.

Benton’s retirement from the clandestine world took place two years later, and his talent for writing spy thrillers manifested itself in the publication the next year of The Twenty-Fourth Level, a spy thriller with secret agent Peter Craig as its hero, set in a Brazilian goldmine. Numerous other thrillers followed, including two murder mysteries, A Time for Murder and Greek Fire, written under the pen name James Kirton.

BERLIN TUNNEL. Codenamed STOPWATCH by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and GOLD by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), this was a joint project involving the construction of a tunnel almost half a mile long, extending under the border at Rudlow into the Soviet zone of Berlin, to intercept a cable duct beside the Schön-felder Chaussee that carried traffic between the Soviet military headquarters in Zossen-Wunsdorf and Karlshorst to Moscow. The tunnel was dug undetected, the target cables were tapped unnoticed, and the product was recorded, processed, translated, and distributed without a leak. This very expensive undertaking was massive in size and technically very challenging, but it promised to supply the West with a trip wire that would virtually guarantee that the Soviets could not mount a surprise attack on the Allies. Monitoring and analysis of the intercepts would remove the continuing anxiety about Soviet intentions in Germany and act as a window into the daily activities of the Red Army’s Central Group of Forces permanently based in East Germany.

Elaborate precautions were taken to isolate the CIA’s Berlin base, located in the Clayalee, and the local Secret Intelligence Service station in the compound beside the Olympic Stadium, from the planning of the tunnel. The initial planning meeting took place over three days in London in December 1953, attended by George Young as SIS’s director of requirements; Tom Gimson, who headed the Y Section that had masterminded the Vienna tap; the project manager, Stewart Mackenzie, a future SIS controller of operations; and John Taylor, a technical expert from the Post Office Research Establishment at Dollis Hill. Having agreed the general principles, another meeting was held early in 1954 at the Y Section’s office at 2 Carlton Gardens. On this occasion, the minutes of the discussion were taken by George Blake, who the previous April had been released from captivity in Korea and had joined the section in September 1953. Blake passed a copy of the minutes to his Soviet contact on 18 January 1954.

The processing was to be shared between Washington, D.C., where a windowless building off the Mall was prepared for the teletype, and a compartmented unit in Clarence Terrace, Regent’s Park, with room for a staff of 300 linguists for the Russian and German voice traffic, working in shifts. By August 1954 the surface building, ostensibly a radar station, warehouse, and barracks had been completed by a German contractor, and work began from the basement level to sink a shaft 30 feet and then dig a tunnel six feet in diameter. The U.S. Corps of Engineers completed the horizontal work on 10 March 1955, and within three weeks had broken into the junction box housing the cables. At this point British telephone engineers were brought in to install 25 tons of preamplification equipment, voltage, stabilizers, and banks of tape recorders, together with the relay cables linking a specially fabricated tap chamber to the sophisticated hardware under the warehouse building capable of handling up to 500 separate channels. The connections were made and on 11 May 1955 the first of many thousands of reels of tape were processed, revealing the “take” to be a veritable intelligence bonanza. The raw material ranged from indiscreet conversations among officers and complaints about the frequent mechanical breakdowns that plagued the T-52 tank to data that helped GCHQ solve some of the codes found in Soviet tactical wireless traffic. There were even sufficient references to a KGB operation to tap an American communications cable in Potsdam for the CIA to take the appropriate countermeasures.

The hemorrhage of Soviet traffic continued for 11 months and 11 days, until 1:00 A.M., Sunday, 22 April 1955, when a team of Russian and German engineers, apparently repairing flood damage to cable conduits across the city, uncovered the tap chamber and sounded the alarm.

BERNE CLUB. The international antiterrorist intelligence exchange within the European Union, established in 1971 at which all security agencies are represented, is known as the Berne Club. It meets regularly at the director level to coordinate operations and agree on strategy.

BERRY, JOHN. A former Intelligence Corps corporal who had served on radio intercept work on Iraqi traffic with 9 Signal Regiment at Ayios Nikolaos in Cyprus six years earlier, John Berry approached two journalists in 1976 and their discussion over three hours prompted an article published in London’s radical weekly journal Time Out entitled “The Eavesdroppers,” an account of GCHQ’s role. Berry was arrested and charged under the Official Secrets Act. He was convicted along with the two authors, one of whom, Mark Hosenball, was an American who was deported. Berry was given a suspended prison sentence of six months and returned to his job as a social worker. The case proved to be a landmark because the judge dismissed all the espionage charges and was critical of the “catchall” nature of Section 2 of the Officials Secrets Act, which made it an offense to pass on any information to an unauthorized person, even though the authors demonstrated that everything they printed had come from open sources.

BESSEDOVSKY, GRIGORI. A Parisian gendarme on duty outside the Soviet embassy in the rue de Grenelle was surprised in early October 1929 by the sudden appearance of a tall young Russian who had climbed over the wall armed with a loaded automatic. He introduced himself to the astonished policeman as the temporary Soviet charge d‘affaires and demanded political asylum, claiming that his wife and son were being held by OGPU thugs in the embassy. He was escorted to the Quai d’Orsay where Bessedovsky and his family, who were removed from the embassy by a squad of gendarmes, were promised protection.

Of Ukrainian Jewish extraction from Poltava, Bessedovsky revealed that he had been active in the Social Revolutionary movement and had become a diplomat in 1922, serving in Vienna, Warsaw, and Tokyo. At the time of his defection, he was 32 years old and held the rank of counselor. According to the Soviets, he was an embezzler who had failed to return to Moscow as instructed; Bessedovsky insisted he was an ideological convert who had been singled out for assassination by the OGPU. Under intensive interrogation by the French, during which he made no mention of having been suspected of having stolen large sums from the Soviet Foreign Ministry, Bessedovsky revealed what he believed was the identity of a British civil servant who had visited a colleague at the embassy in July 1929 in a vain attempt to sell secrets, including copies of the Foreign Office’s ciphers. The offer had been rejected, but Bessedovsky supplied enough information about the mysterious Briton that MI5 was eventually able to identify him, albeit posthumously, as Ernest Oldham, a junior clerk in the communications department who gassed himself in September 1933.

Within two days of Bessedovsky’s defection, he was interviewed by Commander Wilfred Dunderdale, the Russian-born Secret Intelligence Service head of station in Paris, who formed a poor opinion of the man claiming to be his Soviet counterpart, a member of the local OGPU rezidentura. He was described as “smart and intelligent, but neither frank nor principled, and quite possibly not honest.” Nevertheless he was “extremely talkative and indiscreet,” so he was considered an important catch by the British and French security agencies.

Bessedovsky subsequently made a living as a journalist and wrote Revelations of a Soviet Diplomat (1931). He continued to live in France, and there were rumors during World War II that he was active in the Communist resistance and that he had also maintained links with the Gestapo. He was last seen in the south of France in the 1950s, where he was believed to have reestablished contact with the NKVD, on whose behalf he is thought to have peddled numerous literary forgeries, including J’ai choisi la potence by General Vlassov, Ma carriére à l’Etat-Major Sovietique by Ivan Krylov, and Les Maréchaux Sovietique vous parlent by Cyrille Kalinov. Masquerading as Stalin’s nephew, Budu Svanadze, he wrote both My Uncle Joseph Stalin and In Conversation with Stalin, and under his own name wrote an authenticating foreword to both, in which he vouched for the author’s identity. As Boris Souvarine, a French expert on Communism, later demonstrated, Svanadze never existed. In 1952 Bessedovsky pulled off his most impressive and ambitious coup, Notes for a Journal, which were attributed to Maxim Litvinov.

BEST, SIGISMUND. Sigismund Payne Best was the product of an Anglo-Indian marriage that left him with an acute sensitivity about his origins and a lasting inferiority complex. During World War I, his poor eyesight and his knowledge of French, German, and Flemish, acquired while attending university in Munich, brought him into the Intelligence Corps. He started by interviewing Belgian refugees at the Channel ports, but later was transferred to Holland to help organize the networks of trainwatchers operating behind enemy lines.

After the war, following his marriage to the daughter of a Dutch Marines general, Best ran a small import-export business in The Hague dealing in Humber bicycles. He was something of a Wodehousian figure, sporting a monocle and spats, but was very well connected in the British expatriate community. He was also the local representative of a branch of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) known as the Z Organization, a network of agents operating independently of the British Passport Control Offices, the more usual Secret Intelligence Service cover.

Best’s career as a secret agent came to grief in November 1939 when, accompanied by SIS colleague Major Richard Stevens, he drove to Venlo on the German frontier with the intention of meeting a senior anti-Nazi dissident, allegedly a Luftwaffe general. The encounter turned out to be a trap, and the two SIS officers were bundled across the border by a group of heavily armed Nazis.

Best and Stevens underwent lengthy interrogations, and after the war, following their release from concentration camps, each accused the other of having betrayed SIS’s most sensitive secrets. That the Germans had acquired a detailed knowledge of SIS’s internal structure could not be denied. Captured documents proved conclusively that the enemy had acquired first-class information about SIS, and there were indications that, despite their protests, Stevens and Best had been played against each other in a skillful exploitation of the two prisoners. Indeed, when Best demanded financial support from SIS, he was warned that he was lucky not to have been prosecuted. SIS was reluctant to accommodate Best and he was excluded from a list, drawn up in 1964, of victims of Nazi persecution eligible for compensation from the postwar German government. Best, who had become a bankrupt, demanded to be included and his claim was eventually accepted.

The financial settlement achieved by Best did nothing to diminish his sense of grievance, and he insisted that he had been victimized by SIS. In his submissions to the bankruptcy courts, he consistently described himself as an intelligence officer, with the intention of embarrassing SIS, and he made no attempt in his memoirs, The Venlo Incident, to shield his former employers from criticism. He died in Calne, Wiltshire, in 1978 aged 93, having donated his carefully constructed, but largely fictitious, diaries to the Imperial War Museum. They dated back to his adventures with carrier pigeons and observation balloons on the Western Front, but the material concerning his networks of agents in postwar Germany was almost entirely fabricated.

The tragedy of Best’s case was that he was indeed innocent of the charge that he had cooperated with his Nazi interrogators. It was only much later that SIS learned that another SIS officer, Dick Ellis, had spilled secrets to the Abwehr before the war, and this was the infor,-mation that was presented to Best and Stevens separately for corroboration during their incarceration. Each assumed the other had been responsible for supplying the information, little realizing that it had been neither. Ellis confessed to his treachery, citing financial hardship as a motive, only in 1966.

BETTANEY, MICHAEL. Michael Bettaney was recruited to join the Security Service in 1975 when he left Oxford, where he had gained a second-class degree in English at Pembroke College. Once approved for employment by MI5, he worked in F Branch until June 1976, when he was posted to Belfast. There, he was slightly injured in a car bomb attack. Two years later, Bettaney returned to London to participate in the newly created antiterrorist branch. In December 1982 he was transferred to the Soviet counterespionage section, and it was while he was serving in this highly compartmented unit that he made three anonymous approaches to the KGB rezident in London, Arkadi Gouk, and offered to supply him with MI5 secrets.

Although Bettaney subsequently claimed to have been inspired by political motives, the reality is that he had received a final warning following a criminal conviction for fare-dodging and an arrest for being drunk in the street. A further offense of using an out-of-date railway season ticket followed, and although Bettaney had failed to declare it, as he was required to do, he knew it would be disclosed during his next routine security screening, which would inevitably lead to his dismissal.

When Bettaney was arrested at his home in September 1983, as he was preparing to fly to Vienna with another sample of MI5’s secrets to hand over to the Soviets, he was unaware that his offers to Gouk had been compromised by the rezident’s deputy, Oleg Gordievsky, who had reported his approach to his Secret Intelligence Service handler, prompting a mole hunt conducted by Eliza Manningham-Buller.

In April 1984 Bettaney was sentenced to 23 years’ imprisonment; he served his sentence in isolation at Coldingley Prison until he was released in 1996. A Security Commission report into the case was severely critical of the director-general of the Security Service, Sir John Jones, who claimed that MI5 was handicapped because it had nowhere to send problem employees like Bettaney. Somewhat disingenuously, in order to protect Gordievsky, the commission claimed that the would-be spy had been exposed by the vigilance of his colleagues.

BEURTON, URSULA. Known by her married name Ursula Beurton, her nom de guerre Ruth Werner, and her GRU code name SONIA, Beurton was an exceptionally successful case officer, running many spies, among them Melita Norwood and Klaus Fuchs.

She was born in 1907 into a family in Berlin that became well known for its commitment to radical socialism. Beurton’s father moved to England to take up an academic appointment in Oxford in 1933 as the Nazis took power. Her sister, Birgitte, was recruited as an agent by the Soviet GRU and her brother, Jurgen, was to lead the KPD in exile. Beurton worked in a bookshop selling “progressive literature” and briefly visited New York to do relief work among the homeless. In 1929 she married an architect, Rolf Hamburger, and they set up a home together in Shanghai, where she fell under the influence of the Soviet agents Richard Sorge and Agnes Smedley.

Already committed to the Communist cause, Ursula was recruited into the GRU by Sorge although at that early stage she was uncertain of the exact nature of the organization. “Only two years later did I know that it operated under the intelligence department of the Red Army General Staff. It made no difference to me. I knew that my activities served the comrades of the country in which I lived.”

In February 1931 their son Micha was born, but this event did not cement their marriage, which was under strain, primarily because of political differences. “I could not talk to him about the people who were closest to me or the work on which my life was centered.” Hamburger was deliberately excluded from Beurton’s clandestine activities and had no idea that Sorge used their house to store secret information. Only later did he convert to Communism, by which time Beurton had left him. In the meantime, she spent six months in Moscow undergoing a GRU training course, returning to meet Hamburger in Prague and returning to China via Trieste in April 1934. They settled in Nukden and then in June 1935 moved to Peking, where she became pregnant by Ernst, a GRU agent with whom she had trained in Moscow.

Beurton returned to Moscow with Micha late in 1935, and after a brief stopover, continued her journey via Leningrad to London where she was reunited with her family. She then moved with Hamburger to Warsaw, where daughter Janina was born in April 1936. After a mission to Danzig, Beurton was recalled to Moscow to receive further training, the Order of the Red Banner, and a new assignment in Switzerland. In October 1938 Beurton was living in the village of Caux, above Montreux, with her two children, supervising a network of agents that included members of the International Labor Organization of the League of Nations in Geneva and workers at the I. G. Farben plant in Frankfurt. However, her passport was false and in 1939 she divorced Hamburger, who had been ordered back to China, and married a young English veteran of the Spanish Civil War, Len Beurton, in order to acquire British citizenship.

In December 1940 Ursula and her children made their way to England, via Barcelona, Madrid, and Lisbon, and rented a house in Oxford where, in late 1942, she was joined briefly by Len before he was called up for service in the Coldstream Guards. While in England she acted as a GRU case officer for Norwood, who supplied atomic secrets from the British Non-Ferrous Metals Association, and for Fuchs, a role that led to MI5’s interest in her in August 1947. Although on the one occasion Beurton was interviewed she denied any connection with espionage, she fled to East Germany in February 1950, the day before Fuchs appeared at the Old Bailey. In her retirement, she lived in East Berlin, an unapologetic Communist, devoted to Len and their son Peter, who was born in September 1943. Her biography was published in 1977. She died in 2000, soon after the loss of her husband.

BEVAN, JOHN. John Bevan was the head of London Controlling Section, the strategic deception coordinating organization in London during World War II that supervised campaigns such as FORTITUDE (the deception campaign to cover the D-Day invasion of Europe) and the means used to convey the false information to the enemy. A stockbroker in civilian life, Bevan had fought in World War I and in May 1942 was appointed to replaced Oliver Stanley. Assisted by Dennis Wheatley, Bevan’s first achievement was the cover plan for the TORCH landings in North Africa.

BIG LEMON. A Greek from Istanbul, BIG LEMON was the leader of THE LEMONS, a pair of Abwehr spies arrested in Cyprus in 1943. BIG LEMON was imprisoned by Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME), while his radio operator worked for SIME as a double agent.

BIGGS, ERNEST. A one-legged tea importer based in Stockholm, Ernest Biggs participated in LUMPS, an ill-fated 1940 scheme with the local British Petroleum representative, Harry Gill, to destroy the port facilities in Oxelösund, through which iron ore was exported to Germany. Devised by Section D and led by Alexander Rickman, the plan failed when Rickman was arrested by the Swedish Security Police in April and sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment. Biggs was caught in possession of two suitcases filled with dynamite and received five years. Two other conspirators, Arne Behrisch and Elsa Johansson, were sentenced to three and a half years’ imprisonment. Biggs was released in October 1941 and flown to Scotland to join Special Operations Executive’s F Section.

BINGHAM, CHARLOTTE. The daughter of John Bingham and Madeleine Bingham, Charlotte Bingham wrote the first volume of her autobiography at age 19 while she was struggling with her shorthand and working during the day as a typist in MI5’s Registry. Coronet among the Weeds was an instant and hilarious success. Soon afterward, she married actor and writer Terence Brady and together they formed a successful writing partnership. Lucinda followed in 1966 and a second autobiography, Coronet among the Grass, was released in 1974.

After her education at the Sorbonne, Charlotte was recruited into MI5, as a filing clerk, helped by her father, who was a close friend of the “Registry Queen,” Bunny, Lady Cadogan. After an introductory course at Leconfield House, she was posted to C Branch in Cork Street, where she found the work very uninspiring. Among MI5’s more unconventional employees, she kept a bottle of champagne on her desk and photographs of film stars on the filing cabinets. She recalls that much of her time was spent typing letters with impossibly long Greek Cypriot names and she was really more interested in shopping at Fenwick’s, the conveniently close department store, and in the weekend house parties that dominated the debutante season at that time. Later her section moved to new accommodations in Queen Street, Mayfair, directly under the counterespionage unit run by Charles Elwell that caught John Vassall in September 1962. Her clandestine career was to be short lived, partly due to the reception of her first book, but also because of her poor typing and the increasingly long lunches she spent with publishers. Her sense of security was also regarded as dubious, especially after an estimated 29 files of classified atomic documents in her care were mislaid. As the Director of C Branch at the time remarked, “We can only hope they haven’t been lost on a Number 9 bus.”

Charlotte and Terence Brady continue a successful writing partnership and live in Bruton, Somerset.

BINGHAM, DAVID. A Royal Navy sublieutenant assigned to HMS Rothesay in Portsmouth, David Bingham was a torpedo specialist who began supplying classified data to the Soviet naval attaché, Lori Kuzmin, in early 1970. As an expert on sonar, Bingham had been commissioned from the ranks and was heavily in debt when he sold information about the submarine 2001 sonar system to the Soviets for £2,810. He was sentenced to 21 years’ imprisonment in March 1972. His wife Maureen, who also received two and a half years, later claimed that she had cooperated with MI5 and demanded a review of her conviction. While in prison he divorced Maureen and married a cousin, Mary. After his release from prison in 1981, Bingham changed his name to Brough and began a new career, managing an alternative therapy center, and being elected a vice president of the Bournemouth Conservative Club. He was killed in February 1997 in a car accident at Stratford-upon-Avon.

BINGHAM, JOHN. Best known as a thriller writer, John Bingham, Lord Clanmorris, led a double life. He was one of MI5’s star agent handlers, learning his trade while assisting Max Knight, arguably the Security Service’s most successful case officer ever. Educated at Cheltenham and in France and Germany, Bingham was known as “Black Jack” to his colleagues. He once said that he joined MI5 from the Royal Engineers in 1940, at age 32, having denounced an entirely innocent German refugee to the authorities, but he had worked previously part-time as one of Knight’s informants. Before the war he had been a journalist, first for the Hull Daily Mail, and then in London as a feature writer and then picture editor for the Sunday Dispatch. Bingham recruited numerous beautiful women as his informants and helped run several that he referred to as his “bogies.”

After the war and Max Knight’s retirement, Bingham continued to operate as M15’s principal agent-runner and acquired an apprentice in David Cornwell, who was later to switch to the Secret Intelligence Service. In Germany Bingham operated under Control Commission cover, based in Hannover, and upon his return to London he headed M15’s antisubversion operations unit, based in safe houses around Knightsbridge. Both his wife Madeleine Bingham and his daughter Charlotte Bingham also worked for MI5 and became authors. Upon the death of his father in 1960, Bingham inherited his Irish title, the seventh Baron Clanmorris, and a castle in Northern Ireland that later became Bangor’s town hall.

Throughout his career in MI5, which lasted until 1977, Bingham was a prolific author, starting with his first spy novel, My Name Is Michael Sibley (1952), an unusual book in that it consisted almost entirely of the exchanges between a murder suspect and his interrogator. More than a dozen other crime mysteries were to follow, and Fragment of Fear was made into a movie in 1970. Of them all, Night’s Black Agent and The Double Agent were probably based on his own experiences, the former being a play on Max Knight’s name and his own role as his principal assistant. In the foreword to the latter, he wrote, “There are currently two schools of thought about our Intelligence Services. One school is convinced that they are staffed by murderous, powerful, double-crossing cynics, the other that the taxpayer is supporting a collection of bumbling, broken-down layabouts.” He strongly disapproved of the writing of his protégé Cornwall, observing, “The belief encouraged by many spy writers that Intelligence officers consist of moles, morons, shits and homosexuals makes the Intelligence job no easier.” Bingham died in August 1988, not long after his wife.

BINGHAM, MADELEINE. When Madeleine Ebel married John Bingham in 1934, she was 22 and he was a reporter with the Sunday Dispatch, but soon after the war broke out he was recruited into the Security Service and she followed his example. While he was based in London, running agents with the legendary Max Knight, Madeleine was posted to Blenheim Palace in an administrative role. Later she switched to Special Operations Executive where, she later told friends, she worked in the Baker Street headquarters and kept a drawer of suicide capsules for agents. Her talent as a writer emerged after the war when her three-act comedy, The Man from the Ministry, written under the pseudonym Julia Mannering, was produced in 1947.

Born into a family of relatively humble origins, her father being a decorator and antiques dealer, Madeleine met Jack Bingham at a typing school in London. He was learning his trade as a journalist, and when he landed a job with a provincial paper she went to work at The Times. Madeleine Bingham was to become a much praised biographer, writing the standard works on Sheridan, Sir John Vanbrugh, Henry Irving, and Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Her autobiography, Peers and Plebs: Two Families in a Changing World (1975), documented the unwelcome impact she had, as a Catholic with family roots in central Europe, on her fiancé’s family, which was fiercely Northern Irish and anti-Catholic. However, at no point in the book, which draws to a close with the birth of her son Simon in 1937, does she disclose her husband’s career after journalism, her occupation during the war, or that of her daughter, Charlotte Bingham. Her announcement, years later, that she intended to write an account of her husband’s life and that he had been the model for John le Carré’s character George Smiley, prompted a swift rebuke from the Security Service, which warned her that no such book would be tolerated. As she herself had worked for MI5, she was in a weak position to argue her case and she reluctantly dropped the project. She died in 1988.

BITOV, OLEG. A Soviet journalist and former deputy editor of the Literary Gazette, Bitov was a KGB co-optee who defected in Italy in September 1983, only to redefect to Moscow from London the following August. He claimed at a press conference that he had been abducted by the British Security Service, but the reality was that he had succumbed to depression and had been unable to complete a contract for the publication of his memoirs, Tales I Could Not Tell.

BJ. Known variously as BLACK JUMBOS and BLUE JACKETS, this abbreviation was applied as a generic term for intercepted diplomatic traffic before World War II.

BLACK TOM. The devastating explosion in July 1916 of a 34-car ammunition train at Black Island in New York Harbor was heard a hundred miles away and caused immense damage. The munitions had been destined for Russia, and although sabotage was suspected, it was Admiral “Blinker” Hall who provided the U.S. authorities with the intercepts to identify the German spies thought to be responsible. Although no one was ever prosecuted for setting the incendiary devices believed to have started the fire on the train, several suspects, named by German telegrams intercepted and decrypted by Room 40, were thought to be responsible. The last insurance claims arising from the explosion were settled in 1954. Because a former Secret Intelligence Service officer, Henry Landau, gave such a detailed account of the incident in his Enemy Within (1937), some believed British propagandists had exploited what had actually been an accident.

BLAIR, NEIL. Born in 1910, Neil Blair fought with the Black Watch in North Africa and Sicily and joined the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in 1951. Upon his retirement in 1967, he was commissioned to write an official history of SIS during World War II.

BLAKE, GEORGE. Born George Behar in Rotterdam, Blake possessed British nationality through his father, who had become a naturalized citizen following his war service in World War I. He was educated in Holland and Egypt and joined his mother and sister in London after an escape from the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. In 1943 Blake anglicized his name by deed poll and the next year was recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service as a conducting officer in the Dutch Section.

At the end of the war Blake remained in the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and, having completed a Russian language course, was posted to Seoul, where he was interned at the outset of the Korean War. In captivity Blake volunteered to spy for the KGB and did so upon his release and until he was finally denounced in 1961. At his trial, Blake received a record sentence of 42 years’ imprisonment, but in October 1966 he was to escape to Moscow with help from a fellow prisoner, Sean Bourke, and a group of British left-wing sympathizers who publicly acknowledged their role and were subsequently prosecuted and acquitted of having assisted a fugitive. They claimed they had received no support from the KGB, but instead had been financed by film director Tony Richardson.

Following his escape from Wormwood Scrubs in 1966 and his successful exfiltration to East Berlin, Blake took up permanent residence in Moscow, where he now lives with his second wife. In recent times there have been two disclosures from Moscow that shed new light on his case. The first is the admission that one of his KGB contacts in London was Vasili A. Dozhdalev, who, by coincidence, happened to be conveniently on hand in Berlin on the very night Blake turned up, ostensibly without warning—the implication being that even if the Soviets did not play a direct role in engineering his escape from the Scrubs, they must have had foreknowledge of his arrival in Germany. The second is the claim made by Lieutenant General K. Grigoriev, a retired KGB officer, that Blake’s recruitment in Korea had not been an example of ideological conversion, but rather one of manipulation by a brilliant KGB interrogator. Apparently Colonel Nikolai Loy-enko befriended Blake by slipping him bread and chocolate and was quoted subsequently as having concluded that “the way to an intelligence officer’s heart is through his stomach.”

Blake wrote an autobiography, No Abiding City, which was read by a few Western publishers but rejected by all on the grounds that it was too boring, so Blake prepared a second memoir, No Other Choice. Despite the British government’s legislation to prevent former intelligence personnel from disclosing details of their professional work, Blake’s book was released in England, and it contained numerous names of Blake’s former SIS colleagues whose identities had never previously been published. Surprisingly, no action was taken to prevent the book’s circulation, and in one passage the traitor claims that he was trapped into confessing his duplicity by a skillful interrogator who suggested that he had been coerced into becoming a spy. This version contrasts with the memory of one of those present in the room at the time of his confession, who insists that Blake was spotted by surveillance experts trying to telephone his Soviet contact in an apparent hope of a rescue. Royalties from Blake’s autobiography have been blocked by the treasury solicitor in order to prevent a criminal from profiting from crime but this appears to have been the only disadvantage to the release of No Other Choice.

BLEICHER, HUGO. A noncommissioned officer in the German Abwehr, Hugo Bleicher proved to be a skilled counterintelligence agent who successfully penetrated several Special Operations Executive networks in occupied France during World War II. He was responsible for the arrest of Peter Churchill and Odette Samson, and his mistress was the notorious “La Chatte,” Mathilde-Lily Carré, who betrayed Roman Garby-Czerniawski’s Polish network. After the war Bleicher ran a tobacconist’s shop in Germany and was prompted to write his memoirs, Colonel Henri, to counter allegations of misconduct. Bleicher was never charged with any war crimes and always remained friendly with Peter Churchill.

BLENHEIM PALACE. The home of the Duke of Marlborough, MI5 occupied the Blenheim Palace estate in 1940 following a Luftwaffe raid on Wormwood Scrubs that damaged much of the Registry that September. Most of the administrative sections were transferred to the main house, with other local houses, including Cornbury Park, accommodating the personnel, and Keble College, Oxford, providing training facilities.

BLETCHLEY PARK. Also known as “Station X” and the Secret Intelligence Service’s War Station, Bletchley Park is an ugly mansion set in a private estate in what is now the new town of Milton Keynes. It was bought by Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair in 1938 as an emergency headquarters for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). During the Munich crisis, Sinclair mobilized the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS) and accommodated hundreds of linguists, analysts, and cryptographers in temporary huts on the extensive grounds to work on German intercepted wireless traffic. SIS’s Section VIII was transferred to nearby Whaddon Hall in November 1939, and the radio masts were removed from the garden.

By the end of the war, GC&CS’s British and American staff of 12,500 had broken a large number of Enigma keys. The resulting decrypts, circulated under the code names BONIFACE and then ULTRA, enabled strategists to shorten the war by an estimated two years. After the war, GCHQ moved its headquarters to Eastcote but a training facility remained on the site until 1985, when the estate was taken over by British Telecom.

BLOCKADE INTELLIGENCE. One of the two divisions of the Ministry of Economic Warfare’s Intelligence Branch, created in November 1939 and headed by Major Desmond Morton. Blockade Intelligence had responsibility for the collection and collation of information concerning foreign shipping, and its distribution to Contraband Control for enforcement by the Royal Navy.

BLOUNT, SIR CHARLES. The prewar director of air intelligence at the Air Ministry, Charles Blount was responsible in 1934 for developing AI4, the Royal Air Force’s first signals intelligence unit, based at RAF Waddington.

BLUNT, ANTHONY. A wartime MI5 officer, Anthony Blunt was a member of the notorious Cambridge Five and worked as an active Soviet agent from his recruitment in 1936. The son of the embassy chaplain in Paris, Blunt was educated at Marlborough and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he excelled in French but later gained a reputation as an art historian, specializing in the paintings of Poussin. At the outbreak of war, Blunt remained in contact with Kim Philby and Guy Burgess, but disliked his former pupil, John Cairncross, all of whom were part of the NKVD network set up by the Soviet illegal Arnold Deutsch. With help from his brother, a territorial officer, Blunt succeeded in acquiring a commission in the Intelligence Corps and was sent to France with a Field Security Section. After the evacuation from Dunkirk, he was invited to join MI5 by Lord Rothschild, and he made himself indispensable to the director of counterespionage, Guy Liddell.

During the five years Blunt worked inside the Security Service, he systematically betrayed every secret that passed over his desk and looted the famed Registry for any information that might be useful to the Soviets. He compromised MI5’s technical coverage of the Communist Party of Great Britain headquarters, warned the NKVD that Tom Driberg was an MI5 source, and revealed the identity of a Secret Intelligence Service spy inside the Kremlin run by Harold Gibson. In addition, Blunt copied hundreds of classified documents and obtained a list of MI5 agents in embassies and legations in London.

During his period in MI5, Blunt went overseas only twice, in 1945. Once was on a mission to the Duke of Brunswick’s castle to rescue pictures for Buckingham Palace, the other to Rome to investigate the leakage of information from the prewar British embassy. After the war, Blunt returned to the Courtauld Institute as director and was appointed surveyor of the queen’s pictures. He was knighted in 1953 even though he came under suspicion following the defection of his friends Burgess and Donald Maclean in May 1951. Blunt was finally confronted in April 1964 and, in exchange for a formal immunity from prosecution, confirmed the unsubstantiated allegation made by his former lover Michael Straight that he had been a Soviet mole. In his confession, Blunt also implicated a former military intelligence officer, Leo Long, and an Admiralty scientist, Dr. Alister Watson. News of Blunt’s treachery was revealed in November 1979 by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who, outraged at his immunity, stripped him of his knighthood. Blunt’s principal interrogator, Peter Wright, always believed that Blunt had remained loyal to the Soviets and asserted in his autobiography, SpyCatcher, that Blunt had not jeopardized anyone who had not already fallen under suspicion. Blunt died in March 1983, having made a very few public statements about his covert career.

BODYGUARD. Code name for the deception campaign to cover the Allied invasion of Europe in June 1944. BODYGUARD had various components, including FORTITUDE NORTH and FORTITUDE SOUTH. BODYGUARD was the largest and most successful operation undertaken during World War II.

BOER WAR. British military reverses in South Africa during the Boer War highlighted the lapses in intelligence that had prevented sufficient troops from being deployed to the region before the war started and resulted in the troops that did arrive being poorly prepared and equipped. A series of defeats in December 1899 left Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking under siege, with the government resorting to unorthodox tactics to contain the enemy. Secret service funds were paid to consuls across the world to collect information about arms shipments to the Boers and agents were deployed in the Transvaal to survey railway bridges as possible targets for sabotage.

During the war, Colonel David Henderson of the Field Intelligence Department introduced several innovations, including strategic deception through the manipulation of the media. Henderson circulated “confidential tips” on future plans to newspapermen, who published them in London. The scheme was so successful that the War Office reprimanded Lord Roberts on the serious indiscretion of his staff, but the truth emerged when the journalists who had been manipulated complained about their “unfair and dishonest treatment.”

The war concluded with a significant intelligence coup in May 1901 pulled off by the postal censor in Aden, who intercepted a secret message from the Boers addressed to President Kruger, who was then in Holland. The code was broken and the content revealed that General Smuts, Christiaan de Wet, and the Dutch consul in Pretoria had concluded that they could not hope to beat Lord Kitchener, even if that was not the view in Europe. The text was promptly passed to Kitchener, who exploited the Boer weakness to his advantage.

In July 1902 Lord Elgin was appointed by the new prime minister, Arthur Balfour, “to inquire into the military preparations and other matters connected with the war in South Africa,” and a year later he concluded that the government had failed to take account of the intelligence it had received regarding Boer intentions and had been at fault for not having sent reinforcements out early, even if there had been a wish not to appear provocative. The Elgin Commission discovered that, whereas the Boers had spent £170,000 annually on secret service, General Sir John Ardagh had asked for only £10,000 and had been allowed a mere £100. One result of this postmortem was a readiness to prepare contingency plans for a war in Europe, which necessitated the creation of a Secret Service Bureau.

BOHR, NIELS. The winner of the 1922 Nobel Prize for physics, Niels Bohr was one of the leading scientists of his generation. Bohr remained in Copenhagen after the Nazi occupation of 1940, but in October 1943 he cooperated with British Intelligence and was exfiltrated to Sweden, where he was placed on a clandestine flight to Scotland so he could join the Manhattan Project. He reported that in September 1941 he had been visited by the leading German physicist, Werner Heisenberg, and had conducted an ambiguous conversation about the possibility of creating a nuclear weapon.

At Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he worked under the alias Nicholas Baker, Bohr was troubled by the ethics of an American monopoly on an atomic bomb and pressed for the Soviets to be included in the research. He returned to London to persuade Winston Churchill, who warned his scientific adviser that he believed Bohr was on the brink of “mortal crimes” and that preparations should be made for his detection if he contacted the Soviets.

At the end of the war, Bohr returned to Denmark, where he was approached by the Soviets for information, but he declined to cooperate. Bohr’s two controversial conversations, with Heisenberg in 1941 and Yakov Terletsky and Lev Vasilevsky in 1945, have been the subject of much speculation, several books, and a successful play, Copenhagen.

BOLERO. Code word for a committee created in 1942 by the War Cabinet to coordinate security arrangements with the United States forces based in Britain. The committee met at Norfolk House and was chaired by Sir Findlater Stewart. The British side was heavily represented by MI5 (a contingent led by the director-general of the Security Service, Sir David Petrie, and consisting of Brigadier Allen, Jasper Harker, Kenneth Younger, and Guy Liddell. The Americans were General R. H. McClure, Colonel H. G. Sheen, and R. D. Coe from the U.S. Embassy. The BOLERO secretariat consisted of Brigadier Gurney and L. Petch.

BOND, JAMES. The most famous, if fictional, British Intelligence officer, James Bond, codenamed 007, first appeared in Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale. Over the years, there has been speculation about who Fleming used as a model for Bond, assuming the character was not based on himself or his brother Peter Fleming, The Times journalist and travel writer who joined MI(R) in 1940 to advise on guerrilla tactics. One suggestion is Sir Fitzroy Maclean, a young diplomat in Moscow when Peter introduced him to his younger brother. Another possibility is Commander Wilfred “Biffy” Dunderdale, RNVR, for 14 years the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) head of station in Paris, who had plenty of official contact with Fleming at the Admiralty.

A Yugoslav double agent, Dusko Popov, also has been mentioned as a candidate for Bond, primarily because of his renown as a wartime playboy and his adventures in neutral Lisbon and at the Estoril Casino, where he gambled against Axis agents and diplomats in scenes reminiscent of Casino Royale and Goldfinger. Popov’s encounter with Fleming took place in late July 1941 and involved the transfer of $80,000 from the Abwehr to another MI5 double agent, TATE, in London, who had run low on funds. MI5 pretended TATE had received the money, leaving the Abwehr in Lisbon to employ Popov to pay a similar amount into what was purported to be Glass’s bank account in New York. Popov was handed the bundle of notes by his German contact one evening, too late to hand it over as arranged to his SIS handler, so instead he carried it to dinner and, watched by Fleming, then brandished it at the baccarat table in the Estoril Casino while calling the bluff of a wealthy Lithuanian player who, when passed the bank, invariably called for a no-limit game. Infuriated at his arrogance, Popov had suggested a bet of $40,000, causing his rival to withdraw and Fleming to gasp. As the Yugoslav recalled, “Even for the Estoril Casino in the fever of war, it was a lot of money. The chatter stopped. Somehow the wager communicated itself to the other tables in the room, and all became silent. I glanced at Fleming. His face turned bile green.”

Another of several possible candidates for Bond was Conrad O’Brien-Ffrench, a dashing figure who undertook clandestine missions abroad for SIS when he was not skiing in the Austrian Alps with the Fleming brothers.

Fleming drew on many of his own experiences for Bond, and many clues are to be found in his thrillers, with “M” being so close to the real “C,” even down to his trusted secretary Miss Moneypenny whose surname sounds so like that of C’s real secretary, Miss Pettigrew. Over lunch with the director of naval intelligence (DNI), Admiral John Godfrey, in May 1939 at the grill in the Carlton Hotel, Fleming was offered a post as his assistant in the Admiralty. Godfrey was to be Fleming’s model for “M,” Bond’s gruff chief, whom Fleming described in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as having served on HMS Repulse, “M’s final sea-going appointment.” In fact, Godfrey had commanded the battle cruiser in the Mediterranean before being posted to the Admiralty as DNI.

The similarities between Fleming’s own personal experiences and his fictional character did not end there. In many cases, the author drew on the name of friends for some of the personalities who appeared in the books. Bond used the name Bryce, his lifelong friend Ivar Bryce’s surname, in Dr. No and Live and Let Die. David and Caroline Somerset (now the Duke of Beaufort) appear in From Russia with Love. Fleming’s New York lawyer pal Ernie Cuneo is transformed into a well-informed Los Angeles taxi driver in Diamonds Are Forever, and the names Scaramanga and Blofeld came from Fleming’s prep school chums. As for the name James Bond, the original was a distinguished ornithologist who had published a study Fleming knew well, Birds of the West Indies.

Much of what is revealed about Bond himself in the first novel coincides with Fleming. He had been on a mission to Monte Carlo before the war, had killed a Japanese cipher expert in New York during the war (where Fleming went twice in wartime), and had ended the war in Hong Kong (at a time when Fleming was on an official tour of the Far East). Fleming’s mother was eventually to take up residence in Monaco, and it was no coincidence that the Japanese Consulate in New York was a few floors below the headquarters of British Security Coordination (BSC), located on the 38th floor of the Rockefeller Center on Fifth Avenue. The murder, of course, was sheer imagination, but it is very likely that BSC did mount some clandestine surveillance operation to monitor the Japanese who were so conveniently close at hand. Ivar Bryce, later to write You Only Live Once, worked for BSC during the war and had been present when Fleming, staying at the St. Regis Hotel, visited the building to meet BSC’s director, William Stephenson.

BONIFACE. The code name selected for the original Government Code and Cipher School decrypts of enemy wireless traffic during World War II. As credibility in the source was undermined by distrust of the Secret Intelligence Service, the decision was taken to disclose the true signals intelligence nature of the source to the chiefs of staff and introduce a new security classification, “Ultra Secret.”

BOSLEY, REX. A veteran Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer based in Stockholm and Helsinki, Rex Bosley was in contact with Sidney Reilly and was the last British officer to see him before Reilly embarked on his ill-fated final mission back across the Soviet border in September 1925. According to the declassified KGB archives, Bosley’s office had been penetrated, although there is no evidence to support the assertion made by Alexander Orlov that Bosley himself had been in the pay of the Soviets.

After World War II, Bosley served as the SIS station commander in Helsinki, Stockholm, and finally Oslo.

BOTHWELL, JOHN. In July 1986 Commander John H. Bothwell, a 59-year-old former U.S. Navy submariner who had left the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1972, was arrested at his home in Bath and charged with breaches of the Official Secrets Act. Bothwell was accused of having sold naval secrets to Viktor P Gundarev, who had defected to the CIA in Athens following a row with his KGB resident and was resettled in the United States. Bothwell, who had commanded three submarines during his 22-year career, left the U.S. Navy in 1965 because his first wife had disliked navy life, and after three years at Langley he had been set up in business in Athens by the CIA. After retiring from the CIA, Bothwell ran a maritime supplies agency in Athens with contracts to the Soviet merchant fleet. In 1978, having met Anne, a British divorcee, he settled in Bath so their two children could be educated in England. During interrogation while he spent five weeks in Wormwood Scrubs prison, Bothwell acknowledged he had supplied information to the GRU but insisted it was without value and certainly did nothing to prejudice British interests. He was cleared and the charges were dropped.

BOURKE, SEAN. An Irish criminal and former Royal Air Force clerk, Sean Bourke assisted George Blake’s escape from prison in October 1966. Bourke became friendly with Blake while serving a seven-year prison sentence in Wormwood Scrubs for sending an improvised explosive device to a police detective. Released in November 1965, he had maintained contact with Blake via a small walkie-talkie. After the escape, Bourke surfaced in Moscow, where he wrote The Blake Escape, and eventually flew to Ireland in October 1968. He was detained briefly in Dublin at the request of Scotland Yard, but was released in February 1969 when his extradition was blocked. He died of a heart attack in January 1982.

BOXSHALL, EDWARD. The prewar representative of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in Bucharest, Captain Edward Boxshall also worked for Vickers and was married to Prince Stirbu’s daughter. After the war, Boxshall remained in SIS and upon his retirement was appointed the first Special Operations Executive adviser to the Foreign Office, acting as guardian of that organization’s archives. His value as a human encyclopedia was such that he was eventually identified in a London newspaper as Britain’s oldest full-time civil servant.

BOY SCOUT MOVEMENT. Founded in 1908 by Lieutenant General Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the hero of the siege of Mafeking and the author of Scouting for Boys, the International Scout Movement was intended to promote good citizenship and healthy outdoor pursuits. However, the author’s pride in espionage and interest in fieldcraft aroused considerable suspicion in some, including the Nazis who borrowed some of the principles when creating the Hitler Youth. The Sicherheitsdienst believed the Scout Association to be a branch of British Intelligence and noted that John Wilson, formerly the deputy police commissioner in Calcutta, and then the Scout Association’s camp chief, was appointed the first head of Special Operations Executive ’s training section in 1940.

BRACKENBURY, HENRY. In January 1886 General Henry Brackenbury was appointed head of the Intelligence Division of the War Office, a post he retained for five years, becoming the British Army’s first director of military intelligence. A former professor of military history at the Royal Military College, Woolwich, Brackenbury had participated in the suppression of the Indian Mutiny, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 (leading a British Hospital Unit), the Ashanti Campaign, and the Zulu Wars. Brackenbury reorganized the Intelligence Division, then located at 16–18 Queen Anne’s Gate, and negotiated an allowance to encourage army officers to translate foreign books and take notes while traveling abroad. In 1891 Brackenbury was replaced by General Chapman and posted to Delhi as director of the Indian Intelligence Department.

BRANDES, WILLI. Ostensibly a salesman for the Phantom Red Cosmetic Company and the Charak Furniture Company of New York, Willi Brandes was a Soviet illegal who had been placed under surveillance by MI5 when he was seen contacting Percy Glading, but he slipped out of the country before the arrests were made in January 1938. He had been tipped off by the porter in his block of flats in the Edgware Road, who had been asked by MI5 to identify his tenant.

MI5 learned that Brandes had entered England in January 1937 on a Canadian passport, but inquiries with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police revealed that his papers were false and had been supported by a man using the name Arman Labis Feldman, who also was using a fraudulent Canadian birth certificate. The resulting investigation revealed an extensive trade in bogus passport applications made in Canada by Soviet surrogates.

According to the KGB archives, Brandes’s real name was Mikhail Borovoy, and he had been handed control of the Woolwich Arsenal spy ring by Arnold Deutsch in January 1937. Brandes and his wife had been introduced by Glading to Olga Gray as “Mr. and Mrs. Stephens” in August 1937, and they visited Glading’s safe house in Holland Road on several occasions.

Ironically, in 1938 upon his return to Moscow, he was arrested in the purges and spent two years at a labor camp in Siberia.

BRAZILIAN EMBASSY. During World War II, the Brazilian embassy was a target for MI5 penetration. The butler was recruited, and he obtained good documents and the plain texts of important cipher messages starting in 1941, remaining there even after the war. MI5 described him as “someone without any imagination, reliable and staid; and sends us exact lists of connections and random ‘portions’ of used papers.”

BRISSEX. The British component of a paramilitary operation conducted by Allied personnel behind German lines in France immediately after the D-Day landings. Commanded by the Secret Intelligence Service’s Commander Kenneth Cohen, the objective was to mobilize local resistance groups and harass the enemy.

BRISTOW, DESMOND. Fluent in Spanish, Desmond Bristow joined the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in 1941 and served in its Iberian section at headquarters under Kim Philby, and then in Gibraltar. In January 1943 he was transferred to Algiers, and a year later he moved on to Lisbon for a few months before returning to North Africa. Soon after D-Day, Bristow was recalled to London before being posted to liaison duties in Paris.

At the end of World War II, Bristow took over responsibility for the Iberian desk at SIS in London and in September 1947 he was posted to Madrid as head of station. He remained in Spain until April 1953, when he was appointed to SIS’s strategic materials section. This lasted a year, and then instead of accepting an assignment in Buenos Aires, he resigned to work for the de Beers diamond firm. He later retired to the south of Spain, where he wrote his book, A Game of Moles (1993), despite threats of legal action in London from the treasury solicitor. Bristow died in September 2000.

BRITISH CONTROL COMMISSION FOR AUSTRIA (BCCA). The BCCA was the official body responsible for administering the British zone of occupation in Austria after World War II. It provided convenient cover during the postwar era for Secret Intelligence Service operations in Austria.

BRITISH CONTROL COMMISSION FOR GERMANY (BCCG). The BCCG was the official body responsible for administering the British zone of occupation in Germany after World War II. Its Intelligence Division, headed by Brigadier J. S. (“Tubby”) Lethbridge provided cover for Secret Intelligence Service operations in Germany during the postwar era.

BRITISH MIDDLE EAST OFFICE (BMEO). The BMEO supplied military and diplomatic cover for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) stations in Cairo and Cyprus from 1945 to 1956. It also temporarily accommodated the Tehran and Baghdad stations at various times when the local embassies were obliged to close. The first head of the BMEO in Cairo was Colonel Iltyd Clayton, until 1943 deputy head of the Middle East Intelligence Centre. From 1949 until withdrawal to Cyprus in 1956, the SIS cover was the BMEO’s Coordination Division, headed by John Collins and assisted by Edward de Haan.

BRITISH SECURITY COORDINATION (BSC). Headed by Sir William Stephenson and based at Rockefeller Center in New York, BSC provided an umbrella organization for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), Special Operations Executive, MI5, the Radio Security Service, and the Political Warfare Executive during World War II. It was established in July 1940 to replace the Passport Control Office in downtown Manhattan and ran a Special Training School at Ottawa, Ontario. BSC was responsible for running operations throughout the Western Hemisphere, and it received large quantities of intelligence from the Imperial Censorship office in Bermuda, through which all the transatlantic mails were routed. Stephenson’s deputy was an SIS professional, Dick Ellis, and their work was documented in an official history published in 1999. Contrary to one of the many myths that developed about BSC, INTREPID was its cable address, not the director’s code name.

BRITISH SERVICES SECURITY ORGANISATION (BSSO). Based at Rheindahlen, the BSSO was MI5’s regional office for Germany, responsible for maintaining the security of the British Army of the Rhine and protecting British military installations from Warsaw Pact infiltration and from terrorist attack from the Provisional Irish Republican Army. The BSSO also maintained liaison offices in Bonn, Berlin, and Cologne as a link to the Federal German security service, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz. Usually headed by an MI5 officer, the BSSO staff consisted of Ministry of Defence personnel seconded on temporary duty, with a permanent staff of locally employed Germans.

BRITISH UNION OF FASCISTS (BUF). In April 1934 MI5 began an investigation into the BUF that showed links between the Ausland Organisation (AO) in London and Sir Oswald Mosley’s staff. It also revealed that while the BUF was financed by Benito Mussolini, there were elements within it whose leaders—W. E. D. Allen, William Joyce, Raven Thomson, and an Australian-German named Pfister—had closer ties and sympathies with the Nazis. When these contacts showed signs of getting out of control, Mosley issued an order forbidding any contacts with foreign organizations other than those under the direct control of his headquarters.

MI5’s investigation was limited by Home Office restrictions, which limited the collection of information to the deployment of penetration agents, without mail intercepts. However, in January 1934 a German was arrested in Switzerland and among his papers was the London address of the AO in a context that suggested a connection with the Gestapo. This prompted an informal discussion between Sir Vernon Kell and Sir Russell Scott, the Home Office permanent undersecretary; Scott decreed that unless in the ordinary course of MI5’s business it discovered subversive propaganda or other actions inimical to the interests of our country, the BUF should be left alone. Nevertheless, Guy Liddell conducted further investigations and in June 1934, calculating that it would be easier to get authorization to open mail sent to addresses in Germany than mail coming into London, requested and obtained permission to intercept mail being sent to two addresses in Hamburg with which, MI5 had established, the AO branch in London was in correspondence. Thus the unpredicted arrest in Switzerland turned out to be the decisive factor in overcoming the home secretary’s reluctance to allow MI5 to obtain intelligence about the Nazi organizations in England, which led to the accumulation of extremely extensive and graphic material compromising the Nazis and proving that Mosley was in close contact with Mussolini and Hitler and also that he was receiving a subsidy from the former of around £100,000.

After Mosley’s arrest in 1940, it was discovered that certain of his bank accounts had been conducted in such a way as to camouflage the way the BUF received funds. Mosley clearly wished to make it difficult for the finances of the BUF to be investigated but evidently most of the funds had come from “unknown sources” and only a small portion came from members’ dues.

BRITTEN, DOUGLAS. A Royal Air Force (RAF) chief technician, Douglas Britten sold huge quantities of classified communications data to the KGB. According to his confession, Britten was recruited casually, while browsing in South Kensington’s Science Museum, by a friendly Soviet diplomat based in London who addressed him by his amateur wireless call sign. When Britten was posted to Cyprus later in the year, he maintained contact with the KGB and was allegedly blackmailed into supplying further material. When Britten was transferred in 1966 to an RAF signals base in Lincolnshire, he was handled by Aleksandr Bondarenko. He was finally identified as a spy by MI5 when he attempted to deliver documents to the Soviet embassy, having missed a rendezvous. Britten was sentenced to 21 years’ imprisonment in November 1968.

BRIXMIS. The abbreviation for “British Commander-in-Chief’s Military Mission to the Soviet Forces.” Brixmis consisted of three-man teams of soldiers who patrolled the Soviet zone of Germany under the terms of the Quadripartite Agreement, which allowed the four armies of occupation to reconnoiter each others’ sectors, until it was dissolved in December 1990. The teams, based at a headquarters located at the Olympic Stadium compound, were drawn from 30 men who served in the unit on secondment, supported by about 200 other personnel, among them technicians, photographic processors, and weapons analysts. The Brixmis teams underwent training at the Templer Barracks, Ashford, and were required to be proficient in the recognition of nearly a thousand Warsaw Pact weapons, ranging from the latest model of the AK-37 assault rifle to the Soviet-made T-82 tank. Deployed in vehicles equipped with cameras but not radios, they were allowed to visit anywhere in the Soviet zone apart from preagreed permanent exclusion areas.

BROADSIDE. Code name for the introduction of internment in Palestine in June 1946 prompted by a raid on the British base at Sarafand, where the armory was emptied to provide weapons for the Haganah. Some 3,000 detainees were arrested and questioned at an interrogation center established at Rafiah. The operation achieved plenty of good intelligence and served to isolate the Irgun from the Haganah.

BROADWAY. Until 1966 the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service were located at 54 Broadway, conveniently close to Victoria and Westminster and immediately adjacent to 21 Queen Anne’s Gate, then the official residence of the chief.

BROMO. Secret Intelligence Service code name for José Laradogoi-tia, a Basque recruited by the Abwehr in Spain and sent to Rio de Janeiro, where he sent letters to his German contact in Madrid using secret writing. He then moved to the United States, where he had lived before the war until he had been deported for check fraud. Alerted by British Security Coordination, BROMO was recruited as a double agent, and he continued to send his letters under control from New York until March 1944 when he starting transmitting by wireless. The Federal Bureau of Investigation supplied him with two nominal agents, ALBERTO and LUIS.

BRONX. MI5 code name for Elvira Chaudoir (nee de la Fuentes), who was a Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) agent in Vichy where her father was a Peruvian diplomat. As a neutral, she acted as a courier in France for SIS and then worked for MI5 after she had been approached by the Abwehr in Paris in October 1942. Under the supervision of her case officer, Hugh Astor, she conveyed false military information until the end of the war. As a popular London socialite and a predatory lesbian, Elvira had many useful contacts in London.

BROOK, GERALD. A Russian-speaking university lecturer, Gerald Brook was arrested in Moscow in 1965 and convicted of distributing subversive literature on behalf of the Ukrainian nationalist movement (NTS). Although Brook denied any involvement with British Intelligence, NTS had always been supported by the Secret Intelligence Service but was heavily penetrated by the KGB. Sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, Brook was exchanged in a spy swap for Peter and Helen Kroger in 1969.

BROOK, SIR NORMAN. Secretary of the Cabinet during the Attlee, Churchill, and Macmillan administrations, Sir Norman Brook, later ennobled as Lord Normanbrook, undertook a review of the Security Service in March 1951 and recommended changes that would be enshrined later in the year in the Maxwell Fyfe Directive.

In August 1961 Brook conveyed a request to John Profumo from MI5 to assist in entrapping the Soviet naval attaché, Eugene Ivanov, a suggestion made so discreetly that the secretary of state for war misunderstood it.

BROOKS, TONY. Codenamed ALPHONSE, Brooks was one of Special Operations Executive’s most successful organizers and ran a network around Lyons that delayed German reinforcements from reaching Normandy after the D-Day landings. Decorated with the Distinguished Service Order, Brooks joined the Secret Intelligence Service after the war, helped develop stay-behind networks in Eastern Europe, served in Bulgaria and Cyprus, and joined the Mountbatten Inquiry into George Blake’s escape from Wormwood Scrubs prison.

BROOMAN-WHITE, DICK. Educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, Dick Brooman-White worked first as a private secretary to Sir Archibald Cochrane, MP, and then drifted into journalism, ending in 1938 as a public relations officer for the Territorial Army. At the outbreak of war, he joined MI5, but later transferred into the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) to head the Iberian Section, where he recommended Kim Philby for recruitment. Despite contesting Bridgetown, Glasgow, in the 1945 general election, Brooman-White remained in SIS and was posted in 1946 to the SIS station in Turkey, where he had worked alongside Philby under diplomatic cover. When Philby was sacked from SIS in November 1951 for suspected disloyalty, he had many supporters in the service itself, in the media, and especially in the Commons among those who had worked in the same secret wartime corridors, of whom Brooman-White was but one.

BROUER. Secret Intelligence Service code name for a double agent working as a stay-behind agent in Rome for the Sicherheitsdienst in 1944.

BROWN, JOHN. After his return to England in 1945 Quartermaster-Sergeant John H. O. Brown of the Royal Artillery was decorated with the Distinguished Conduct Medal, an award that caused some surprise among the British prisoners of war with whom he had shared the previous four years. They remembered him as having often expressed pro-German sympathies and although he had never been a member of the notorious British Free Corps, he had been regarded as more likely to face a court-martial when he was back in England than to be the recipient of a medal. In reality, Brown had undergone a lengthy debriefing at the hands of Leonard Burt of MI5 as soon as he had been repatriated, and his evidence, together with the secret messages he had succeeded in smuggling out of various German prison camps, ensured that none of those who had collaborated with their captors escaped justice.

The secret of John Brown’s duplicity was finally revealed at the Old Bailey trial of Walter Purdy, a renegade Briton who was convicted of broadcasting propaganda for the Nazis. Both he and Tom Cooper, a leading recruiter for the British Free Corps, were sentenced to death after Brown had given damning testimony for the prosecution. Once Brown’s role was made public, he returned to civilian life. The full details of his extraordinary wartime adventure were published only after his death in 1964, when a manuscript was discovered among his possessions.

Educated at Cambridge and a man of deep religious beliefs, Brown had attended a course of MI9 lectures to prepare him for the possibility of capture. He memorized a simple code to use in his correspondence home and was taught to indicate the existence of a secret message by writing the date in a particular way and by underlining his signature. Scrutiny of the letters by British censors upon their arrival in London enabled those with secret messages to be diverted to MI9, where they were decoded.

Brown was captured in France at the end of May 1940 with a dozen survivors of his battery, a remnant of the British Expeditionary Force. His first prison camp was Lamsdorf, but he volunteered for a work camp at Blechhammer in Upper Silesia, where he gathered information and conveyed it to MI9. Later, masquerading as a Nazi sympathizer, he was approved for a special camp, Genshagen, which from June 1943 accommodated potential members of the British Free Corps. Brown was eventually liberated by American troops in April 1945 but was kept in custody as a suspected traitor until MI9 could confirm his credentials. Upon his release, he was flown home for a lengthy debriefing.

BRUCE-LOCKHART, JOHN. Educated at Rugby and St. Andrews University, John Bruce-Lockhart returned to his old school as a teacher and, like several other masters at Rugby, joined the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in 1940. Bruce-Lockhart was posted to the SIS cover organization in the Middle East, the Inter-Services Liaison Department, and later worked in North Africa and Italy. At the end of World War II, he went to Paris under assistant military attaché cover and in 1948 started a three-year tour in Germany as head of the German Stations under the umbrella cover of the Control Commission.

Somewhat to his embarrassment, Bruce-Lockhart was hastily transferred to Washington, D.C., in May 1951 following Kim Philby’s recall and dismissal. This must have been an awkward assignment, bearing in mind that some Americans could not understand why Philby had not been prosecuted and suspected a convenient establishment cover-up. Returning to London in 1953, Bruce-Lockhart remained at SIS headquarters until his retirement in 1965. In September 1984 he presented a paper entitled “Intelligence: A British View” to a Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies conference on Anglo-American intelligence and described himself as having been “actively involved in intelligence at a senior level.” Three years later his remarks were updated and formed a chapter in British and American Approaches to Intelligence, edited by Ken Robertson of Reading University. At the time of his death in May 1995, Bruce-Lockhart was researching a detailed account of SIS’s contribution to the Italian campaign during later stages of World War II.

BRUCE-LOCKHART, SIR ROBERT. Officially appointed a “British agent” at a time when there was no ambassador appointed to Russia, Sir Robert Bruce-Lockhart was believed by Lenin to have participated in a scheme to assassinate him. This became known as the Lockhart Plot and implicated Sidney Reilly who, unlike Bruce-Lockhart, really was a Secret Intelligence Service officer.

BRUSA. The first Anglo-American cryptographic treaty, the British-United States Security Agreement (BRUSA), signed on 17 May 1943, resulted in the general introduction of the Combined Cipher Machine and a division of other responsibilities of mutual interest. The agreement was negotiated by the legendary codebreaker William Friedman, author Telford Taylor, and the head of the newly formed Special Branch of the U.S. Signal Corps, Colonel Alfred McCormack. It provided for “a full exchange of cryptographic systems, cryptanalytical techniques, direction finding, radio interception and other technical communication matters.” John Tiltman, head of GCHQ’s General Cryptographic Section, was posted to Washington, D.C., as a liaison officer, a post he was to hold until 1954. Accompanying him were George McVittie, an expert on meteorological codes, and Philip Howse and James Gillis, both specialists in Japanese Navy traffic.

In November 1943 a second inter-Allied conference was held at Arlington Hall, Virginia, at which GCHQ was represented by (Sir) Edward Travis, with his counterparts from Canada and Australia. BRUSA remained in effect until it was superseded in 1947 by the UKUSA Agreement.

BRYCE, IVAR. A prewar playboy and close, lifelong friend of Ian Fleming, Ivar Bryce moved to New York in 1938 and later was recruited into British Security Coordination (BSC), for whom he undertook clandestine missions to South America. Bryce speculated in his autobiography, You Only Live Once, that he might have been a model for Fleming’s James Bond and revealed his role in an attempt to destroy the fuel stocks in Recife upon which the Italian transatlantic airline LATI relied. Although the fire set by Bryce’s incendiaries was unsuccessful, BSC mounted an alternative, political campaign to persuade the Brazilian president to cancel LATI’s landing rights, which achieved its objective.

BUCHAN, JOHN. Born in Perth, Scotland, in 1875, the son of a clergyman, John Buchan was educated at the Glasgow Academy and Brasenose College, Oxford, and was called to the bar in the Middle Temple in 1901. Two years later he was appointed private secretary to Lord Milner, the high commissioner for South Africa, and during World War I he served on the General Staff in France until 1917, when he was made MI5’s press liaison officer and entitled director of intelligence at the Ministry of Information. In his memoirs. Memory Hold-the-Door, he recalled, “I have some queer recollections of those years—of meeting with odd people in odd places, of fantastic duties which a romancer would have rejected as beyond probability.”

In 1927 Buchan was elected the Conservative MP for the Scottish universities, a seat he held until 1935 when he was elevated to the House of Lords as the first Baron Tweedsmuir and appointed governor-general of Canada.

Buchan’s espionage novels influenced a generation. His character Richard Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) was based, so he said, upon his friend Edmund Ironside (later Field Marshal Lord Ironside of Archangel). Buchan died in Montreal in 1940, one of the most successful writers of the era.

BUCKMASTER, MAURICE. A former Ford Motor Company manager in France, Maurice Buckmaster joined Special Operations Executive in 1940 and was appointed head of the French Section, designated F Section. After the war he wrote his memoirs, Specially Employed. Under his leadership, F Section suffered a high rate of losses and was criticized after the war because it had been penetrated so comprehensively by the Abwehr.

BULGARIA. Special Operations Executive’s man in Bulgaria was Mostyn Davies, who parachuted into Macedonia with a Canadian Croat interpreter in September 1943 and then crossed into Bulgaria to receive Frank Thompson in January 1944. An Oxford-educated civil servant who had been Lord Llewellyn’s private secretary at the Ministry of Transport and Shipping before joining SOE, Davies had worked for Louis Franck in Lagos, Nigeria, and then moved with him to New York to take control of British Security Coordination’s South American operations. This had led to a posting to Force 133 in Cairo. Thompson was also an Oxford man, but a committed Communist too. He had been recruited into Force 133 by James Klugmann in September 1943 and, after a spell at STS 102, had volunteered to use his knowledge of Russian to assist Davies, whose only foreign language was Spanish. Their combined mission, codenamed MULLIGATAWNY, was disrupted at the end of March 1944 when they were caught in a watermill by a Bulgarian patrol. Davies and his sergeant wireless operator were killed, but Thompson managed to escape.

The nearest British liaison officer, Major Dugmore, signaled Bari from Macedonia, and a replacement team was arranged by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). However, on the night of the intended drop, the head of SIS’s Yugoslav Section, John Ennals, and the wireless operator were injured in a motor accident, so Flight Lieutenant Kenneth Syers was obliged to drop alone. This was not the first time he had been forced to do so; the previous August he had joined TYPICAL as Bill Stuart’s replacement. On this occasion he was to be with CLARIDGES, a new team to organize the Bulgarian partisans, assisted by a wireless operator, Sergeant Kenneth Scott of the Royal Corps of Signals, who was dropped in April 1944, and joined by Sergeants Monroe and Walker from Major Dugmore’s headquarters.

The team made its way deep into Bulgaria, leaving Syers to undertake a reconnaissance mission for SIS. In June 1944 Monroe and Walker were killed in an ambush, and Thompson and Scott were taken prisoner by Bulgarian troops and handed over to the Gestapo in Sofia. Four days later Thompson, who boasted of his Communism, was shot by a firing squad, supposedly for the crimes of learning the Bulgarian language and being a political activist. Scott was forced to transmit using CLARIDGES’S surviving wireless set, but his traffic was instantly recognized as being under enemy control because he had deliberately omitted his security check. By convention, the case was handed to SIS, which successfully maintained the radio link, thereby preserving Scott’s life. Bickham Sweet-Escott recalls one of the many difficulties in keeping up the charade:

Each message we received from Scott had to be passed to SIS, which in due course handed to us the reply it thought should be sent. Sometimes we did not agree that the reply altogether met the case and we had many anxious days. The Gestapo were evidently keen to score an easy success by shooting down one of our aircraft, for they were always asking for a sortie. We, of course, had to think of all the possible reasons for not sending one.

The Americans made a determined effort to reach Sofia to free a group of 325 U.S. Army Air Force PoWs. A two-man Office of Strategic Services (OSS) team landed in Greece in August 1944 and trekked across the Greek frontier into Bulgaria, but when they arrived in the capital on 17 September they were met by four other OSS officers who had driven overland from Istanbul. However, both missions, as well as a newly arrived SIS contingent, had been beaten there by the Red Army, which had entered Bulgaria in early September. The British and Americans were ordered to leave the country on 24 September and when they refused, the Soviets threatened to imprison them; all promptly left without further encouragement. Scott had been moved by the Germans to a prison in September and then released in anticipation of the Red Army’s arrival. He was subsequently taken to Turkey by the Russians and then flown to Cairo by the Americans.

BULL, GERALD. A Canadian scientist who developed the concept of firing projectiles over exceptionally long distances using ingeniously extended gun barrels. Bull’s controversial research led him to work for Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime, which planned to build a “supergun” with which to bombard Israel. Bull was the subject of an investigation by the Secret Intelligence Service because some of his weapon’s components were built in England. However, he was shot dead at his apartment in Brussels in March 1990 by an unknown assassin widely presumed to have been contracted by Mossad.

BURGESS, GUY. A member of the Cambridge Five, along with Donald Maclean, John Cairncross, Kim Philby, and Anthony Blunt, Burgess was educated at Eton and Dartmouth Royal Naval College. After graduating he joined the BBC as a radio producer in the Talks Department, which gave him entree into the world of politics and journalism. By the time he was recruited into the Secret Intelligence Service’s Section D as an expert on wireless broadcasting with an assignment to transmit anti-Nazi propaganda from Radio Luxembourg, he was also a fully fledged Soviet agent and was supplying information to the Security Service. The NKVD gave Burgess the code name MADCHEN (“Maiden”) and considered him volatile but valuable. To MI5, he was a useful agent-runner; Burgess recruited ORANGE, a Swiss journalist named Eric Kessler, who worked in the Swiss embassy throughout the war and proved an important source. Burgess moved from the BBC to the Foreign Office and in 1945 was made private secretary to the new Labour government’s minister of state, Hector McNeill.

Although always a controversial diplomat, constantly in trouble for his predatory homosexuality and drunken behavior, Burgess was posted to Washington, D.C., where he stayed with his friend Philby. In May 1951, having been returned to London in disgrace, Burgess defected to Moscow with Maclean. Burgess remained in Moscow until his death in 1963, always faithful to the Communist cause but never able to conform to a lonely, isolated life in the Soviet Union, dependent upon occasional visitors from England for news and company.

BURMA. Special Operations Executive’s Oriental Mission and India Mission played a large role in preparing stay-behind networks in Burma in anticipation of the Japanese invasion and participated in the liberation of Rangoon in 1945. Operations MANUAL, NATION, and CHARACTER were mounted in support of the British offensive to recapture the country, and DRAGOON assisted in the attack on the capital.

BURT, LEONARD. At the time of his invitation to join MI5 in September 1940, Chief Inspector Leonard Burt was a Vice Squad detective. He and a colleague, Detective Sergeant Jim Skardon, had worked on the Willie Clarkson Will case with William Charles Crocker of the Security Executive. Burt moved his offices to MI5’s temporary headquarters in Wormwood Scrubs, together with his deputy, Reginald Spooner, and Detective Inspectors Smith and Donald Fish. There, under the command of Lord Rothschild, they created MI5’s first specialist antisabotage section.

Burt’s transfer to MI5 took him first to Aberdeen, to investigate a case of suspected sabotage that had sunk a freighter in the harbor, and later to Gibraltar where, in February 1942, he supervised the countermeasures intended to deter raids mounted by Italian frogmen operating from Spanish territory.

After the war, Burt investigated several cases of collaboration with the enemy, including those of John Amery, William Joyce, and some of the misguided British renegades, the members of the “Legion of St. George.” Later in 1945 Burt returned to Scotland Yard to head the postwar Special Branch, a post he would hold for a record 12 years. He retired in 1958 and died in September 1983, having published his memoirs, Commander Burt of Scotland Yard.

BUTKOV, MIKHAIL. In May 1991 Mikhail Butkov, a member of the KGB’s rezidentura in Norway, operating under journalistic cover as a TASS correspondent, defected to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and was received by the head of station in Oslo. Butkov was to be the first of several useful defectors who opted to jump ship following the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Butkov and his girlfriend were resettled in England, and what propaganda value he had was extracted by the publication in Oslo of his memoirs, The KGB in Norway. Although Butkov assisted SIS in an operation conducted in Spain in 1992, directed against an Iranian criminal gang, his subsequent history proved awkward for SIS. Short of cash, Butkov masterminded a language school scam from his home in Berkshire, advertising tuition and visas in foreign-language newspapers in the United States. However, instead of supplying the courses; Butkov simply pocketed the deposits and fees and caused considerable embarrassment for SIS when he was charged with fraud and imprisoned for three years.

BUTLER, CHARLES. A veteran of MI5 since 1926, Colonel Charles Butler was the director of A Division, in charge of administration, until his retirement in 1950. Briefly, following the dismissal of Sir Vernon Kell in June 1940, he was acting deputy director-general of the Security Service, until the appointment of Sir David Petrie as director-general and the promotion of Jasper Harker.

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CABINET OFFICE. The Cabinet Office at 60 Whitehall is headed by the Cabinet secretary and accommodates the intelligence coordinator to the Cabinet, the secure meeting room used by the Joint Intelligence Committee, and the suite of offices occupied by the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee and its clerk.

CABINET SECRETARY. The Cabinet secretary chairs the Permanent Secretaries’ Committee on the Intelligence Services, which recommends the most senior appointments to the three agencies and is the prime minister’s principal adviser on intelligence issues. Among those Cabinet secretaries whose names have been most closely associated with British Intelligence are Sir Robert Armstrong, Sir Burke Trend, and Sir Edward Bridges.

CAIRNCROSS, JOHN. A brilliant linguist and French scholar, John Cairncross was a member of the Cambridge Five although, unlike the others, he was unaware that they were spies. Uniquely, he joined the Foreign Office from Cambridge, having placed first in both the highly demanding Foreign and Home Civil Service examinations. Unpopular and socially ill at ease with his contemporaries, he was moved from the Foreign Office, where he briefly shared a desk with Donald Maclean, to the Cabinet Office as private secretary to Lord Hankey. Here he was responsible for passing a copy of the Maud Committee Report, on the feasibility of developing an atomic weapon, to his Soviet controllers. Later, when he was moved to Bletchley Park as a German interpreter, he stole thousands of ULTRA decrypts, and when he was transferred to the Secret Intelligence Service, where he worked briefly with Kim Philby, he continued his espionage. After the war, he was moved again to the Ministry of Supply and gained access to details of Britain’s military budget and plans for civil nuclear energy.

Cairncross fell under suspicion following the defection of Guy Burgess in May 1951, and when a document in his handwriting was found in Burgess’s flat, he resigned from the civil service and moved abroad. While lecturing at Northwestern University in Chicago in April 1964, he was interviewed by Arthur Martin of MI5 and a Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent and made a partial admission of his espionage, forcing him to leave the United States. For the remainder of his life, he worked in Italy and the Far East for the United Nations. He died in England after he had completed his memoirs, The Enigma Spy, in October 1995. Although he denied having spied after World War II or having betrayed atomic secrets, his NKVD dossier, declassified in Moscow, identifies him as an agent codenamed LISZT and MOLIERE and confirms the true extent of his espionage.

CAIRO. During World War II, Cairo was the regional headquarters of four branches of British Intelligence: Special Operations Executive (SOE), the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), the Middle East Intelligence Centre (MEIC), and MI5. SOE’s local organization, in the Rustum Buildings on the Sharia Kasr-el-Aini, was known as the Middle East Mission. SIS’s local cover was the Inter-Services Liaison Department, headed by Cuthbert Bowlby and located in the GHQ Middle East compound. The MEIC was headed by Brigadier Walter Cawthorn, assisted by Colonel Iltyd Clayton. MEIC was superseded by MI5’s regional branch, Security Intelligence Middle East, headed by Colonel Raymund Maunsell, then Brigadier Douglas Roberts. In 1943 Henry Hopkinson was appointed chairman of a newly created Middle East Intelligence Committee to coordinate the work of the competing groups.

CALVO, LUIS. Recruited by the Abwehr as a spy, Luis Calvo was a Spanish journalist who had represented various newspapers in London since 1932 and had been identified from ISOS intercepts. He was arrested in February 1942, having been compromised by MI5’s double agent “G. W.,” and spent the remainder of the war at Camp 020, where he became the prison’s librarian. After the war, he was released and later became editor of ABC, Madrid’s major daily newspaper.

CAMBRIDGE FIVE. The generic term used to refer to Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross, who were all educated at Cambridge University, although not simultaneously. Philby was the first to be recruited, but only after he had graduated and was working as a journalist in London, having married a Comintern agent, Litzi Friedman, in Vienna. As well as the group the Soviets referred to as the “Magnificent Five,” there were others associated with the key figures, among them Leo Long and James Klugmann. Other spies educated at Cambridge University before the war include Allan Nunn May and J. B. S. Haldane.

CAMILLA. Code name for the first major deception operation of World War II in the Middle East conducted in January 1941 by Dudley Clarke. The objective was to divert attention away from General Wavell’s intended offensive in Libya by pretending he was planning an attack in Somaliland. Rumors were circulated in Cairo, dummy wireless traffic was transmitted between Aden, Nairobi, Pretoria, and Delhi, and bogus maps and pamphlets about the area were distributed to the troops. The deception succeeded too well, because the Italian commander-in-chief, the Duke of Aosta, decided that Somalia could not be defended in the face of such overwhelming odds and withdrew his forces to Libya.

CAMP 020. The official military designation for Latchmere House, MI5’s wartime interrogation center at Ham Common, Richmond, where suspected enemy agents were detained and questioned in secure accommodation. Commanded by the fearsome Colonel R. W. G. Stephens, Camp 020 was a former asylum and home for shell-shocked officers. It played a significant role in persuading German agents to cooperate with their captors and isolated other spies who could not be brought to trial. When Camp 020 reached capacity, a further facility, designated 020R, was constructed at Huntercombe in Oxfordshire. Later in the war, additional Camp 020 satellites were established at Diest in Belgium and Bad Nenndorf in Germany.

CAMPAIGN FOR NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT (CND). Created in February 1958, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament became of focus of MI5’s attention because it was regarded as a Communist Party of Great Britain front organization funded by the KGB and led by Soviet agents of influence.

CANADIAN SECURITY AND INTELLIGENCE. British Intelligence, and especially the Security Service, has always enjoyed the closest relationship with its Canadian counterpart, which was created as the Intelligence Branch of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in 1936. It was initially coordinated by a staff of six in Ottawa headed by Superintendent Charles Rivett-Carnac and a Czech immigrant, John Leopold, who had been successful as an undercover agent penetrating radical movements for eight years from March 1920 and had risen to be a senior Communist party official. The Intelligence Branch field inquiries were conducted by plainclothes Mounties of the normal Criminal Investigation Branch.

During World War II, the Intelligence Branch was enhanced to deal with two Nazi spies dropped onto the coast by U-boats, Werner Janowski and Alfred Langbein, and to handle a couple of double agent cases supervised by the MI5 security liaison officer, Cyril Mills.

Following the defection of Igor Gouzenko in September 1945, the Intelligence Branch was transformed into the RCMP Special Branch in 1950, headed at first by Rivett-Carnac. He was replaced in 1947 by Superintendent George McClellan, the first RCMP officer to be trained by the British. Under his direction, Inspector Terry Guernsey and Sergeant Owen Jones were sent to England to be trained by MIS, and Jim Skardon flew to Ottawa to initiate a counterespionage course. As a result of British influence, the Special Branch was structured on MI5’s model.

In November 1949 the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) station commander in Washington, D.C., Peter Dwyer, who had participated in the debriefing of Gouzenko, left SIS to take up a post with the Communications Branch of the National Research Council. Three years later, he switched to the Privy Council Office in Ottawa, where he exercised influence over Canada’s fledgling security apparatus.

In November 1956 the RCMP Special Branch was redesignated the Directorate of Security and Intelligence, and then in 1970 it was established as the RCMP Security Service, led by John Starnes, a civilian of deputy commissioner rank. In July 1984, following the 1981 McDonald Inquiry into allegations of illegal operations conducted by the Mounties against the Quebecois Liberation Front, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service was created as an entirely civilian organization without police powers. Although CSIS officially does not gather intelligence overseas, it does post liaison officers in foreign countries, attached to Canadian diplomatic missions.

The mole hunts of the 1960s that had afflicted British intelligence did not leave the RCMP Security Service uncontaminated. A lengthy investigation codenamed LONGKNIFE resulted in the conviction of a former Mountie, Corporal Jim Morrison, who confessed to having sold secrets to the KGB between 1955 and 1958. In another example of hostile penetration, Sergeant Gilles Brunet, codenamed TANGO, who had been fired in December 1973 for disciplinary reasons, was identified as a Soviet mole after his death from a heart attack in 1984.

CANARIS, WILHELM. The head of the German military intelligence service, the Abwehr, until his arrest in 1944, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris is believed to have been executed at Flossenburg concentration camp in early 1945 for complicity in the plot to assassinate Hitler in July 1944.

Of Greek extraction, Canaris escaped from internment in neutral Chile in World War I, evading a British inspection at Falmouth upon his return home, and commanded a U-boat in the Adriatic. He was appointed head of the Abwehr in January 1935.

In 1941 Canaris made contact with the Secret Intelligence Service in Bern, Switzerland, indirectly through his mistress, Halina Szymanska, whose husband had been the Polish military attaché in Berlin. Using false papers in the name of Marie Clenat, Szymanska met Canaris on several occasions and was coached on messages to pass to the British, including a warning that Hitler intended to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941.

CARR, HARRY. A veteran, Russian-speaking Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer, Harry Carr was the SIS head of station for 14 years in Helsinki before World War II. Later as SIS’s controller, northern area, Carr supervised the infiltration of Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian émigrés into their Soviet-occupied countries. This operation, codenamed WESTWARD HO, proved to have been thoroughly penetrated by the KGB before it was abandoned in 1954.

CARRÉ, MATHILDE-LILY. The mistress of Roman Garby-Czerniawski and then his Abwehr captor, Hugo Bleicher, Carré was a French nurse known as “la Chatte” (“the Cat”). She betrayed a major Polish intelligence organization, codenamed INTERALLlÉ, to the Nazis in Paris in November 1941. Despite this setback for the Secret Intelligence Service, Carré continued to remain in contact with Special Operations Executive and succeeded in compromising F Section’s main network, AUTOGIRO.

In February 1942 Carré reached England by boat from Brittany. She was immediately placed under surveillance and later arrested and interned at Aylesbury Prison. Her trial, for collaboration, took place in Paris in January 1949. Her death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, but she was released in 1954, having spent a total of 12 years in prison. In 1959 Carré wrote her version of events, I Was the Cat.

CATTLEY, CHARLES. Born in St. Petersburg to English parents, Charles Cattley was educated in England and, fluent in French, Russian, and Italian, was appointed vice consul at Kerch. In 1854 he was expelled by the Russians, but his knowledge of the Crimea was recognized by Lord Raglan, who was to appoint him his head of intelligence. Adopting the alias “Mr. Calvert,” Cattley recruited agents in Kerch and supplied a hopelessly ill-informed British Army with the first reliable intelligence about the opposing Russian forces during the Crimean War. In June 1855 he was placed in command of the Corps of Guides, but three weeks later succumbed to cholera.

CAVELL, EDITH. In August 1941, when neutral Belgium was occupied by the Germans, Edith Cavell was working as a nurse in the Ber-kendale Medical Institute in Brussels as a Red Cross nurse. She was also a member of an escape organization enabling Allied stragglers, cut off during the enemy’s advance, to reach their own lines, and in August 1915 Cavell was arrested and charged with espionage. She was convicted at a court-martial in October and shot by a firing squad, despite many well-publicized pleas for clemency. Her execution was a propaganda disaster for the Germans and overnight Nurse Cavell, who had confessed to helping evading soldiers, became an international heroine and a symbol of savage German oppression.

The British naturally exploited the enemy’s inhumanity, but thereby appeared to exclude women from any active role in espionage during war, a legacy that discouraged the authorities from openly acknowledging the true scale of the losses sustained by Special Operations Executive in World War II.

CAVENDISH, ANTHONY. Educated in Switzerland, Anthony Cavendish was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps at the end of the war and sent to Cairo, where he joined Security Intelligence Middle East. There Cavendish met Maurice Oldfield, and they served together in Egypt and Palestine until Oldfield’s transfer to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in London. In July 1948 Cavendish was demobilized and, following an interview with Frank Slocum, Dick Brooman-White, and Tim Milne, was invited to join R5, the counterintelligence requirements section, where Oldfield worked alongside Charles Ransom. In the summer of 1950 Cavendish was posted to Hamburg under Control Commission cover as one of John Bruce-Lockhart ’s subordinates; there, he helped run agents across the Baltic into Eastern Europe. Later he was moved to Berlin and then, after falling out with Donald Prater, transferred to the SIS station in Vienna. Cavendish’s promising SIS career came to an end soon afterward when he was recalled to London following a late-night motor accident.

Cavendish first came to public attention in 1986 when he wrote to the Times to protest that Chapman Pincher could never have conducted an interview with the late Sir Maurice Oldfield on the latter’s deathbed, as claimed by the veteran Daily Express journalist. Cavendish insisted that he had been at Oldfield’s bedside continuously and Pincher’s claim was untrue. The background to the challenge was extraordinary. Oldfield, who had been chief of SIS, and later director of intelligence in Northern Ireland, had been posthumously denounced by Pincher as an active homosexual who had first lied about, and then confessed to, his illicit proclivities to the authorities. As a former SIS officer who had maintained his friendship with Oldfield long after he had moved into merchant banking, Cavendish was outraged by Pincher’s allegation and was prompted to publish his own memoirs, Inside Intelligence, in defense of his friend. His account traced his work as a case officer with Security Intelligence Middle East and as an SIS officer in postwar Germany and recalled his involvement with one of SIS’s first Soviet intelligence defectors. However, far from welcoming his intervention, the British government responded with an injunction, which was later overturned in the Scottish courts. When it was eventually released in 1990, the book contained a foreword by George Young, formerly SIS’s vice chief.

CAVENDISH LABORATORY. The principal physics laboratory at Cambridge University, the Cavendish Laboratory undertook atomic research for the Tube Alloys project during World War II and was the target of Soviet espionage. According to documents disclosed by the KGB archives, the convicted spy Dr. Allan Nunn May was recruited by the NKVD while working at the Cavendish.

CAVENDISH-BENTINCK, VICTOR. A professional diplomat who joined the Foreign Service in 1915 at the age of 18 to work at the British Legation in Oslo and then fought with the Grenadiers, Bill Bentinck attended the Lausanne Conference in 1922 and was destined for a conventional career in the Foreign Office. He was posted to Paris twice, The Hague, and Santiago, but when he returned to London in 1937 he was appointed chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), a recently created body that had been moribund under the leadership of his predecessor, Ralph Stevenson. Through sheer force of personality and the evident lack of coordination between the many branches of British Intelligence, Bentinck developed the JIC from an insignificant subcommittee of the chiefs of staff into a vital instrument of victory. Under his deft touch, the JIC became the fulcrum of intelligence decision-making, and at the end of hostilities he was rewarded with the post of ambassador to Warsaw, although he was obliged to resign in 1947, without any pension benefits, when his ex-wife made wholly false allegations during a messy divorce. As the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, said at the time, “I could have saved him if his name had been Smith.”

Bentinck went into business with the chemical giant Bayer and in 1980, when his brother Sir Ferdinand died without issue, he became the ninth Duke of Portland, a title inherited through his cousin from his great great-grandfather, the sixth Duke. Bentinck died in June 1990 without any surviving heirs to the dukedom, four years after the publication of his biography by Patrick Howarth, Intelligence Chief Extraordinary.

CAVERSHAM PARK. The BBC Monitoring Service at Caversham, on the outskirts of Reading in Berkshire, makes a valuable contribution to British Intelligence, recording thousands of foreign-language broadcasts daily and distributing translated summaries or transcripts. The service is partly funded by the Foreign Office and the Central Intelligence Agency’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service.

CD. Symbol of the head of Special Operations Executive, adopted by Sir Frank Nelson in 1940 and his successors, Sir Charles Hambro and General Sir Colin Gubbins.

CECIL, ROBERT. For the last two years of World War II, Robert Cecil, a regular member of the Diplomatic Corps, was seconded to the Secret Intelligence Service to act as “PA/CSS,” personal assistant to Sir Stewart Menzies. In the summer of 1943 he succeeded Patrick Reilly in this position, his previous experience having been assistant to Peter Loxley, the private secretary to the permanent undersecretary, Sir Alexander Cadogan. After the war Cecil worked in the American Department at the Foreign Office, with a desk in the same room as Donald Maclean, a trusted colleague whom he had known in Paris in 1939. After Maclean’s defection, Cecil was appointed his successor as head of the American Department. Cecil was also acquainted with Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess.

After his retirement from the diplomatic service, Cecil took an appointment at Reading University and subsequently published The Myth of the Master Race and Hitler’s Decision to Invade Russia. He has also written on the subject of intelligence, his first contribution being “The Cambridge Comintern,” a chapter in The Missing Dimension, edited by Christopher Andrew and David Dilks. In February 1978 he wrote a damning critique of Kim Philby’s My Silent War for The Times, ably identifying several instances where the traitor could be seen to have deliberately distorted history. In his biography of Maclean, ever sensitive to Alan Maclean, Donald’s brother and his friend and former colleague, Cecil gives his version of the traitor’s escape in May 1951 and the innocent part played by Goronwy Rees.

CELERY. MI5 code name for Walter Dicketts, a former Air Intelligence officer during World War I who acted as an MI5 nominee when he was recruited by SNOW to meet his Abwehr controllers in Lisbon in January 1941. CELERY spent several weeks in German hands, undergoing a detailed interrogation in Hamburg, but survived to be given a sabotage mission to England and £10,000. MI5 decided to detain SNOW upon their return, so CELERY’s case was abandoned in August 1941.

CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (CIA). Created in 1947 by the National Security Act, the American CIA has enjoyed a uniquely close relationship with British Intelligence and by agreement has posted a declared chief of station (CoS) in London under diplomatic cover at the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square. The London Station is one of the largest outside the United States; the CoS’s post is considered prestigious and by convention has been held by a senior officer who subsequently may be appointed deputy director for operations. The CoS in London sits as an ex officio member of the Joint Intelligence Committee. In reciprocation, the Secret Intelligence Service head of station in Washington, D.C., acts in a liaison capacity and abides by an agreement that neither agency will recruit its nationals or conduct operations on the other’s territory without prior consent.

CENTRAL REGISTRY. See REGISTRY.

CENTURY HOUSE. A gaunt tower block at 100 Westminster Bridge Road, Southwalk, Century House was the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) after its move from Broadway in 1966. SIS moved to Vauxhall Cross in 1998.

CHANG, JOHN. A senior officer in the Royal Hong Kong Police, Superintendent John Chang was imprisoned in 1974 after he was convicted of working as a long-term spy for the Chinese Ministry of State Security. Upon his release, Chang went to the People’s Republic of China and was appointed mayor of Canton.

CHAPSKY, ADOLF. The NKVD’s London rezident until his withdrawal in 1937, Adolf Chapsky operated under diplomatic cover at the Soviet embassy under the alias of Second Secretary Anton Schuster. When he returned to Moscow, Chapsky was executed in Stalin’s purge.

CHARLIE. MI5 code name for a photographer named Eschborn, who was identified as a German spy based in London in 1938 when he was compromised by a letter forwarded by Jessie Jordan. Eschborn was interviewed by MI5’s Edward Hinchley-Cooke and explained that, unlike his two brothers, he had acquired British nationality at birth and was loyal. However, he and one of his brothers had been recruited by the Abwehr during a visit to Cologne, and he had cooperated because of a threat to his other brother, who lived in Germany. When he was approached by SNOW in 1940 to assist him, Eschborn willingly cooperated with MI5 as a double agent.

CHEESE. Code name for Renato Levi, an Italian Jew who worked for the Secret Intelligence Service in Rome before World War II and subsequently was recruited by both the Servicio Informazione Militare and the Abwehr. In February 1941 Levi arrived in Cairo, where Bill Kenyon-Jones of Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME) provided him with a fictitious wireless operator, NICOSSOF, but when he returned to Italy later in the year Levi was imprisoned for black market offenses. However, in his absence NICOSSOF continued to maintain contact with the Abwehr until February 1945. Within SIME, CHEESE was also known as “Mr. Rose” and was later handled by James Robertson and Evan John Simpson.

CHEKA. The original Bolshevik intelligence agency in Russia, the Cheka did not conduct operations in England, although it was much feared as a ruthless adversary by the Secret Intelligence Service.

CHEN PING. The general-secretary of the Malay Communist Party (MCP), Chen Ping was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1945 for his participation in Force 136 and for organizing networks behind the Japanese lines during World War II. He was invited to London to march in the Victory parade and also received the personal thanks of Lord Mountbatten.

The activities of the MCP had been monitored for years by the local Special Branch, which had recruited Chen’s deputy, Lai Teck, who was withdrawn in March 1947 after he had fallen under suspicion. After World War II the MCP mounted a guerrilla campaign to seize control of the country. In December 1955 negotiations were opened with Chen through his old Force 136 commander, John Davis, by then a police superintendent, but he refused the offer of unconditional surrender and returned to the jungle. In April 1957 his principal assistant, Hor Lung, accepted a reward of £55,000 for information that effectively eliminated the MCP

CHESHAM HOUSE. The office of the Soviet Trade Delegation and the Soviet charge d’affaires in Chesham Place, London, before the Bolsheviks received diplomatic recognition, Chesham House was the subject of technical surveillance by the Security Service between 1919 and 1927.

CHICKSANDS PRIORY. The family seat of the Osborne family, the entire Chicksands Priory estate was taken over by the Royal Air Force (RAF) and operated as a signals intelligence intercept site during World War II by the Royal Navy’s Y Service. Chicksands also provided a communications center in England for the Heavy Mobile Units that accompanied the RAF’s advance squadrons established in Europe after D-Day. In November 1950 the U.S. National Security Agency took over the estate and the U.S. Air Force’s Security Service, which collected signals intelligence, was established permanently as the headquarters of the 6940th Radio Squadron (Mobile). In 1996, following the American withdrawal from Chicksands, the site was selected as the newly created Defence Intelligence and Security Centre.

CHIDSON, MONTY. In May 1940 Major Monty Chidson headed the Section D mission to Amsterdam to recover stocks of industrial diamonds before they were seized by the approaching Germans. Chidson later suffered a breakdown and was sent to Ankara, Turkey, where he acted as security officer at the British embassy during the period CICERO, Elyesa Bazna, was copying the contents of the ambassador’s safe. Chidson’s 1940 assignment was described by David Walker in Adventure in Diamonds and made into a movie called Operation Amsterdam.

CHILDERS, ERSKINE. After Haileybury and Trinity College, Cambridge, Robert Erskine Childers worked in the House of Commons as a clerk, but in 1899, aged 29, he was one of the first to respond to the call for volunteers to go to South Africa. He fought in the Boer War with the Honourable Artillery Company and wrote an account of his experiences, entitled In the Ranks of the City Imperial Volunteers. Childers and his wife were keen sailors and in 1903 he achieved tremendous success with his novel of espionage along the German coast, Riddle of the Sands. The book contained detailed topographical observations and, based on his own experiences while sailing his yacht in German waters, gave an authentic flavor of an agent conducting a clandestine survey. This was reprinted shortly before World War I and captured the public’s imagination, even if there was no realistic possibility of Germany launching a raid or invasion.

In 1910 Childers resigned his post in the Commons to devote himself to Irish affairs, advocating dominion status for Ireland. In July 1914 he sailed his yacht Asgard with a cargo of weapons to a port just north of Dublin to arm the National Volunteers. Soon after the outbreak of war, Childers joined a seaplane carrier HMS Engadine as a Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve officer and an expert on reconnaissance work. He participated in the Cuxhaven raid in November 1914 and was later posted to the Mediterranean, where he found himself employed by the Secret Intelligence Service’s Near East branch, running agents up the Turkish coast and flying intelligence missions. He trained officers for the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS), which brought him into contact with Captain L. B. Weldon, the author of Hard Lying. By the end of the war, when the RNAS had amalgamated with the Royal Air Force, Childers held the rank of major and the Distinguished Service Cross.

When he returned to civilian life in March 1919, Childers settled in Dublin and committed himself to the Irish republican cause. He protested strongly about the British government’s use of the Black and Tans and was appointed minister of propaganda in the self-constituted Dail Eirrean, formed in May 1921. Childers accompanied Eamon De Valera to London to negotiate with the British Cabinet, but stubbornly resisted any compromise treaty that fell short of complete independence for a republic. At this stage, as a hard-liner, Childers joined the republican army’s mobile columns to oppose the new Irish Free State government. In November 1922 his home in County Wicklow was surrounded by Free State soldiers, and he was court-martialed and executed by a firing squad at Beggar’s Bush barracks. Moments before his death, he shook the hand of every member of the firing party.

CHILTON, SIR JOHN. A former permanent undersecretary at the Northern Ireland Office, Sir John Chilton was appointed staff counsellor to the Intelligence Services in 2002, and in 2004 served as a member of Lord Butler’s review of the intelligence available to the British government before the 2004 Gulf War.

CHINA MISSION. In the absence of any Secret Intelligence Service activity in China during World War II, the role of intelligence gathering fell to Special Operations Executive (SOE), which was established by Findlay Andrew at the British embassy in Chunking and at Hunming in 1943. SOE did not run any subversive operations in China, apart from NONCHALANT and OBLIVION in Hong Kong. Instead it collaborated with Chinese agencies, the International Intelligence Service and the Resources Investigation Institution. SOE’s greatest coup in the region was REMORSE, which financed much of the organization’s wartime activities.

CHINOOK CRASH. The accidental crash of a Chinook helicopter on the Mull of Kintyre on 2 June 1994, which resulted in the deaths of 10 Royal Ulster Constabulary Special Branch detectives and six MI5 officers, is the single greatest loss of life in MI5’s history.

CHISHOLM, RIARI. The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) station commander in Moscow, Riari Chisholm was responsible for maintaining contact with Oleg Penkovsky. His wife Janet acted as a courier, meeting Penkovsky covertly in Moscow as she took her three children for afternoon walks in the Arbat. Chisholm was expelled from the Soviet Union in November 1962, but it was later established that he had been compromised by George Blake, with whom he had served at the SIS station in Berlin. Chisholm later served in Pretoria. The author of Ladysmith, he contracted viral malaria while returning to London and died.

CHOIR. MI5 code name for a probe microphone used to eavesdrop on conversations held in the Soviet Consulate in London during the Cold War.

CHURCHILL, PETER. The organizer of Special Operations Executive networks in southern France in World War II, Peter Churchill was arrested by Hugo Bleicher and survived the war as a prisoner. Later he married Odette Samson and wrote three volumes of his memoirs, Of Their Own Choice, Duel of Wits, and The Spirit in the Cage.

CHURCHILL, SIR WINSTON. Always fascinated by intelligence, Winston Churchill had been introduced to the need for good information from the bazaars when he was commissioned by the Daily Telegraph to write about the Afghan revolt on the northwest frontier of India in 1897. His views on the shortcomings of the British Army’s intelligence organization were reinforced by his experiences in the Boer War, when he became an articulate advocate for the “money and brains” desired by the intelligence service. In 1902 Churchill demanded in the House of Commons “an efficient and well-staffed Intelligence Department.”

When the Secret Service Bureau was created in 1909, Churchill, as president of the Board of Trade, received a briefing from the director of military operations, General John Ewart. Then, as home secretary in 1910, he was called upon to defend Sir Robert Anderson, the assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard until 1901, who had supervised the undercover activities of Thomas Beach, alias “Major Henri le Caron,” when both men became the subject of political controversy.

In 1911, when Churchill was appointed to the Admiralty, he was kept informed of the counterespionage investigations conducted to catch German spies in the naval dockyards, and in 1914 took a close interest in the codebreaking activities of his director of naval education, Sir Alfred Ewing. Although Churchill may have been aware that some Boer ciphers had been cracked and exploited during the South African war, as first lord of the Admiralty he was fully indoctrinated into Room 40 and the astonishing successes achieved by Ewing’s team of cryptographers, among them the solution to the Zimmermann Telegram in 1917 that helped bring the United States into the war.

In 1920, as secretary of state for war, Churchill continued to have access to intercepts, and he was persuaded by the director of intelligence at Scotland Yard, Sir Basil Thomson; the director of military intelligence, Sir William Thwaites; and the director of naval intelligence, Admiral Hugh Sinclair, that the spread of Bolshevism had become such a threat that Russia’s true intentions should be exposed by the publication of decrypted secret Soviet telegrams; however, he was overruled by the Cabinet. In the period leading up to World War II Churchill, out of office, became dependent upon Major Desmond Morton of the Industrial Intelligence Centre to keep him informed about German rearmament, and these leaks continued until he was swept into Downing Street in 1940 and became an avid daily consumer of what was then termed a “most secret source,” then codenamed BONIFACE and later designated ULTRA. Churchill positively reveled in his access to high-grade, raw signals intelligence, and the Secret Intelligence Service chief, Stewart Menzies, made a daily visit to show him a selection of diplomatic and military “flimsies” —the unprocessed traffic, translated but not sanitized as a summary. As prime minister, Churchill excelled as a shrewd exploiter of the intelligence and twice visited Bletchley Park to thank the staff for their vital, but as yet publicly unacknowledged, contribution to victory over the Axis powers. In his masterly history of World War II, Churchill omitted any reference to ULTRA or its influence over the Allies’ prosecution of the war, but did make veiled mention of “most secret sources.”

CLARENCE, JOHN. In December 1954 John Clarence, a 27-year-old member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and a former Royal Corps of Signals soldier, was imprisoned for five years on offenses under the Official Secrets Act, having volunteered to spy for the Soviet embassy in London. A convicted petty criminal, Clarence had removed documents from an antiaircraft site in Northumberland, where he was briefly employed as a civilian clerk.

CLARK, MARY ANN. The mistress of the Duke of Wellington since they had met at Bath in 1882, Mary Ann Clark was to have a profound effect on the development of British Intelligence as Wellington supplemented her income by recommending her nominees for army commissions. She charged huge amounts to the grateful officers, but eventually a scandal erupted when she attempted to send one of her footmen to the West Indies as an officer. The duke was obliged to resign and in consequence his Depot of Military Knowledge lost its principal sponsor.

CLARKE, DUDLEY. The head of British deception in the Middle East responsible for running “A” Force, a fictitious military unit that provided cover for Allied operations, Dudley Clarke was commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1916 at the age of 17. Born in Johannesburg and educated at Charterhouse and Woolwich, he served during World War I as a pilot in Egypt and afterward fought in the Iraq revolt, in Palestine, and in 1940 in Norway. Having participated in the first commando raid on the French coast, at Le Touquet, which was ineffectual as he described in his memoirs Seven Assignments, Clarke was posted to Cairo in December 1940. While on General Wavell’s staff, he supervised the CAMILLA and ABEAM deceptions and took command of “A” Force, a dedicated deception unit. In 1944, following his pioneering work inventing deception stratagems, he was transferred to London to support D-Day, but was arrested in Madrid on his way home in questionable circumstances, apparently dressed as a woman.

In 1948 Clarke was appointed head of public opinion research at Conservative Central Office and had his request for permission to write a book about wartime deception, entitled The Secret War, turned down. He died in 1974.

CLAYTON, SIR ILTYD. Born in 1886 and educated at Lancing and Woolwich, Iltyd Clayton served with the Royal Artillery during World War I and in 1929 was posted to Iraq, where he spent the next eight years. In World War II he headed the Middle East Intelligence Centre until 1943, when he was appointed adviser on Arab affairs to the minister of state. In 1945 he was made head of the British Middle East Office, and he retired in 1948.

CLEMENTS, DICK. A political aide to two Labour party leaders, Neil Kinnock and Michael Foot, Dick Clements was the editor of the Tribune for 21 years until 1982. According to documents copied by the KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin, Clements was an agent of influence codenamed DAN and was regarded by the KGB rezidentura in London as the most important of their assets during the 1970s.

CLIVE, NIGEL. When Nigel Clive came down from Christ Church, Oxford, in June 1940 he volunteered for the army and by Christmas was in Egypt with the 2nd Armoured Division. Instead of being transferred to the Libyan desert, Clive’s troop was deployed to Greece and arrived only shortly before the evacuation of April 1941. Posted to Palestine, where he underwent an operation and a period of recuperation, Clive was recruited into the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) by Frank Giffey, formerly the head of station in prewar Riga and now the SIS man in Baghdad. For 18 months Clive was billeted with Freya Stark, the noted Arabist and a wartime SIS agent, and learned the rudiments of secret intelligence.

Clive was appalled by the interdepartmental jealousies that plagued the British intelligence structure in Iraq, where five different agencies were in fierce competition with one another. He recalled, “It became a commonplace to say that if fifty percent of the day could be devoted to trying to defeat Hitler, we were doing well and might win the war.” In July 1943, disillusioned by the interagency rivalries, Clive obtained a transfer to SIS’s Yugoslav Section in Cairo, where he prepared to join a military mission to aid Tito. At the last moment, the operation was canceled and Clive was returned to Cairo, where he was reassigned to SIS’s Greek Section, headed by Edward Dillon. There he experienced further delays, but in December 1943 he was finally parachuted into the Epirus region of Greece to join up with a group of anti-Communist guerrillas operating under Special Operations Executive’s sponsorship.

Clive remained in the mountains of Greece operating with the partisans until November 1944, when, following the German withdrawal, he reported to Cairo only to be returned to Epirus on a second mission later the same month. He arrived in Athens in time to witness the opening rounds of the Greek Civil War. By the end of the year he was back in London, recalled to SIS’s headquarters for consultations. Having briefed David Footman, the head of SIS’s Political Section on the deteriorating situation in Greece, Clive returned to Athens in March 1945 to start what was to be a three-year attachment to the British embassy.

In April 1948 Clive was transferred to Jerusalem and arrived in time to watch the first Arab-Israeli war, but his cover was blown almost as soon as he had opened his office. In 1950 he was posted to Iraq to run SIS’s Baghdad Station. Clive was back in London to take over from George Young as controller, Middle East, in time to supervise SIS’s contribution to the ill-fated Suez campaign in 1956. Two years later Clive was posted to Tunis, and thereafter to Algiers. He returned to London in 1966 and was appointed head of the Information Research Department.

In 1969 Clive retired and joined the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, and until 1980 served in the secretary-general’s private office. In 1985 his wartime memoirs were published, apparently without the knowledge or consent of his old office, but no action was taken to prevent their distribution.

COBWEB. Code name of double agent run by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in Iceland during World War II. A Dane of Icelandic origin, Ib Riis was landed by a U-boat in April 1941 and surrendered to the British authorities, who arranged for him to transmit misleading shipping information to the Abwehr under the supervision of his SIS handler, Harold Blyth. One of his objectives was to tempt the enemy battle cruiser Tirpitz into the North Sea so she could be attacked by the Royal Navy.

COCKERILL, SIR GEORGE. Born in 1867 and educated at Cheltenham and Sandhurst, George Cockerill served on the northwest frontier of India, working in the Intelligence Branch at Simla, and fought in the Boer War before commanding the 7th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers in 1914. In 1915 he was transferred to staff duties and appointed deputy director of military intelligence and director of the new Directorate of Special Intelligence. In 1918 Cockerill was elected the Unionist MP for Reigate, a seat he held until 1931.

CODRINGTON, JOHN. Born in 1898 into a distinguished military family, John Codrington was educated at Harrow and Sandhurst and served with the Coldstream Guards during World War I. In 1933, after service with the French Foreign Legion in Beirut, he was appointed ADC to the commander-in-chief in India, Sir Philip Chet-wode, and then was recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) to join the Z Organisation, working under London Films cover. At the outbreak of war, Codrington was placed in charge of A5(a), the production section responsible for the collection of intelligence in Tangier and Gibraltar. In 1942 he was appointed the SIS head of station in Gibraltar, where he was a witness to the air accident that killed General Sikorski. By the end of the war, Codrington was back in London as a liaison officer with the French Deuxième Bureau. After the war he rejoined London Films and later began a new career as a garden designer. He died in April 1991.

COHEN, KENNETH. Born on 15 March 1900, Kenneth Cohen was the son of a barrister and was educated at Eastbourne College before joining the Royal Navy as a “special entry” cadet in 1918. He subsequently served on HMS Iron Duke and became an expert on torpedoes before he transferred in 1935 to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Soon after joining SIS, Cohen was placed in charge of the London headquarters of a European network, known simply as Z or the Z Organisation, which operated under commercial cover in parallel to the more overt SIS structure that depended on a string of Passport Control Offices attached to diplomatic premises abroad. Masquerading as “Kenneth Crane” and designated “Z-3,” Cohen worked through a front company, Menoline Limited, in Maple Street and an office in Bush House to recruit sources, including several distinguished foreign correspondents of British newspapers in France, Holland, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, and Italy. Upon the outbreak of war, Z’s assets were amalgamated into SIS’s main organization, and Cohen was attached to the French country section known as A4, becoming head of the Vichy French country section, designated P1, in May 1940. His task was to recruit sources from within the unoccupied zone of France. One of his successes was Jacques Bridou, who was parachuted into France in March 1941 to establish the ALLIANCE network, based in Pau and Marseilles, and later headed by the formidable Marie-Madeleine Fourcade.

In the summer of 1943, in anticipation of an invasion of Europe, Cohen was selected to take charge of BRISSEX, the British component of a large scheme codenamed SUSSEX to parachute 60 two-man Allied intelligence teams behind enemy lines. This huge paramilitary enterprise was intended to disrupt Nazi communications and logistics immediately after D-Day, and then liaise with local resistance organizations until reached by the Allies. The role played by Cohen required considerable tact and diplomacy because the American volunteers were inexperienced and the French intransigent.

After World War II Cohen was appointed a CMG and held the senior posts of director of personnel; controller, Eastern Europe; and director of production, before retiring in 1953 with a CB to become European adviser to United Steel Companies, and in 1967, chairman of the Franco-British Society. He died in 1984, survived by his wife Mary Joseph, whom he had married in 1932, and his son and daughter.

COHEN, MORRIS AND LONA. Morris Cohen and Lona Petka were married in July 1941 and operated as Soviet couriers. Both born in the United States, they had met soon after Morris returned from the Spanish Civil War, where he had been wounded while fighting with the Abraham Lincoln Battalion and had been recruited as a Soviet agent with the code name VOLUNTEER. When Morris was called up for military service with the U.S. Army in Europe, Lona was codenamed LESLEY and became an enthusiastic courier, traveling to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to collect documents from atomic physicist Theodore Hall.

The Cohens fled their home in New York when Julius Rosenberg was arrested in 1952 and subsequently moved to England, where they operated as illegals using the aliases of Peter and Helen Kroger. They were arrested in January 1963 and convicted of offenses under the Official Secrets Act but released in 1969 in a spy swap. In their retirement, they lived in Moscow, where Lona died in 1993 and Morris died two years later.

COLE, HAROLD. A deserter from the Royal Engineers at the time of the evacuation from Dunkirk, Sergeant Harold Cole collaborated with the Abwehr and posed in occupied France as a British officer and later as an American. Cole’s task was to infiltrate Allied escape lines, and he was responsible for betraying scores of résistants to the enemy. Wanted by each of the Allies, he was captured in Saulgau, Germany, in June 1945, in the plausible guise of a British intelligence liaison officer, “Captain Mason of the U.S. Counterintelligence Corps,” but escaped in November 1945 when a dispute arose over jurisdiction. Finally betrayed in Paris in January 1946 by a Frenchman, he was shot while resisting arrest.

COLLARD, JOHN. Born in January 1913 and educated at Cranleigh and Keble College, Oxford, where he read history, John Collard was a solicitor working for the treasury solicitor when in 1940 he joined the Cheshire regiment and was seconded to MI5 and then MI11. After the war he rejoined MI5 and undertook protective security duties until he was posted to Singapore for two years. Upon his return to England, he was recruited by the recently retired director-general, Sir Percy Sillitoe, to combat the trade in illicit diamonds, and for the next three years Collard was based in Johannesburg working for the International Diamond Security Organization. His subsequent account of his adventures, as disclosed to Ian Fleming in 1957, became The Diamond Smugglers. His own book, A Maritime History of Rye, reflected his latter occupation as a partner in a firm of solicitors in that town. He died in October 2002.

COLOSSUS. The first programmable analog computer, designed to race through millions of permutations of the keys of the German Enigma cipher machine during World War II, Colossus was built at the General Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill and installed at Bletchley Park in December 1943.

COLVIN, JOHN. After graduating from Dartmouth and London University, John Colvin joined the Royal Navy and was an entirely conventional sailor until his transfer to the Adriatic during the war. There he ferried agents across to Yugoslavia on motor gunboats, but his clandestine career was to start in earnest when he joined the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in 1951 and was posted to Oslo. In 1953 he was transferred to Vienna.

Colvin’s first posting to the Far East, after three years in London, took place in 1958 when he went to Kuala Lumpur. During the height of the Vietnam War, between 1965 and 1967, he was in Hanoi, enduring the nightly American air raids. Colvin’s next appointment was as ambassador to the People’s Republic of Mongolia, a post traditionally reserved for retiring SIS personnel, although in 1977 he went to Washington, D.C., for his final posting as the SIS head of station. After his retirement Colvin took up writing, and he remained active until his death in London in 2003.

COMBINED BUREAU MIDDLE EAST (CBME). The GCHQ cover name for its organization in the Middle East during World War II, based at the King Farouk Museum in Heliopolis, Egypt. Opened in May 1941 by Colonel Freddie Jacob of Bletchley Park’s Army Section, CBME was linked by radio to Whaddon Hall.

COMBINED INTELLIGENCE CENTRE IRAQ (CICI). During World War II British intelligence agencies operating in Iraq, hitherto considered the Royal Air Force’s exclusive territory, created a unified organization, the CICI, commanded by Colonel Dawson-Sheppard.

COMBINED INTELLIGENCE FAR EAST (CIFE). Created in 1935 in Hong Kong under Captain Bill Wiley, CIFE provided an umbrella for MI5 and Secret Intelligence Service personnel in the Far East. CIFE was moved to Kandy, Ceylon, in 1942 and was headed by a Japanese-speaking MI5 officer, Courtney Young. It was based in Singapore after World War II.

COMBINED INTELLIGENCE SERVICE (CIS). A dedicated unit based at Dublin Castle and headed by Colonel Ormonde Winter, the CIS operated against the Irish Republican Army (IRA). It was effectively destroyed on Bloody Sunday, 21 November 1919, when IRA gunmen shot 14 CIS officers, along with two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary.

COMBINED RESEARCH AND PLANNING OFFICE (CRPO). Cover name for Secret Intelligence Service stations in the Middle East to replace the Inter-Services Liaison Department in 1947.

COMBINED SERVICES DETAILED INTERROGATION CENTRE (CSDIC). With the military intelligence designation MI19, CSDIC established facilities during World War II to question enemy prisoners at Beaconsfield, Wilton Park, and Latimer. In the Middle East CSDIC operated from September 1940 under MI(L) cover, at Maadi, purpose-built on the edge of the desert south of Cairo, with cells wired for sound by engineers flown out from Dollis Hill. CSDIC in the Far East was based at the Red Fort, Delhi, where prisoners were kept in the elephant stables. In November 1944 CSDIC established a base in the medieval fortress of Diest, but this was absorbed in November 1945 by Bad Nenndorf.

COMINTERN. The Communist International (Comintern) was considered an important target for British Intelligence throughout its existence, and between 1932 and 1934 GCHQ succeeded in intercepting and decrypting some of its international wireless traffic, which was distributed under the code name MASK. Later, more of the messages were read under a World War II project codenamed ISCOT.

COMMITTEE OF IMPERIAL DEFENCE (CID). As a Cabinet subcommittee, the CID supervised the activities of British Intelligence and at the end of the Boer War commissioned Colonel James Edmonds to examine the causes of perceived recent intelligence failures. Edmonds’s report led to the CID recommending the creation in August 1909 of the Secret Service Bureau. The CID’s assistant secretary and then secretary from 1908 to 1938 was Sir Maurice (later Lord) Hankey who, probably more than any other single person, exercised considerable influence over the development of British Intelligence during the first half of the 20th century.

The prime minister decided in March 1909 that a CID subcommittee comprised of Lord Haldane, Mr. McKenna, Sir Charles Hardinge, three Service representatives, and Sir Edward Henry, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, should make a brief review of the nature and scale of foreign espionage and report on whether it would be desirable to establish an official link between the Admiralty and the War Office on the one hand and the police, postal, and Customs authorities on the other, with the aim of ensuring appropriate surveillance of the activities of foreigners suspected of espionage or of being secret agents. The subcommittee was also asked to propose measures to expand the powers required to investigate suspected spies and to report on the collection of intelligence from overseas by the Admiralty and War Office.

The CID was presented with information on a large number of cases in 1908 and the first quarter of 1909 in which Germans had been suspected of espionage. Certain German officers had let slip inadvertently that they had been assigned an area of Britain for intelligence purposes and that individual Germans had been observed making sketches and topographical notes. It was reported that in one instance a number of Germans of a military bearing had been living for 18 months in a house in Hythe; two or three men had stayed there for about two months at a time before being replaced by others, so that over the 18-month period about 20 different men had been seen. Allegedly they had used the house as a base for tours and their interest in Lydd and the surrounding area had been noted. The general impression was such that the situation resembled that in France before the German invasion in 1870. France’s defeat in 1870 had been attributable to a lack of an appropriate intelligence organization, and it was widely accepted that the great generals of the past, such as Frederick the Great, Napoleon, and the Duke of Wellington, owed much of their success to a carefully developed espionage system. Immediately after hostilities had commenced in the 1870 war, the French had attempted to set up a counterintelligence organization from scratch, but it had been too late.

COMMUNIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN (CPGB). Founded in January 1921, the CPGB was regarded by MI5 as an instrument of the Kremlin, funded by the Soviet Union and led by Marxists inherently disloyal to Great Britain, and was therefore the subject of intensive study by MI5 throughout its existence. As a result of MI5 surveillance, two CPGB national organizers, Percy Glading and Douglas Springhall, were convicted of espionage, and numerous other members were suspected of participating in spy rings. A member of the National Executive, Bob Stewart, acted as a link between the party’s underground cells and the NKVD, and James Klugmann, the party’s historian, was responsible for recruiting and handling John Cairncross and Michael Straight.

Proof that the CPGB was never an independent organization was found in the intercepted wireless messages, codenamed MASK, exchanged between the Comintern in Moscow and the party’s secret radio transmitter located in Wimbledon.

Technical surveillance of the CPGB’s headquarters in King Street, Covent Garden, was compromised in 1941 by Anthony Blunt, who warned the NKVD that microphones had been inserted into the walls of the building. Information from this source had been circulated within MI5 under the code name TABLE, while transcripts of conversations in another CPGB property in Great Newport Street was codenamed KASPAR.

COMPOSITE SIGNALS ORGANISATION (CSO). The CSO is the branch of GCHQ responsible for the management of the organization’s network of interception and collection stations in the United Kingdom and overseas.

CONTROLLERATES. The postwar reorganization of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) divided the world into six geographical controllerates responsible for the supervision and management of the individual stations overseas. Headed by a controller, each controllerate is responsible for the production of intelligence in response to tasks set by SIS’s requirements sections.

COOPER, DUFF. Having been secretary of state for war between 1935 and 1937, then first lord of the Admiralty, in 1940 minister of information, and chairman of the Security Executive in Winston Churchill’s War Cabinet, Alfred Duff Cooper, MP, had held many of the senior positions of state in the land when he was appointed the British ambassador in Paris. He and his wife, the legendary Lady Diana Cooper, were a huge diplomatic success at the embassy, but his choice of subject for his first and only novel was to prove exceptionally controversial.

When word reached Whitehall that Duff Cooper intended to write about the wartime operation codenamed MINCEMEAT, “strong pressure was put upon him not to do so” according to his son. “Just what form this pressure took I have not been able to establish, but it seems likely that the prime minister—Mr. Attlee—was personally involved.” According to Charles Cholmondeley, the MI5 officer who had dreamed up MINCEMEAT, Cooper was threatened with criminal prosecution and had retorted that he would identify his source as Churchill, who he alleged had embroidered the story somewhat for his audience at a dinner party! The book, Operation Heartbreak, was published in November 1950, and the controversy did not prevent him from being elevated to the House of Lords with a viscountcy in 1952. Cooper died in 1954 without disclosing that his story had been based on true events, and without seeing the Twentieth Century-Fox movie of the same title, which was released in 1955 and incidentally included a scene with a serving MI5 officer, Ronald Reed, operating a transmitter.

In the meantime a Daily Express journalist, Ian Colvin, had been tipped off to the authentic background of the novel and had undertaken a search of cemeteries along Spain’s Atlantic coast to find a British officer who had been buried at the appropriate time. His relentless research took him to Huelva, where he found the grave of a Major William Martin, and to the Ministry of Defence where he was informed that the Hon. Ewen Montagu, QC, had been allowed access to the relevant files. Montagu had been the Naval Intelligence Division’s representative on the Twenty Committee during the war and had played a key role in the execution of the plan. In 1953, as Colvin uncovered the true story for publication as The Unknown Courier, Montagu was commissioned to write over a single weekend an official account, which was entitled The Man Who Never Was and was serialized in the Sunday Express in February 1953.

COPPERHEAD. Code name for an ingenious MI5 deception plan to persuade the Germans that, shortly before D-Day, General Bernard Montgomery had passed through Gibraltar on his way to a new appointment in the Mediterranean, thereby implying that the long-awaited invasion of occupied France was likely to be spearheaded from the Mediterranean and drawing attention away from the preparations for the imminent invasion of Normandy. Lieutenant Clifton James, a Royal Army Pay Corps officer who bore a strong resemblance to Monty, was flown to Gibraltar with a suitably large retinue to catch the attention of the local Abwehr agents and received by the governor.

CORDEAUX, JACK. After graduating from Osborne and Dartmouth, Jack Cordeaux served in the Royal Navy but in 1923 he transferred to the Royal Marines. At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, he was assigned to the Naval Intelligence Division, and two years later he moved again, to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) with the rank of acting colonel.

The decision to draft in three senior officers, one each from the Admiralty, the Army, and the Royal Air Force, was taken after numerous complaints had been made regarding the dissemination of intelligence. In an almost unique display of unity, all three services protested that SIS was consistently failing to deliver information to the appropriate quarter in a timely fashion, and the creation of a special tier of management on the distribution side was intended to rectify the situation before the Joint Intelligence Committee took more drastic action. Cordeaux’s role was to enhance the links between SIS and its naval clients by supervising the extraction of intelligence with a naval significance from the production or operational branches of SIS.

Once Cordeaux had completed his task he was given a particularly sensitive assignment, and one that remains classified to this day. He was selected to head SIS’s inquest into the fate of its networks in Holland and to identify the structural failures that had allowed the enemy to mount a hugely successful deception campaign that had led to the Abwehr exercising almost complete control over the organization of Special Operations Executive (SOE). More than 40 Dutch agents had perished in the notorious fiasco, and it fell to Cordeaux, as controller, northern area, with responsibility for supervising operations across Holland, Denmark, and the rest of Scandinavia; to chronicle the tragedy and apportion the blame. Neither the document he wrote nor its conclusions have ever been declassified, or even its existence divulged to the parliamentary inquiry held after the war in the Netherlands.

Cordeaux retired from SIS in 1946 and subsequently contested two elections in Derbyshire before being elected the Tory MP for Nottingham Central in 1955. He never achieved ministerial office during his 11 years in the Commons, but he was a fierce defender of what he perceived to be SIS’s interests. In December 1958 he launched a scathing attack on the SOE survivors who had written their memoirs, referring to them as “these amateur spies cashing in on their war experiences by turning amateur authors.” Three years after he left the Commons he wrote a novel, Safe Seat, in which he told the story of “Jack Reston,” the MP for Trentham East, who was defeated in the 1964 general election and, having been found a safer constituency, lost that too in a by-election. Cordeaux died in January 1982, leaving the distinct impression among his readers that it was virtually impossible to distinguish between the wretchedly ambitious “Jack Reston” and his creator.

CORFIELD, SIR FREDERICK. Elected the Conservative MP for Gloucestershire South in 1956, Frederick Corfield joined the 8th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, in 1935 and served in India until 1939. He was a prisoner of war in Germany during World War II, having been captured with the 51st (Highland) Division in France in 1940. After his release, he was called to the bar and then took up farming. After he retired from the Commons in February 1974, he was appointed a judge.

The Corfield Report, entitled Historical Survey of the Origins and Growth of Mau Mau, released in May 1960, provided a detailed analysis of the background to the intelligence weaknesses that allowed the Mau Mau movement in Kenya to develop in the absence of a comprehensive security apparatus that reported to a single body able to distribute the information and coordinate the appropriate countermeasures.

CORNWELL, DAVID. David Cornwell’s first encounters with the intelligence world took place while he was still an undergraduate at Lincoln College, Oxford, reporting to a friend of his father. After graduating from Oxford, he worked as a teacher at Eton and then in 1958 joined MI5’s F4 subsection as a subordinate to John Bingham, a successful thriller writer and one of the great agent-runners of his generation, whom Cornwell came to admire. By then he had completed his national service, which, thanks to his knowledge of German acquired during his year in Bern, Switzerland, in 1948, had been spent with the Intelligence Corps in Germany screening refugees from the East. After leaving Eton, Cornwell worked as a freelance illustrator and was employed by Max Knight to provide the pictures for his Talking Birds in 1961.

Cornwell served his apprenticeship with Bingham and then transferred in 1960 to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), which posted him to Bonn. This city became the backdrop for several of his subsequent novels. His first, written under the pen name John le Carré while still operating for SIS under consular cover in Hamburg, was Call for the Dead (1961). This was followed by A Murder of Quality (1962), which drew upon his experience as a schoolmaster at Millfield and Eton and introduced the character of George Smiley, the retired intelligence officer who, Cornwell later admitted, was based upon Bingham. With the publication of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold in 1963, a typically bleak story of espionage and betrayal, Cornwell achieved worldwide recognition and won both the Somerset Maugham Prize and his early retirement from SIS. He compounded his success with The Looking-Glass War and later developed Smiley as the troubled, lonely spymaster in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People.

Cornwell not only relied upon real people from his own past to use as characters in his books but also extended the vocabulary of the intelligence community by describing authentic espionage tradecraft in unprecedented detail and referring to “lamplighters” (known as “the watchers” in the real world) and calling the guardians of safe houses used to accommodate defectors’ “babysitters.” In a remarkable example of life following art, he may have introduced the terms mole and mole hunter into the lexicon. Certainly Cornwell was keenly aware of his predecessors in both MI5 and SIS who had opted for a literary life. He recalled that in his day the Security Service had been hostile to Graham Greene and MI5’s legal adviser, Bernard Hill, had considered urging the attorney-general to prosecute Greene for disclosing inside information in Our Man in Havana. As he remarked in an interview:

Writers are a subversive crowd, nothing if not traitors. The better the writer, the greater the betrayal tends to appear, a thing the secret community has learned the hard way, for I hear it is no longer quite so keen to have us abroad. Nevertheless, [Compton] Mackenzie ended his days with a knighthood. Greene will end his with the order of merit at least, and if there is any justice at all in the secret world of literary awards, a Nobel prize.

Cornwell’s success, due mainly to the compulsive power of his writing, is also due to his subject matter and the realistic atmosphere he creates. His research is often painstaking, as was demonstrated when he called upon old colleagues in SIS to entertain him while preparing The Honourable Schoolboy, his tale of plots and intrigue set in the Far East and based in part on the remarkable Alexis Forter.

Cornwell’s portrayal of intelligence officers in a poor light did little to enhance his popularity within British Intelligence; John Bingham, the colleague he acknowledged as the model for the fictional character of George Smiley, was particularly infuriated. Cornwell wrote a semiautobiographical book, The Naive and Sentimental Lover, but has gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent others, including the biographer Graham Lord, from writing about him. His official, approved biographer is to be the novelist Robert Harris.

CORPORATE. Code name for the military operation to recover the Falkland Islands after they were occupied by an Argentine invasion force in April 1982. A Royal Navy task force was deployed to the South Atlantic and recaptured the islands two months later.

CORPS OF GUIDES. Following the success of the French Corps des Guides, especially during Napoleon’s campaign in Italy, a British version was established in March 1797 and deployed initially along the south coast to warn of a French invasion. Composed of men with a local knowledge, the Corps of Guides was an elite unit undertaking reconnaissance and intelligence-collection missions. The Corps of Guides was to serve during the Peninsula War, in India, and in South Africa.

COSTANTINI, FRANCESCO. Employed by the British ambassador in Rome, Sir Eric Drummond, until his dismissal in 1936, Francesco Costantini copied large quantities of diplomatic cables and Foreign Office cipher books and sold them to the Italian military intelligence service (SIM) and the NKVD. Even after he had been sacked, he was able to gain access to the embassy through his brother Secondo, who kept his job as a trusted embassy servant throughout the war. Codenamed DUDLEY by the Soviets, Costantini was betrayed by Walter Krivitsky as having spied since 1924. After the war, Count Ciano’s Dairies revealed the leak, causing a statement to be made in the House of Commons in December 1947.

COSTI, KYRIACOS. A 27-year-old Greek Cypriot tailor and Communist Party of Great Britain member, Kyriacos Costi was convicted of offenses under the Official Secrets Act in December 1971 and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. Costi had acted as a Soviet agent for the KGB defector Oleg Lyalin and had been arrested with Constantinos Martianon when Lyalin had identified them to MI5.

COTTENHAM, MARK. The sixth Earl of Cottenham, succeeding his brother to the title in 1922, Mark Cottenham was an enthusiastic driver and pilot. After leaving Charterhouse, he worked for the aviation department of Vickers and joined the racing teams of Alvis and Sunbeam. In the House of Lords, he was an enthusiastic advocate of the rights of the motorist and in 1937 was appointed adviser to the Metropolitan Police’s driving school. When war broke out, he was commissioned into the Leicestershire Yeomanry and worked for the Security Service in its transport department. This exclusive unit comprised Jock Horsfall, another racing driver and former member of the Bentley team, and Joan Wheatley. Reference to Cottenham’s role in MI5 is to be found in Joan Miller’s One Girl’s War, but his clandestine career was to be short-lived as he was opposed to war with Germany; he moved to the United States in 1941, where he died two years later, aged 40. Cottenham had divorced his wife in 1939 and left behind two novels, All Out and Sicilian Circuit; numerous books about motoring, including the Steering-Wheel Papers; and a travel book based on his experiences in North America in 1937, Mine Host, America.

COUNTER-CLANDESTINE COMMITTEE. An interagency committee created immediately after World War II to coordinate the work of MI5, the Secret Intelligence Service, and GCHQ in the field of illicit signals. The committee’s objective was to pool experience in relation to Soviet radio communications so overt broadcasts could be monitored and spies identified.

COUNTERESPIONAGE. Responsibility for counterespionage operations lie primarily with the Security Service, although inevitably the Secret Intelligence Service and GCHQ occasionally encounter evidence of hostile activity and investigate it. During World War II, counterespionage was acknowledged as an interagency discipline that overlapped different organizations, and in 1942 it was the motive for an attempt at amalgamation, which ultimately was rejected.

COUNTER-GANGS. One of the more controversial tactics adopted by British Intelligence during the Palestine Mandate was the introduction of “counter-gangs” intended to intimidate the Irgun terrorists. Led by the former director of combined operations, General Sir Bernard Fergusson, the counter-gangs were accused of assassinations and abductions, the same strategy applied by their adversaries. Two teams of 10 men each, led by Alistair MacGregor from the Secret Intelligence Service and Roy Farran from 2nd Special Air Service regiment, were deployed against the Irgun, but the policy was abandoned after the abduction and murder of an Irgun suspect, Alexander Rubinowitz. Farran was charged with the murder in October 1947 but fled to Damascus; Fergusson persuaded him to return to face a court-martial, which subsequently acquitted him.

COUNTERINTELLIGENCE. The discipline devoted to penetrating the adversary’s intelligence structure and protecting one’s own organization is known as counterintelligence, and within British Intelligence, responsibility for such operations has been divided between the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Confusingly, before and during World War II, SIS’s counterintelligence section was designated Section V, the Roman numeral five being the cause of considerable misunderstanding and confusion for outsiders.

COUNTERTERRORISM. Responsibility for countering terrorism in the United Kingdom traditionally has been in the hands of the police but in December 1989, under the terms of the Security Service Act, MI5 was given the lead role, and the Terrorism Act (2000) enabled the home secretary to proscribe certain named groups or their fronts, such as Fatah, Hamas, and Hezbollah, and to close their bank accounts. The list of proscribed groups extends from the obvious, such as Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, to the Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK), the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (the DHKP/C) in Turkey, and even more obscure Macedonian, Albanian, Chechen, and Kashmiri rebels.

Some of these groups are generic and accommodate numerous splinter groups, in much the same way that the Palestinian cause attracts activists from across the spectrum, with some, such as Shaqaqi (Palestinian Islamic Jihad) and the Abu Nidal Organization (also known as Fatah-Revolutionary Council and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command), rejecting the authority of the Palestine Liberation Organization. All are active in London with, for example, Abu Nidal preferring to transfer funds through local banks, including the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which first came to the attention of the authorities in a terrorist money-laundering context and not the outright fraud that eventually led to its collapse.

Similarly, Kashmiris are highly fragmented, with four principal organizations operating in England. The largest is the Lashkar-e-Tay-yaba (LT), which operates covertly behind the front of a political wing, the Markaz Dawa al-Irshad. The LT, which fights for the establishment of an Islamic state, is primarily focused on the Indian forces in Kashmir, but in 1998 declared a jihad against the United States following the first American air raids on Afghanistan. The Harakat Mujahadeen (previously called the Harakat ul-Ansar) undertakes bombing campaigns in India and has also abducted Western tourists. In December 1999 it hijacked an Indian Airlines flight and successfully negotiated the release of some of its imprisoned members. The Jaish-e-Mohammed is led by Mazud Azhar, who has expressed an ambition to unite all the Kashmiri Islamic groups; he is also committed to the jihad against the United States. The Jaish is of particular interest to MI5 as a British passport holder, of Pakistani origin, was arrested by the Indian police in Srinigar and charged with terrorist offenses, the implication being that he had been recruited and trained in Britain.

Sikh secessionists, dedicated to an independent Khalistan within the Punjab, either support the International Sikh Youth Federation, which plots assassinations in India but does not have any quarrel with Western interests, or the Babbar Khalsa (BK), a potent group created in 1978 that has been engaged in terrorism continuously ever since. The BK is regarded as having been responsible for the 1985 Air India incident, and it has killed numerous Indian officials in the Punjab. The BK engages in recruitment and fundraising within the émigré Sikh community and is known to have planned the assassination of Indian officials visiting Britain.

The largest other non-Islamic group active in Britain is the Tamil Tigers (LTTE), who have never sought to extend the conflict to establish an independent state, Eelam, which began in 1983, outside Sri Lanka, apart from the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. This single example was intended to stop India’s support of the Colombo government, and the LTTE’s activities in London are quite overt, with much emphasis on fundraising, prompting frequent protests from the Sri Lankan Embassy.

Altogether, MI5 monitors 21 separate nondomestic organizations that are the subject of proscription in the United Kingdom and keeps a further unknown number under discreet surveillance. Some pose minimal threat in London, such as the Abu Sayyaf Group, based in the Philippines, which has a history of seizing Western hostages and is known to have links to Libya and bin Laden. Aum Shinrikyo (“Supreme Truth”), which released deadly Sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo subway in March 1995 and killed five passengers, is essentially a religious sect established in 1987 by Shoko Asahara. The cult has global ambitions and at one time was a recognized religion that contested elections in Japan. After being outlawed in 1995, it has spread abroad and claims many thousands of adherents in a dozen countries, including Britain. The other Japanese group on MI5’s list is the Japanese Red Army (JRA), led by the elusive Fusako Shigenobu and based in the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. The JRA’s bloody history dates back to a massacre at Lod Airport in 1972, and its support of the Palestinian cause spreads into a wider, anticapitalist, anti-imperialist field.

Among the other Asian terrorist groups are the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), dedicated to the removal of President Karimov from Tashkent. Although the IMU has only limited support within the Muslim community of Uzbekistan, which comprises 85 percent of the population, and mainly conducts its terrorism with car bombs, it is represented in London.

Apart from the 14 Irish groups on the British proscribed list, the two principal European terrorist organizations active in the United Kingdom are the Basque separatists of ETA, who are known to have been in contact with the Provisional Irish Republican Army, and the Greek 17 November Revolutionary Organization, often known as N17 and named after a 1973 student uprising against the military dictatorship. N17 has its Marxists roots in Athens and has not been active outside Greece, but it has a history of assassinating journalists and Western personnel, among them a British military attaché, Brigadier Stephen Saunders, shot dead in June 2000, and the Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Athens, Dick Welch, murdered in 1975. The organization’s entire membership was convicted and imprisoned in 2004.

Of all these groups, it is the religious fundamentalists that provide the hardest targets. The English cells of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, its rival al-Gama‘at al-Islamiya (responsible for the deaths of 65 tourists in Luxor in November 1997), and the Islamic Army of Aden are hard to penetrate with outsiders, and the opportunities to recruit insiders are very limited.

Another difficult problem to solve is the tendency of these volatile, politically motivated groups to develop offshoots, such as the Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC) that split from the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) in 1998. Both remain committed to a civil war in Algeria that has gone largely unreported in the West and has resulted in the deaths of an estimated 50,000 people. Like the GIA, the GSPC is particularly active in France, indulging in “commuter terrorism” from London, much to the frustration of MI5’s French counterpart, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire.

While the Security Service enjoys extensive liaison contacts overseas, with official links to nearly a hundred other foreign police and security agencies, it occasionally encounters a degree of state sponsorship, the best example being that of Hezbollah (“Party of God”), which has been directed from Tehran. Like Abu Nidal, which has attacked British targets on 17 occasions, Hezbollah attracts special attention from MI5 because in the past it kidnapped three Britons in the Lebanon. While Libya has renounced its sponsorship of terrorism, chiefly as a result of the isolation imposed after the destruction of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, Iran’s role remains ambiguous, and Hezbollah retains plenty of adherents in British mosques. Accordingly, surveillance on Iranian and Syrian diplomatic missions is as intensive now as when Somalia was providing Carlos the Jackal with a safe haven in Khartoum. See also SPECIAL AIR SERVICE.

COUNTRY CODES. Before and during World War II, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) adopted a system of two-digit numeric codes to identify particular countries. By 1940 it was so compromised that it was said a group of Abwehr officers in Lisbon had been heard singing “Zwefland, Zwelfland uber Alles” in a public acknowledgment that the number 12 had been assigned to Germany. The other numbers were: 11, Bulgaria; 13, Belgium; 14, Romania; 15, Hungary; 16, Iceland; 18, Turkey; 19, Denmark; 21, Finland; 22, Great Britain; 23, Spain; 24, Portugal; 27, France; 29, Czechoslovakia; 32, Italy; 33, Holland; 34, Siberia; 35, Yugoslavia; 36, Sweden; 37, Japan; 38, Poland; 44, Austria; 45, United States; 47 Ukraine; 75, South America; and 96, Soviet Union.

In addition, SIS designated numbers to personnel posted overseas, based on the same system, so 14000 would be the station commander in Bucharest, and the deputy commander in Rome was 32100. Thus an agent recruited by the Section V officer in Madrid would be likely to have a number like 235001.

COVENTRY RAID. The Luftwaffe launched a devastating attack on Coventry in November 1940 despite British knowledge of the navigation system used by the enemy to guide their bombers to their targets and the ability to “bend the beams” along which the aircraft flew. The messages indicating the VHF frequencies on which the beams were to be transmitted were encrypted on an Enigma cipher regularly read at Bletchley Park, but on this occasion the wrong frequency was passed to 80 Wing, the Royal Air Force (RAF) unit responsible for ASPIRIN, the countermeasure used to distort the enemy’s signal and divert the raiders away from their targets. Information gathered by Air Intelligence at the PoW interrogation center at Trent Park, Cockfosters, suggested an imminent massed attack codenamed MOONLIGHT SONATA would be directed against a city in the Midlands, and the RAF was confident that the date and precise target would be revealed by ULTRA in good time for the countermeasures to be deployed. However, in the event, ASPIRIN failed, and the mistaken belief grew that British Intelligence had allowed the raid to proceed in order to protect the ULTRA source. This myth was given wide circulation by Fred Winterbotham and Anthony Cave Brown, but was disproved by Sir Harry Hinsley’s official history.

COVERT HUMAN INTELLIGENCE SOURCE (CHIS). The police prefer not to use the term “agent,” so the managerial term for a human source is referred to by the acronym CHIS.

COWELL, GERVASE. The Secret Intelligence Service station commander in Moscow in 1962, Gervase Cowell acted as Oleg Penkovsky ’s case officer but was expelled when the GRU colonel was arrested. It later emerged that Cowell had been compromised by George Blake before he had even left London on his assignment and was under constant covert KGB surveillance wherever he went. Fortunately, his contact with Penkovsky was limited to a clandestine encounter at a party held inside the British embassy. In his retirement, Cowell was the Special Operations Executive adviser at the Foreign Office.

COWGILL, FELIX. A former Indian Army officer, Cowgill joined the Secret Intelligence Service in the early 1930s and was appointed head of Section V in 1940. He was skillfully outmaneuvered by Kim Philby. After the war, he took an administrative post in Germany.

CRABB, LIONEL. A pioneer scuba diver, Lieutenant Commander “Buster” Crabb was an expert in the removal of underwater munitions who was decorated for his work in Gibraltar during World War II. He died in April 1956 while undertaking a clandestine mission for the Secret Intelligence Service in Portsmouth Harbor, surveying the hull of the visiting Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze, prompting a diplomatic incident; major embarrassment for Prime Minister Anthony Eden, who had banned potentially risky operations during the official visit to London by Nikita Khrushchev and Marshal Bulganin; and an investigation headed by Lord Bridges. A badly decomposed body was recovered from the sea a year later and was buried as Crabb’s.

CRADOCK, SIR PERCY. Percy Cradock was appointed chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) in 1985 in succession to Sir Antony Duff, and he combined the post with his role as the prime minister’s foreign policy adviser, an innovative post initially held by Sir Anthony Parsons. Cradock, who was to hold both posts for eight and a half years until June 1992, had previously served as the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service’s Foreign Office adviser and head of the JIC’s Assessment Staff between 1971 and 1975, and therefore had an unrivaled knowledge of the intelligence community. After his retirement, Cradock wrote a history of the JIC, Know Your Enemy, and his memoirs, concentrating on his role in China and the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China.

CRESLOW MANOR. A powerful radio transmitter built in 1944 at Creslow Manor in Buckinghamshire provided Whaddon Hall with an additional link overseas. After World War II, it remained in operation for the Diplomatic Wireless Service until 1993.

CRETE. The first British clandestine mission to Crete in World War II was a joint Secret Intelligence Service (SIS)/Special Operations Executive (SOE) operation that landed from HMS Thunderbolt in October 1941. It was led by Jack Smith-Hughes, a barrister in peacetime who had only recently been evacuated from the island. Formerly in charge of the RASC field bakery in Canea, Smith-Hughes had been captured and placed in a camp at Galatas from which he quickly escaped with a group of friends. Together they formed a band of irregulars and had lived with Cretan sympathizers until being collected from the Preveli coast by a British submarine in August 1941. On his mission, to reestablish contact with the Cretans who had helped him and his companions, Smith-Hughes was accompanied by an Inter-Services Liaison Department wireless operator, Ralph Stockbridge, a Royal Corps of Signals noncommissioned officer and Cambridge graduate who had also successfully evaded the enemy before being evacuated to Egypt. They were followed in October by Monty Woodhouse.

Upon his return to Cairo after 10 weeks in the field, Smith-Hughes was placed in charge of SOE’s Cretan subsection. Although nominally under the command of John Stevens (and later Tony Simonds), “the Greek office and the Cretan office were completely independent of one another” and were respectively designated B6 and B5.

A sea route to Crete was maintained by “Skipper” Pool, a former Section D member and ex-merchant navy officer who had previously managed the local Imperial Airways seaplane terminal. Equipped with two caïques, the Escampador and the Hedgehog, manned by Michael Cumberlege and John Campbell, SOE initiated and maintained a regular link from Mersa Matruh, near Alexandria, Egypt, to the secluded beaches scattered along Crete’s southern coastline. Xan Fielding attempted to use this method late in December when he was infiltrated into western Crete with a seven-man team consisting of a wireless operator, Reg Everson; an Australian sergeant, Guy Delaney; a World War I veteran named Guy Turrell; and four Cretan graduates of the Haifa Special Training School, but bad weather had dictated the employment of a submarine, HMS Torbay.

By the middle of 1942 Crete had been divided into three sectors, each commanded by an SOE officer. Patrick Leigh Fermor and an Australian, Tom Dunbabin, the former assistant director of the British School of Archeology in Athens, would join Fielding, together with another wireless operator, Sergeant Alec Starves. Later, Fielding was replaced by Smith-Hughes’s staff officer, Dennis Ciclitira, and a New Zealander, Sergeant Dudley (“Kiwi”) Perkins, who was killed in a German ambush in February 1944.

The kinds of political problems that were to hamper SIS and SOE perpetually in Crete were manifested at an early stage when a three-man, all-Greek SIS team led by Stelio Papaderos abandoned its mission to set up a radio in the White Mountains because of what were politely termed “irreconcilable differences.” Papaderos was evacuated to Cairo, leaving in the field his two Inter-Services Liaison Department colleagues, who had insisted on limiting their local recruits to only EAM/ELAS supporters. The island’s ELAS commanders were determined to thwart SIS and SOE, partly because of the reprisals inflicted upon the local civilians, which made the British-sponsored resistance groups unpopular, but also because of the declared official British policy of supporting the eventual establishment of a democratic form of government, headed by a constitutional monarch. The Communists not only opposed the king’s return but also capitalized off other, more moderate republicans. Nor was opposition to the king’s return limited to the Communists. The rival EAM (National Liberation Front) was equally unenthusiastic about the prospect of the king’s return, although this was practically the only matter on which the two resistance organizations were agreed. Fielding admits to having been “naive enough to imagine that the two parties would cooperate in perfect amity,” but was to be disappointed. He recalls going “out of my way to meet and hold discussions with the rival leaders whenever I could. But every conference ended in the same way with the EAM supporters demanding that I arrange for arms to be dropped to them while at the same time refusing to accept my suggestions as to how those arms should be distributed and used.”

Betrayals were frequent and ELAS often deliberately wrecked plans by threatening to announce the whereabouts of British personnel to the enemy. At least one SOE wireless operator, a Cretan named Manoli, was sold to the Germans, and the feuding probably accounted for the deaths of several others, including two sergeant majors, a Coldstreamer, and a New Zealander attached to an SOE mission led by Ciclitira. This perpetual conflict, combined with a complete disregard for security, “where careless talk was the rule rather than the exception,” and the very high proportion of airdropped supplies lost made Crete extremely dangerous. Many of these losses were accounted for by the inhospitable terrain, but theft was also a significant factor. Mission leaders, who naturally were obliged to organize reception committees, found it difficult to persuade their more enthusiastic recruits to be discreet, and the majority of parachuted containers routinely went missing after each drop.

The continuing rivalry in Cairo between Edward Dillon’s SIS section and SOE jeopardized efficiency, although relations between the missions on the ground were always good, chiefly because the chronic shortage of wireless operators and sets obliged each organization to rely to some extent on cooperation from the other. In September 1942, communications became so desperate that Flight Sergeant Joe Bradley, a radioman who had bailed out over Crete from a stricken bomber during a raid on the Kastelli airfield, was co-opted by an SOE mission and retained as its wireless operator, rather than being passed down an MI9 line for repatriation.

SOE’s first major operation, conceived in 1942, was designed to wreck German plans to refloat HMS York, which was lying damaged in Suda Bay. The enemy was rumored to be about to refloat the battleship, and the Royal Navy was especially anxious to prevent this from happening. The selection of Arthur Reade as the saboteur gives credence to Fielding’s belief that the entire operation had been accepted by Brigadier Keble, SOE Cairo’s unpopular chief of staff, merely to remove a troublesome staff officer from Cairo—as Reade happened to be entirely unsuited for the task, being 40 years old, “a poor swimmer and ignorant of the technicalities of marine sabotage.” In addition, Reade’s responsibilities at Rustum Buildings were particularly sensitive, for he was the head of the section dealing with the recruitment, welfare, and accommodation of agents and therefore had enjoyed access to the most secret categories of information, including the true identities of individual agents. Reade was landed “blind” in Crete by Greek submarine, the Papanicholis, in November 1942, but his mission proved quite impossible and he was withdrawn six months later, “dismissed by the service and sent back in ignominy to England.” Instead, HMS York was left to the attention of the Royal Air Force—an altogether more practical remedy.

CRIMEAN WAR. When the Crimean campaign began in September 1854, the British Army was ill prepared and devoid of any intelligence organization. In each of the first three major battles, at Alma, Balaclava, and Inkerman, the infantry and cavalry were taken by surprise. Lord Raglan’s intelligence adviser was Charles Cattley, a former British vice consul at Kerch who had been born in St. Petersburg and spoke fluent Russian, French, and Italian. Because he was well known in the Crimea, Cattley adopted the alias “Mr. Calvert” and acted mainly as an interpreter, interrogating enemy prisoners: Nevertheless, he soon recruited some Turkish agents in the besieged city of Sebastopol even though, as the official history noted, “The gathering of knowledge by clandestine means were repulsive to the feelings of an English Gentleman.” In 1855 Cattley was appointed head of intelligence and made responsible for assessing the enemy’s strength, morale, and ammunition reserves, but he died of cholera in July, leaving Raglan’s successor, General Simpson, without any military intelligence capacity.

The intelligence failures of the Crimea were exacerbated by a continuous leakage of sensitive information to newspaper correspondents, who were not subject to censorship, and an efficient Russian intelligence organization that could operate with impunity in the absence of any counterintelligence measures taken by the British. In the 12 years following the war, investigations were conducted by 17 Royal Commissions, 18 Parliamentary Select Committees, 19 War Office committees, and 35 Special Committees, reaching conflicting conclusions about why the army had fared so badly and been so ill prepared.

CROCKER, SIR WILLIAM CHARLES. A distinguished solicitor and future president of the Law Society, William Charles Crocker traced the notorious prewar London fireraisers and identified a West End wigmaker, Willie Clarkson, as one of the culprits responsible for 11 separate insurance claims. Crocker accumulated enough evidence for him to be prosecuted in October 1934, but Clarkson died before he could be convicted and the case dragged on for another four years until Crocker proved that Clarkson’s will had been forged and his fellow conspirator, William Hobbs, was imprisoned for insurance fraud.

Crocker’s reputation as a skilled investigator with excellent contacts in Scotland Yard was established by this episode, which was concluded by Lloyd’s and the other insurance companies being repaid. In May 1940, when Winston Churchill sacked MI5’s elderly director-general, Sir Vernon Kell, he appointed Crocker, together with Sir Joseph Ball and Lord Swinton, to a highly secret committee, the Home Defence (Security) Executive, to supervise the transformation of the Security Service from a hidebound peacetime organization into a body more appropriate for the task of combating Nazi subversion and espionage. Crocker died in September 1973, but not before he had written two volumes of memoirs, Far from Humdrum (1967) and Tales from the Coffee House (1973).

CROSS, JOHN. In January 1941, shortly before the fall of Singapore, the regional chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in Malaya, Major Rosher, inserted a group of volunteers into the Malayan jungle equipped with radios and instructions to report on enemy troop movements. The first party, led by Major James Barry, included John Cross, a sergeant from the Royal Corps of Signals who had arrived in the Far East from Catterick only three months earlier. Cross had been called up at age 29, while he was working for a firm of chartered accountants in London.

Operating under SIS’s military cover of the Inter-Services Liaison Department, Rosher had established a training school designated STS 101 on an island outside Singapore. There, in anticipation of a Japanese invasion, he had supervised the transformation of selected Chinese members of the Malayan Communist party from political activists into well-armed saboteurs. The mission he entrusted to Major Barry was to lead a team of three SIS volunteers, assisted by some Chinese communists chosen by the Malay Special Branch, into the forest to report on enemy troop movements. Known as “Station A,” it was to form a radio net with similar outposts on Java and in Rangoon and make regular reports to SIS’s main receiving center at Kranji.

The plan went wrong almost from the beginning when the Japanese swept through the supposedly impenetrable jungle and outmaneuvered the disorganized British defenses. Kranji was evacuated just before Singapore surrendered, leaving Barry and his mission isolated in the jungle for a harrowing three years. Racked by disease and cut off from the outside world, Barry slashed his wrists in mid-July 1944, leaving Cross in charge of what remained of his party. In April 1945 they eventually linked up with Major J. V. Hart of MINT and reestablished contact with the Inter-Services Liaison Department in Ceylon, which had long given up Barry’s mission for lost. By the end of the following month, they were aboard HMS Thule and heading for Fremantle, where they received a hero’s welcome and a Distinguished Conduct Medal.

After a brief period of recuperation, Cross was brought back to London and returned to civilian life, but he continued to correspond with the Chinese friends who, by their membership in the Communist party, had become opponents of the British colonial presence in Malaya. Although invited to remain in SIS and return to Malaya under cover, Cross declined to do so, but he kept in touch with “the friends” whenever he traveled abroad.

Although self-educated, from a humble background in Acton, Cross was an exceptional man, and Cross was not his true name. He had been born Valentine Frederick Hegelund to a bigamous Dane, the manager of a cinema in North London who later ran off to California. His stepfather, determined to erase all trace of his natural parent, transformed him into John Cross. A committed Socialist, he later ran a woodworking business in Abingdon, worked for a wire wholesaler in London, and ended up as a credit controller in an employment agency he started in Bletchley. Cross published an account of his grueling experiences in 1957 and thereby became the first SIS agent of World War II to write about his contribution to the secret war.

CROSSBOW. Code name of the Whitehall committee created in 1943 by Winston Churchill to collate all intelligence relating to Adolf Hitler’s secret weapons, from sources that included ULTRA, PoW interrogations, agent reports, and photographic imagery. Chaired by Churchill’s son-in-law, Duncan Sandys, the committee gave an accurate assessment of the construction and capabilities of the V-1 “doodlebug” and the V-2 ballistic missile. One member of the committee, Colonel Kenneth Post, was later considered by MI5 to be a good candidate for a GRU spy in London codenamed RESERVIST.

CROZIER, BRIAN. As he left the Economist in February 1964, Brian Crozier, formerly of Reuter’s News Agency and the News Chronicle, recalls that “within days” he had been “approached by two secret services, and within weeks by a third. I already had three BBC contracts, with the French, Spanish and Latin American services, and a one-year contract with The Sunday Times.” The offer from the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) came through Frank Rendle, “who wanted me to know that he hoped I would continue to provide occasional material that I might pick up in the course of my work and my travels. He even hinted that his ‘firm’ might on occasion contribute traveling expenses.”

Crozier took up Rendle’s offer and was later to make the transition from agent and source to contract officer, with an office in SIS’s dreary new headquarters in a South London tower block, Century House. His reputation as an author specializing on neocolonialism gave him immediate and enviable entree across the globe, and when he was commissioned to write General Francisco Franco’s biography, Maurice Oldfield mischievously suggested after lunch at the Atheneum that he might take advantage of his visits to the Spanish Foreign Ministry to place a listening device under the desk of a senior official. “I declined without hesitation,” Crozier recalled in his autobiography Free Agent, “partly because I thought I would be extremely vulnerable to detection, but also because I did not think the potential gains were of sufficient interest to justify the risk. The only matter of interest to Century House seemed to be the Spanish attitude to Gibraltar, on which my own views were neither pro-British nor pro-Spanish.”

Overtly, Crozier maintained the role of a freelance journalist, and in 1966 he was one of the founders of Forum World Features (FWF), a press agency handling news stories with a discernible political stance. In reality FWF was subsidized first by SIS and then by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Crozier, an Australian by birth, reported directly to a CIA case officer.

CUCKNEY, SIR JOHN. Educated at Shrewsbury and St. Andrew’s University, John Cuckney served in the royal Northumberland Fusiliers and the King’s African Rifles during World War II and joined MI5 in 1945. Until the British withdrawal from the Suez Canal Zone, Cuckney was the defence security officer at Ismailia, Egypt. In 1957 he went into business and was appointed chairman of numerous large companies, among them Brooke Bond, John Brown, Thomas Cook, and Westland Helicopters. In 1992 he led an investigation into the disappearance of the pension funds looted by Robert Maxwell and received a life peerage in 1995.

CURRENT INTELLIGENCE GROUP (CIG). Since 1968 the Assessment Staff of the Joint Intelligence Committee has been organized into CIGs, composed on geographic or geopolitical lines and composed of a small number of seconded analysts. Permanent CIGs include the Latin American CIG and the Afghan CIG.

CURWEN, CHRISTOPHER. Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) from 1985 to 1988, Christopher Curwen was the son of a vicar and was educated at Sherborne School. After joining the 4th Queen’s Hussars in 1948 at the age of 19, he graduated from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. In July 1952 he joined SIS, and two years later, in August 1954, Curwen was posted to Thailand, where he became fluent in Thai. In July 1956 he was moved to Vientiane, Laos, where he married his first wife, Vera Noom Tai, a physiotherapist by whom he was to have a son and two daughters. In October 1958, Curwen returned to Broadway. In 1961 he returned to Bangkok, followed by two years in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In 1965 he was posted to London, and in May 1968 was appointed SIS’s liaison officer in Washington, D.C., for three years, finally returning to London in February 1971. In 1977, having divorced Noom and married Helen Stirling, by whom he was to have a son and a daughter, he went to Geneva as head of station. Curwen came back to London in May 1980 as the SIS’s deputy chief, succeeding Colin Figures in July 1985 with no publicity until The Sunday Times published his profile.

Curwen supervised the exfiltration from Moscow of SIS’s star source inside the KGB, Oleg Gordievsky, and was to remain in his post for just four years, a period when he dealt with only one foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe. In November 1988, he succeeded Figures as the intelligence coordinator to the Cabinet, and he finally retired in 1991, taking on a part-time role as a member of the Security Commission, a body that became redundant when the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee was created three years later, being replaced as coordinator by the retiring deputy chief, Gerald Warner.

CURZON STREET HOUSE. Formerly the Ministry of Education, Curzon Street House was strengthened immediately prior to World War II and in 1973 provided office accommodation for MI5, with half of the spaces dedicated to telephone interception and occupied by British Telecom engineers. The site was demolished in 1993.

CX. The symbol used to indicate a report of the Secret Intelligence Service when circulated in Whitehall, having originated with the first chief, Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming.

CZECH DEUXIÈME BUREAU. Headed by Colonel Frantisek Moravec, the Czech Deuxième Bureau was transferred to London in March 1939. It maintained a good relationship with the Secret Intelligence Service, but its links with the MY Section of Special Operations Executive (SOE) were strained to the point that SOE considered suspending operations into the Protectorate in 1943 because of a lack of knowledge about local conditions. Reprisals following ANTHROPOID inhibited activity and cooperation, and eventually in 1944 two British military missions, MANGANESE and MICA, were established in Slovakia, supported from September 1940 by WINDPROOF, which had been intended for Hungary.

CZECH INTELLIGENCE SERVICE (StB). The Czech Intelligence Service acted throughout the Cold War as a surrogate for the KGB and was particularly effective in London, where its personnel succeeded in identifying and exploiting the Czech origins of sources such as Nicholas Prager and Sir Barnett Stross, MP. The defections of Frantisek August and Josef Frolik in 1969, both experienced StB officers with firsthand knowledge of operations in England, provided MI5 with an unprecedented window into the organization.

–D–

D DIVISION. (1) The wartime MI5 section responsible for port security and travel control headed by Colonel John Adam. D Division was subdivided into:

D1(a), responsible for exit and military permits, headed by Captain W. S. Mars

D4(b), responsible for port intelligence, headed by Colonel C. H. Burne

D4(c), responsible for port security, headed by Commander Burton

D4(d), responsible for visas, headed by Commander Cazalet

D4(e), responsible for liaison with the Home Office and Passport Office, headed by Colonel John Adam

D4(1), based at MI5 headquarters in London

(2) The cover-name for the deception unit in Lord Louis Mountbatten’s Far East command during World War II, headed by Peter Fleming.

D NOTICE. A voluntary censorship scheme restricting the news media in Britain from making disclosures that might damage British national security. Introduced in 1912, the system identifies specific topics upon which editors are requested to seek advice before publishing information that might compromise British secrets.

In 1971 the system was consolidated into 12 D Notices: Notices 1–7 deal with military information that might be of use to an enemy, 8 covers the identification of civil defense sites, 9 deals with radio and radar transmission, 10 requests secrecy for the identities of MI5 and Secret Intelligence Service personnel, 11 protects codes and ciphers, and 12 was issued to conceal the whereabouts in Australia of the KGB defector Vladimir Petrov and his wife Evdokia.

The existence of D Notices, issued by the Defence, Press, and Broadcasting Committee, was disclosed in February 1967 when the D Notice Secretary, Colonel Sammy Lohan, mistakenly authorized the veteran Daily Express defense correspondent, Chapman Pincher, to publish a claim that the government routinely read copies of all the country’s incoming and outgoing private and commercial cable traffic. In fact the government had done so since 1920 under the authority of the Official Secrets Act.

DABBAGH, COLONEL AL-. Until 2003 the commander of one of four Iraqi air defense units in the desert west of Baghdad, Colonel al-Dabbagh supplied the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) with information relating to weapons of mass destruction (WMD) during 2002, using contacts in the London-based Iraq National Accord, a group of exiled opponent of Saddam Hussein’s regime, as intermediaries. Colonel al-Dabbagh insisted that he had witnessed the delivery at night of a “secret weapon”—warheads containing toxic chemicals for handheld rocket-propelled grenades to be used on the battlefield by the Fedayeen and Special Republican Guard—and also provided details on the four factories, at Habbaniyah, al-Nahrawan, Nabbai, and al-Latifia, that had manufactured the warheads. His role as an SIS source, over seven years, was confirmed by his brother-in-law, retired General A. J. M. Muhie, who helped smuggle the information out of Iraq. Al-Dabbagh remained in Baghdad after the Coalition invasion and played a leading role in the Governing Council created as a temporary administration.

DACRE, LORD. See TREVOR ROPER, HUGH.

DAIL, WALTER. A former Special Branch detective sacked after the police strike of 1919, Walter Dail worked for William Ewer, a Daily Herald journalist and Soviet spy. He was arrested in April 1929 with Albert Allier, but was never charged. A raid on his flat provided proof that over the previous seven years he had routinely maintained surveillance on MI5, the Government Code and Cipher School, and Secret Intelligence Service offices in London and had received copious counterintelligence information from former Scotland Yard colleagues. Dail was a countersurveillance expert and succeeded in following one of the MI5 watchers deployed to keep Ewer under observation.

DALTON, HUGH. Appointed minister of economic warfare in Winston Churchill’s coalition administration in May 1940, Dr. Hugh Dalton took Cabinet responsibility for Special Operations Executive when it was created in July, with the prime minister’s famous exhortation to “set Europe ablaze.” For 18 months the Old Etonian socialist and barrister, who had graduated from King’s College, Cambridge, and had been elected to the House of Commons as the Labour MP for Peckham in 1924, supervised the development of “the racket” until he was replaced by the Earl of Selborne:

A future chancellor of the exchequer in Attlee’s postwar government, Dalton enthused about what he called “the secrets of my Black Life,” observing in his memoirs The Fateful Years:

Some thought that all “special operations” should be under the War Office, but this idea found little support. I said that it seemed to me that the War Office had more than enough on their plate already. Branches of M.I. were proliferating everywhere. What some of us had in mind was not primarily a military job at all. It concerned Trade Unionists and Socialists in enemy and enemy-occupied territories, the creation of Fifth Columns, of explosions, chaos and resolution. Some said that hitherto the Foreign Office had prevented all effective action in this field. One day, in my presence, George Lloyd said to Halifax with a laugh: “You should never be consulted, because you would never consent to anything. You will never make a gangster.”

Dalton established his own office in Berkeley Square House, appointing Christopher Mayhew as his personal liaison officer and Sir Frank Nelson as “CD.” Also on his staff at what he quoted Churchill as calling “the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” was Hugh Gaitskell, a future leader of the Labour party. His vision, as he told Lord Halifax, was to foment subversion on the Continent “comparable to the Sinn Fein movement in Ireland, to the Chinese guerrillas now operating against the Japanese, to the Spanish Irregulars who played a notable part in Wellington’s campaign.” Dr. Dalton died in February 1962.

DANISH SECTION. The Danish Section of Special Operations Executive (SOE), designated SD and headed by Ralph Hollingworth, did not succeed in getting an agent into Denmark until December 1941 when Mogens Hammer and Dr. Carl Buhn were dropped near Haslev. It was an inauspicious start, as the newly qualified medical doctor’s parachute failed to open properly and he was killed. He had been carrying the team’s radio, so Hammer was left for four months with no means of contacting London. Eventually the journalist Ebbe Munck was able to smuggle a replacement to him via Stockholm and he resumed contact in April 1942. Hammer was to become a key SOE organizer, and on 17 April 1942 he welcomed three newcomers: Christian Rottball and a pair of former ships’ radiomen, Paul Johannesen and Max Mikkelsen. In August three more SOE agents—Knud Petersen, Hans Hansen, and Peter Nielsen—joined them, but the network was broken up the following month after German radio direction-finders located Johannesen, and he committed suicide to avoid arrest. Rottboll also died, this time in a shootout with police, and the remainder of the group went underground, with Hammer escaping to London. Hammer returned to Denmark in October 1942 and linked up with Nielsen, who had stayed on, to find the other remaining agents, Petersen, Hansen, and Mikkelsen. However, when the three men were assembled and tried to get to Sweden by boat, they were captured by the police and handed over to the Germans. On this occasion a promise was extracted that they would not be executed, and they survived the war in concentration camps.

DANSEY, SIR CLAUDE. Born in October 1876, Claude Dansey was educated at Wellington and in Belgium and spent the next 18 years overseas, mainly in Africa, with the British South African Police. He then joined the British North Borneo Constabulary and later transferred to British Somaliland before being appointed, apparently in poor health, secretary of the Sleepy Hollow Country Club in New York. During World War I, Dansey served with MI5 and in April 1917 participated in an official delegation to the United States to brief senior American intelligence officers on the principles of secret service organization. By July 1917 Dansey was back in London, assigned the task of reorganizing the British Intelligence structure in Holland. This involved his transfer to the Secret Intelligence Service, and in February 1919 he was appointed chief of security to the Paris Peace Conference. In 1929 Dansey was appointed SIS’s station commander in Rome and later he was to develop the Z Organisation, which operated in Western Europe in parallel with the semitransparent network of passport control officers. Always abrasive, Dansey acquired a reputation as a ruthless professional with little time for Special Operations Executive and was promoted deputy chief to Stewart Menzies, retiring in 1944 to take a job with Sir Alexander Korda’s London Films. He died in June 1947, and his funeral was attended by a handful of wartime colleagues, among them Noel Coward.

DARLAN, EMILE. The pro-Nazi Admiral Emile Darlan was vice premier of the Vichy French government and was subsequently put in command of the Vichy forces by Pierre Laval. He happened to be in Algiers when the Allied invasion of North Africa occurred and had quickly decided to cooperate with the Allies. His previous politics, however, made him an awkward supporter for the British and American governments to deal with, and he certainly complicated their relations with Charles de Gaulle, who was deeply suspicious of him. On Christmas Eve 1942, Darlan was assassinated by a Special Operations Executive (SOE) weapons instructor, Lieutenant Fernand Bonnier de la Chapelle, who had been seconded to Ain Taya. De la Chapelle and his accomplice, Captain Gilbert Sabatier, had been assigned to MASSINGHAM and had been issued revolvers on the authority of David Keswick. It was one of these that de la Chapelle used to shoot the hated Admiral Darlan. A summary court-martial was held almost immediately and a French firing squad shot de la Chapelle two days later. Even as he was led to his execution, before dawn on Boxing Day, the 20-year-old refused to say where he had obtained the gun or name his coconspirators. Sabatier, who went missing after the murder, was arrested in January 1943 and charged with supplying de la Chapelle with his gun and plotting to overthrow the state. Somehow the British negotiated his release and the entire matter was discreetly dropped. For their part, the American Office of Strategic Services closed the camp at Ain Taya.

SOE’s complicity in the assassination has never been established, but the incident certainly helped the Allies in their dealings with the Vichy government. According to Sir Alexander Cadogan’s diary entry for 14 November 1942: “We shall do no good till we’ve killed Darlan.” Six days after the assassination, Cadogan wrote that he “went to see Pound to arrange telegram to Cunningham to deny charges that the Secret Service was in any way connected with Darlan murder.” The earlier entry demonstrates a willingness to contemplate drastic action against Darlan, whose right-wing politics were alienating the Communist resistance cells, even if the second appears to show that there was no British involvement. However, one unexplained aspect to the affair was the unusual appearance of Stewart Menzies in Algiers over the Christmas period. Fred Winterbotham recalls that he lunched with Georges Ronin and Louis Rivet, of the Deuxième Bureau and the Service de Renseignments, respectively, in a villa only “a few yards hundred yards away” from the scene. “With the coffee came the news that Darlan had been shot,” he wrote. “They could not have cared less.”

DARLING, DONALD. Donald Darling had worked for Z Organisation of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in France before the war, so it was no surprise when in July 1940 Claude Dansey, the assistant chief of SIS, asked him to act as repatriation officer in the Iberian peninsula, shepherding British military personnel home. His connections with SIS actually predated the war, for he had occasionally undertaken small jobs for them while he was operating as a travel courier in France and Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Once formally on SIS’s books, Darling was attached to the British embassy in Portugal in the guise of a consular official handling refugee affairs, as one of Philip Johns’s subordinates, and made a short visit to Madrid, where he received a frosty welcome from Sir Sam Hoare, the newly appointed ambassador. Hoare strongly disapproved of SIS operating on his territory and was convinced that SIS’s undiplomatic activities would jeopardize his task of keeping Spain neutral. Darling returned to Lisbon and spent the next two years based in the Portuguese capital, enabling Allied evaders to make the arduous journey from northern Europe, across enemy occupied zones and over the Pyrenees. One of the many agents Darling dispatched into France was the oil magnate Nubar Gulbenkian, who recalled his controller as “a very cheerful, intelligent and dedicated man who lived for his job. When one met him alone, he was very witty and an excellent raconteur. In company he sat like a clam.”

In May 1942 Darling moved to Gibraltar, which had become the focus of the escape lines. As a civilian assistant to the governor, he supervised the reception and interrogation of thousands of Allied personnel and arranged for their transport, either by ship or by air, back to England. Among those who were welcomed to the Rock were Captain Airey Neave, previously of Colditz Castle, and Erich Vermehren, the Abwehr defector recruited by Nicholas Elliott in Istanbul. Darling remained at Gibraltar until April 1944, when he was ordered back to London.

Late in the summer of 1944 Darling moved to Paris to supervise the winding-up of P.15’s networks, and later headed the awards office established to arrange for the organization’s membership to receive the appropriate recognition and thanks.

After the war Darling retained his connections with SIS and in October 1946 undertook a five-year assignment to São Paulo, Brazil, under consular cover. He was also in demand as a Portuguese interpreter, often receiving commissions to translate technical documents and contracts for the international diamond trade. Never having married, he died alone in London in reduced circumstances in December 1977.

Donald Darling’s autobiography, Secret Sunday, published in 1975, was among the first of the wartime memoirs of former SIS officers, in which he discreetly drew a veil over the identity of “4Z,” his first SIS contact, for whom he had worked intermittently in France and Spain before the war. However, he divulged the identity of Rudiger von Etzdorf, a German diplomat who defected to the British and subsequently became known as “Mr. Ellerman.” A second book, Sunday at Large, was published in 1977, covering his activities as MI9’s representative in Gibraltar in more detail.

DAVIDSON, BASIL. In March 1938 Basil Davidson was a witness to the Anschluss in Austria, and a year later he was in Paris reporting for the Economist. He was convinced war was inevitable but was recruited into Section D before he could join the army. He had traveled across much of Europe as a journalist and knew the Balkans, which apparently qualified him for an invitation to lunch at Simpson’s in the Strand with “a super-spy.”

Davidson joined Section D in December 1939 and was sent by train to Budapest to open a news agency as cover for more nefarious activities, the preparation of a resistance network. Unfortunately, events overtook Section D and in early April 1941 German troops entered Hungary, forcing Davidson to close down his operations and flee to Belgrade. There he was documented as a press attaché on the British diplomatic staff and evacuated to Rome in the company of several other Section D veterans. Upon his return to London, via Gibraltar, Davidson was absorbed into Special Operations Executive and then dispatched to Istanbul for staff duties with the Yugoslav Section.

After the war Davidson returned to journalism, working successively as Paris correspondent of the Times, Daily Herald, New Statesman, and Daily Mirror. He then took to academic work in Ghana and wrote a series of books about African history and culture. He also wrote two accounts of his wartime experiences, Partisan Story and Special Operations Europe, and made a few ventures into fiction, principally with Golden Horn, a curious Cold War tale set in Istanbul with British and American agents attempting to infiltrate Bulgaria. Davidson has been active in the antiapartheid movement and currently lives in North Wootton, Somerset, whence he continues to contribute articles to periodicals.

DAVIES, TROTSKY. Brigadier “Trotsky” Davies was the most senior Special Operations Executive (SOE) officer to be captured in the Balkans, although his knowledge of SOE’s operations was very limited. A regular officer, he had been mystified by his selection for clandestine work, and until he arrived in Cairo, he had believed he was destined for Yugoslavia. In comparison to the three other brigadiers leading British military missions in the region, Myers (in Greece) and Maclean and Armstrong (in Yugoslavia), Davies was a novice. Nor did he inspire confidence among his subordinates. When he dropped into Albania, where ammunition and all the basic necessities of life such as food were at a premium, he arrived complete with all the bureaucratic paraphernalia needed to run a regular battalion, including a clerk equipped with a typewriter. Nor were his diplomatic skills all they might have been. Two veterans of his command, David Smiley and Peter Kemp recall an awkward discussion led by Davies with a bemused Enver Hoxha regarding British regimental connections. The Communist guerrilla chief could not understand why officers from units with obvious royal connections, such as the Royal Horse Guards and the Royal Scots Greys, were fighting to preserve Socialism. Davies went through the list of his officers’ embarrassingly smart regiments and ended by reassuring Hoxha that his own, the Manchester regiment, was thoroughly plebeian. Davies, though badly wounded, endured Mauthausen concentration camp and Colditz to be liberated in 1945.

D-DAY. The invasion of Normandy by Allied forces on 6 June 1944, which succeeded in large measure because of a sophisticated deception campaign, codenamed FORTITUDE SOUTH, which persuaded the enemy that the long-expected landings would take place at the end of the month in the Pas-de-Calais.

DE GRAAF, JOHANN. Also known as “Jonny X,” De Graaf was a Comintern agent in Germany who volunteered to Frank Foley, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) station commander in prewar Berlin, to work for SIS. He subsequently provided a wealth of crucial intelligence, including contacts made while on a clandestine mission to London in 1934 under the alias of a wine merchant named Dink-meir, and details of Communist plans for a revolution in Brazil in 1936. SIS later exfiltrated De Graaf from Rio de Janeiro and resettled him in Canada at Brockville, on the shore of Lake Ontario, where he managed a motel and was used by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service as a human encyclopedia on Comintern operations. In 1987 journalist Robert Moss based his novel Carnival of Spies on De Graaf’s exploits.

DE GREY, NIGEL. The grandson of the fifth Baron Walsingham, and the son of a country parson, Nigel de Grey was educated at Eton. Instead of going to university, he had wanted to be a linguist, with the intention of joining the Diplomatic Service, but although he was fluent in French and German, he failed his examination in Italian and instead became a publisher, joining William Heinemann in 1907. Three years later he married his second cousin, Florence Gore, who bore him three children, John, Barbara, and Roger. At the outbreak of war he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and was posted to Belgium as an observer in the Balloon Section of the Royal Naval Air Service with the rank of flight sublieutenant. Early in 1915 he was transferred to the Naval Intelligence Division as a cryptographer, and it was while working in the Diplomatic Section of the organization known as Room 40, headed by Admiral Reginald Hall, that he solved the content of the German text known as the Zimmermann Telegram, the public disclosure of which in March 1917 helped to propel the United States into World War I. Later, in the spring of the same year, de Grey was assigned to Taranto and then Rome with the rank of lieutenant commander to run the Naval Intelligence Division’s Mediterranean Section, liaise with Italy’s director of naval intelligence, and focus on Austrian cipher traffic. He was later decorated with the Order of St. Maurice and St. Lazarus for his work in Italy and also appointed an OBE in 1918.

During the interwar period, de Grey headed the Medici Society, which published old master prints, and found time to indulge his many pursuits. He was a keen shot, loved working in his large garden in Iver, and was a good watercolorist and draftsman. As an amateur actor he was an enthusiastic member of the Old Stagers and the Windsor Strollers, and he played cricket during the Canterbury Cricket Week. In 1938, following a financial crisis at the undercapitalized Medici Society, de Grey lost his job, but a year later he was invited to join the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park to concentrate on German wireless traffic encrypted on the Enigma cipher machine. There he was joined by his sister Barbara, who met her future husband there, and by his son John, making the business of cryptography a very family affair. By the end of the war, de Grey was to become deputy director of GCHQ, leading a small, highly compartmented group of cryptographers at Eastcote working on the VENONA Soviet cable traffic, and to be appointed a CMG. Upon his retirement de Grey purchased a pottery in Huntingdonshire, but on the day he completed the sale, 25 May 1951, he dropped dead of a heart attack in Oxford Street.

DE JAEGER, ALBERT. A member of the Sicherheitsdienst in Lisbon, Albert de Jaeger defected to the British in October 1940 and was interrogated at Camp 020. Upon his release he was codenamed HATCHET.

DEAKIN, SIR WILLIAM. Educated at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford, Bill Deakin joined the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars in 1939 and was transferred to Special Operations Executive in 1940. In May 1943 he led the first British military mission to aid Tito in Yugoslavia and at the end of the war was appointed to the British embassy in Belgrade. A year later he was back at Oxford as a research fellow. There Deakin was appointed warden of St. Antony’s, a post he kept until his retirement in 1968. In 1964 he wrote The Case of Richard Sorge, and in 1971 he gave an account of his wartime adventures in Yugoslavia in The Embattled Mountain.

DEAN, SIR PATRICK. Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee during the Suez Crisis in 1956, Pat Dean participated in the covert negotiations with the French and Israelis at Sèvres prior to the invasion of Egypt. He was later appointed British ambassador to the United Nations and then ambassador in Washington, D.C. In 1972 Dean served on Lord Franks’s inquiry into Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act.

DEARDEN, HAROLD. One of the leading psychiatrists of his era, Dr. Harold Dearden was appointed MI5’s principal interrogator at Camp 020 and used his skills to persuade some of the most committed Nazis to work as double agents. A keen amateur photographer, Dearden took pictures of the bomb damage to the perimeter of Latchmere House after a Luftwaffe air raid and recorded Karel Richter’s return to Hertfordshire to recover his parachute.

Born in 1882, Dearden went up to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1900 to read medicine, and then to Guys to train and set up in private practice as a physician and psychologist. During World War I he joined the Grenadier Guards as medical officer and was wounded and invalided out during battle of the Somme. Between the wars, Dearden worked as a playwright and freelance journalist until he was invited to advise the Security Service. He married in 1944 and after the war retired to Hay-on-Wye, where he died in 1961.

DEARLOVE, SIR RICHARD. Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) from August 1999 to June 2004, Richard Dearlove had been David Spedding’s director of operations for the previous six years. Born in Cornwall, Dearlove was educated at Monkton Combe School, near Bath, and at Kent School, Connecticut, before reading history at Queen’s College, Cambridge. He joined SIS in 1966 and his first posting was to Nairobi in 1968, where he remained for three years during which his wife Rosalind bore him a son and a daughter. In 1973 he was appointed station commander in Prague, returning to London in 1976. In June 1980 he went to Paris as deputy station commander.

Following the terrorist attack on New York and Washington, D.C., on 11 September 2001, Dearlove flew to New York on the first Concorde allowed to land at JFK Airport to see for himself the remains of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Dearlove’s demands for additional funds were granted by a Labour government anxious to avoid accusations of starving the intelligence community of resources, and £4 million was immediately allocated to an Afghan Task Force to buy information and influence from the Taliban, which then controlled some of the al-Qaeda training camps. Unfortunately SIS’s principal asset in Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah Masood, the charismatic leader of the mujahedin in the Panshir Valley who had fought the Soviets with British equipment a decade earlier, was murdered by two suicide bombers posing as Moroccan television journalists two days before Osama bin Laden’s 11 September attack on the United States, requiring SIS to find new friends among the warlords of the Northern Alliance. Thereafter Dearlove developed a close relationship with the prime minister and frequently accompanied him on his overseas trips, including one to Camp David, where the chief almost participated in a press conference organized by the White House. His name was added to a list of senior officials accompanying President Bush and Prime Minister Blair, but he hastily withdrew at the last moment, protesting that he did not wish to be photographed.

The controversy that was to dominate Dearlove’s tenure as chief was SIS’s involvement in the preparation of two documents intended to justify the Blair government’s intention to go to war with Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein. The first document, drawn up in haste in September 2002, ostensibly by the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), and accompanied by a foreword written by the prime minister, purported to detail the threat posed by Iraq’s continued possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in defiance of successive UN Security Council resolutions. In particular, the paper reported that Iraq had been detected in several efforts to purchase nuclear material and components and had been prevented from buying uranium yellowcake in Niger, the third largest producer of that precious commodity. This latter assertion—passed by SIS to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and used by President Bush in his State of the Union address to Congress in January 2003—was later discovered to be fatally flawed. The evidence for the illicit procurement in Niger was a series of letters which, upon detailed examination by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, turned out to have been forged. The issue proved to be a great embarrassment for the CIA, with CIA director George Tenet taking personal responsibility for the inclusion of the 16 “offending words” in the president’s speech that should not have been included. Nevertheless, SIS insisted to the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee that it had acquired additional evidence of Iraq’s attempt to buy yellowcake in two other African countries, implying that the origin of the information had been an allied intelligence agency that had demanded its role remain confidential. The paper included a claim, made by a single unverified source, that Iraq’s WMD could be ready for deployment within 45 minutes of the order being given in Baghdad. However, the text in the September report presented the reference to 45 minutes as being the time in which British interests, the two sovereign bases in Cyprus, could come under attack once Saddam had taken the decision to launch.

The second paper, to become notorious as “the dodgy dossier,” was a document released by the government in February 2003 in an effort to justify the imminent coalition attack on Iraq. This publication was presented as an intelligence analysis, written and cleared by the JIC, setting out the current threat posed by Hussein’s regime, but it was quickly exposed as having been constructed from some open sources, among them a 10-year-old doctoral thesis written by a university student in the United States and apparently downloaded, without any attribution, from the Internet. A line-by-line comparison with the original version showed that it had been deliberately edited at Downing Street to exaggerate the threat from Baghdad. Worse, the chairman of the JIC, John Scarlett, complained that the dossier contained some authentic intelligence that had not been cleared for publication by the originating agencies. This issue was the subject of criticism in the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee’s annual report, released in June 2003, after the successful occupation of Iraq by the coalition.

Dearlove gave evidence for the Hutton Inquiry over a voice link from Vauxhall Cross and declared himself to be so pleased with the September dossier that he had proposed a vote of thanks for the JIC’s chairman. Under cross-examination Dearlove acknowledged that, with the benefit of hindsight, it had been inappropriate to have placed such emphasis on the controversial figure of 45 minutes. Dearlove’s testimony on this point was remarkable. He confirmed that the information had come from a single source, “equated to an Iraqi military officer,” and pointed out that much of SIS’s intelligence came from single sources, which did not necessarily devalue it. However, he also acknowledged that the reference to 45 minutes was in relation to battlefield artillery and mortar rounds, and not missile warheads—an admission that undermined the widely circulated assertion that the weapons had posed a direct threat to British interests. This had been taken to mean that Hussein could launch an attack with enhanced Scud missiles on the British sovereign bases in Cyprus within that short time period, but Dearlove completely undermined that proposition. Nevertheless, these unconvincing propositions served to undermine the integrity of the JIC and cast doubt on the extent to which Dearlove and Scarlett had succumbed to political pressure. Dearlove announced, in August 2003, before the end of the inquiry’s proceedings, that he had been offered the mastership of Pembroke College, Cambridge. There was immediate speculation that his Oxford-educated deputy, Nigel Inkster, would be his successor, but Scarlett was appointed instead.

DECEPTION. During World War I, deception was employed only occasionally as an expedient, not as an instrument of overall strategy, with the exception perhaps of camouflage, which was adopted universally. For example, the Royal Navy routinely disguised its warships and utilized “Q ships,” heavily armed merchantmen disguised as unprotected freighters, to entrap U-boats and the enemy’s surface raiders, some of which adopted the same tactics. Q ships were credited with sinking 11 U-boats during the course of the war.

However, during World War II deception as a technique was given full recognition, to the point that the chiefs of staff decreed that all future plans should have a cover plan to mislead the enemy. Accordingly, countermeasures were prepared for deflecting conventional intelligence-gathering methods such as aerial reconnaissance, wireless interception, and open-source literature. In addition, deception was institutionalized through the London Controlling Section, D Division in India, and “A” Force in the Middle East, to exploit what were termed “special means,” usually the manipulation of information reaching the enemy through double agents. After D-Day, a further deception channel, for the management of double agents developed on the Continent from the enemy’s stay-behind networks, was established within the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force under Dick White. The policy of recruiting double agents, coordinating their communications, and creating a sophisticated, integrated support system was a strategy unique to the Allies, having been introduced and refined by principally the Secret Intelligence Service and MI5.

Deception not only became accepted as an essential component of military planning but also achieved considerable success, as judged by the study of captured enemy documents and the interrogation of prisoners. During World War II the Axis consistently overestimated Allied strengths, failed to discern the true objectives of imminent offensives, and most famously misjudged the timing and the target of D-Day, largely as a consequence of the ruses encapsulated in FORTITUDE. See also GARBO.

DEFECTOR. Intelligence professionals who decamp to the opposition, regardless of their motives, are known as defectors, although some may be categorized as ideological defectors. The physical act of moving, as opposed to a mental commitment or political conversion, is the definition of a defector, so Bruno Pontecorvo, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Kim Philby may be accurately described as having defected, in 1950, 1951, 1951, and 1963, respectively. The fact that they spied prior to their departure does not make them “defectors-in-place,” a term that has no meaning within the intelligence community. Receipt of defectors is considered a good indication of the relative integrity of an intelligence agency, especially in the West during the Cold War. Thus, while the Central Intelligence Agency gained a steady stream of KGB (and some GRU) defectors throughout the 1950s and 1960s, MI5 gained no defectors between the arrival of Grigori Tokaev in 1948 and Oleg Lyalin in 1972, a failure regarded by the mole hunters as evidence of hostile penetration. Defectors may be debriefed over many years, although their initial interviews are considered to be the most valuable and the least likely to be affected by embroidery. Defectors to Great Britain and the United States may not necessarily be declared publicly at the time they are granted political asylum, but the intelligence product is usually shared, and during the resettlement process the defector is likely to be taken on a world tour of allied agencies to make his information and advice available to other counterintelligence experts.

DEFENCE GEOGRAPHIC AND IMAGERY INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (DGIA). Created by a merger between Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Centre at RAF Brampton and the School of Military Survey, the DGIA provides maps and imagery. It incorporates the Defence Geographic Centre at Feltham and the Geographic Engineer Group, based at Hermitage in Berkshire and Muchengladbach in Germany.

DEFENCE INTELLIGENCE ANALYSIS STAFF (DIAS). Responsible for defense intelligence assessments and strategic warning, the DIAS is a key component of the Defence Intelligence Staff and is headed by a civilian deputy chief of defense intelligence.

DEFENCE INTELLIGENCE AND SECURITY CENTRE (DISC). Created in 1996 and located at what had been RAF Chicksands Priory in Bedfordshire, the DISC provides triservice security and intelligence training.

DEFENCE INTELLIGENCE STAFF (DIS). Created by the amalgamation of the triservices into the Ministry of Defence in 1964, the DIS took responsibility for the collection, collation, analysis, and distribution of all types of military intelligence. The organization, amounting to 4,500 civilian and military personnel, with the majority based at the Old War Office Building in Whitehall, is headed by a chief of defense intelligence, drawn from one of the three armed services, who sits on the Joint Intelligence Committee as deputy chairman.

The DIS consists of the Defence Intelligence Analysis Staff and the Intelligence Collection Staff and produces a variety of publications, among them Air Intelligence Review, Technical Intelligence Digest, Army Weapons Intelligence Review, and the Naval Intelligence Report.

DEFENCE OF THE REALM ACT (DORA). The legal basis of the draconian powers of the Security Service in wartime is the Defence of the Realm Act, known as DORA, which allows for enemy aliens to be interned and other suspects to be detained without trial.

DEFENCE SECURITY OFFICER (DSO). The cover title for MI5’s representatives overseas attached to British forces during and after World War II in locations such as Aden, Asmara, Bermuda, Cyprus, Gibraltar, Habbaniyah, and Malta. The first was appointed in Singapore in 1936, followed by Hong Kong in 1937.

DEIGHTON, LEN. The son of the chauffeur to the keeper of prints and drawings at the British Museum, Len Deighton was born in London and attended Marylebone Grammar School. His first novel, The Ipcress File, was published in November 1962 and was an instant success, establishing Deighton, then working as a newspaper illustrator, as among the best of modern spy writers. Having graduated from the Royal College of Art and after national service in the Royal Air Force (RAF), Deighton found work as an airline steward with the British international airline BOAC. He never served in intelligence, although he acquired a knowledge of photo imagery while in the RAF.

Deighton’s invented organization, designated WOOG(P), is a small but important branch of British Intelligence and features in five of his thrillers. It was headed initially by a man named Dalby, who enjoyed access to the Cabinet but was exposed as a traitor and replaced by George Dawlish for the last three novels.

DELMER, SEFTON. When Sefton “Tom” Delmer returned to London from Paris, where he had been working as an accredited war correspondent, after the city fell in 1940, he found “a secret war job in a hush-hush department which was part of the glamorous Secret Service.” Born in Berlin to Australian parents, his father a lecturer in English literature at the University of Berlin, Delmer had been educated almost entirely in Germany. He had attended school throughout World War I while his father endured internment at Ruhleben, and at one point he was suspected of being a British spy. His family was released and repatriated in May 1917, but in 1921 his father, who had briefly represented the Daily Mail in Switzerland, returned to Germany as a member of the Inter-Allied Control Commission. Following his graduation from Lincoln College, Oxford, with a history degree, Delmer rejoined his parents in Berlin and, benefiting from a chance encounter with Lord Beaverbrook, was appointed in 1928 to the Daily Express office. There he concentrated on covering German politics and the rise of the Nazis, even accompanying Hitler on his 1932 election campaign.

Delmer was recruited into the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) at a lunch at Scott’s by an unnamed young officer “with an enviable first in Greats from Oxford” and was asked to monitor the activities of certain suspect American journalists who were in London to cover the Battle of Britain. But, as he recalled, “when I came to work on that first assignment, the whole thing petered out most prosaically. What little I did manage to discover did not fit in with any theory of espionage activities.” However, at the end of October 1940 he was sent to Lisbon, ostensibly on an assignment for the Daily Express, but in reality he reported to the local SIS station commander, Richman Stopford. His task was to debrief German Jews who had been wealthy enough to pay to escape to neutral Portugal, in transit for the United States. While they waited for their visas, Delmer interviewed them, helped by two recruits who were veterans of the International Brigade, Alexander Maass and Albrecht Ernst, the latter a left-wing German journalist and former chief of staff to General Emilio Kleber, the first leader of the International Brigade, whom Delmer had first met in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War.

Delmer later observed that his reports were “distributed to several hundred persons, read by no one, and then incinerated as secret waste” (unlike his Daily Express articles, which he thought were read by about 12 million before being used to light a fire). He remained in Lisbon until early the following year, when he was summoned back to London to be transferred from SIS to another highly secret organization, the Political Warfare Executive, which was preparing to broadcast to Germany from a clandestine radio station located at Woburn Abbey. Headed by banker Leonard Ingrams, whom Delmer “knew to have something to do with the cloak-and-dagger side of the war,” this early venture into psychological warfare consisted of a series of programs edited by Richard Crossman, who was to become a Labour cabinet minister. What subsequently was to be called “black radio” was then in its infancy, but the objective was to transmit anti-Nazi propaganda to Europe in German, in such a way as to deceive the listeners into believing that it was an authentic wireless station operating from within the Reich. The shortwave transmitters began broadcasting from a site at Milton Bryant in Bedfordshire: in late May 1941, spreading subversion intended to subtly undermine German morale and create dissention on the home front. From this early start, with programs recorded by anti-Nazi Germans in specially constructed studios located at Wavendon Tower, there developed a highly sophisticated propaganda offensive that was to do much to foment resistance to the Axis. Being almost more German than English, and certainly possessing a deep understanding of the German psyche, Delmer was to prove indispensable to Woburn.

DE MOWBRAY, STEPHEN. A graduate of New College, Oxford, Stephen de Mowbray joined the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in 1950, aged 25, and two years later was posted to Cairo. In 1953 he undertook a two-year tour in Baghdad, and then returned to Broadway. In 1957 he was appointed head of station in Montevideo, returning to London in 1961.

During his period in SIS’s counterintelligence branch, de Mowbray was indoctrinated into the mole hunts that had beset the Security Service. He acted as one of SIS’s two representatives on the FLUENCY Committee (on which Arthur Martin served for MI5), which investigated Soviet spy suspects. One of the cases he pursued was that of Donald Prater, whom he interviewed in New Zealand after the latter’s retirement from SIS, ostensibly on health grounds. De Mowbray transferred to Washington, D.C., in 1964 and succeeded the head of station there in 1966. He remained in the United States for a further two years and then came back to Broadway.

In June 1974 de Mowbray became concerned that evidence of Soviet penetration of the Security Service was being overlooked and decided to alert Prime Minister Harold Wilson. His visit to Downing Street, where he was received by the Cabinet secretary, sparked off the inquiry conducted by Lord Trend into the allegations made against Sir Roger Hollis. At the conclusion of his investigation, about which de Mowbray expressed severe reservations, Trend concluded that “there was no compelling evidence against Hollis, or even that MI5 had suffered hostile penetration.”

De Mowbray retired in 1975 to start a new family in Kent and later moved to West Africa. He helped edit Anatoli Golitsyn’s book New Lies for Old and embarked on an ambitious project to record a comprehensive chronology of the Soviet Union. In the July/August 1984 edition of Encounter, he contributed an article entitled Soviet Deception and the Onset of the Cold War.

DEMPSTER, FERGIE. Born in August 1915 in Tangier, Morocco, Fergus Dempster was working for Shell Oil in Venezuela when World War II broke out. He volunteered to join the Royal Navy and served on an armed trawler in the Adriatic, in support of Yugoslav partisans. After the war, Dempster joined the Secret Intelligence Service, working under consular cover in Barcelona for three years. In 1948 Dempster was appointed head of station in London. Later he replaced Maurice Oldfield at Combined Intelligence Far East in Singapore and became an expert on Communist insurgency movements in the region, serving in Saigon in 1956. In 1958 he was sent to Australia to advise on the creation of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. He was transferred to Madrid in 1960 and later ran the Mexico City station, working against the Guatemalans, who had a territorial claim against British Honduras. After his retirement, Dempster started several unsuccessful businesses, including one with a Central Intelligence Agency colleague in Mexico. He died in October 1996.

DENHAM, HENRY. The British naval attaché in Stockholm throughout World War II, Captain Henry Denham played an active role in collecting intelligence on German shipping in the Baltic. In 1984 he published his memoirs, Inside the Nazi Ring.

DENMARK. British Intelligence operations in Denmark have been based on the relationship forged during World War II when Special Operations Executive (SOE) took the lead role in assisting the Danish resistance to the Nazi occupation. The Danish subsection of SOE’s Scandinavian Section was headed initially by Ronald Turnbull, working under press attaché cover from the British embassy in Stockholm. SOE operations in Denmark, designated BOOKLET, were divided into TABLE (sabotage), CHAIR (development of a resistance organization), DRESSER (lines of communication), SETTEE (procurement of Danish currency), CHEST (propaganda), and DIVAN (operational intelligence).

After World War II the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) maintained a close liaison with the Danes, with Leslie Mitchell running the SIS station in Copenhagen until 1950. Joint operations with the Danish security police, the Poltiiets Efterretnigstjesteste, having included the recruitment in 1974 of a member of the local KGB rezidentura, Oleg Gordievsky. See also DANISH SECTION.

DENNING, LORD. As master of the rolls, Lord Denning was the senior judge appointed by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to investigate the Profumo affair. His report, published in September 1963, was the most detailed account ever published of MI5’s role and involvement in the scandal. The Denning Report included the Maxwell Fyfe Directive of September 1952 in which the home secretary had set out the functions of the Security Service and limited its powers to the defense of the realm.

DENNIS, ERNAN FORBES. See FORBES DENNIS, ERNAN.

DENNISTON, ALASTAIR. Director of the Government Code and Cipher School from 1919 to 1943, Alastair Denniston had attended Bonn University and the Sorbonne and had taught German at the Royal Naval College at Osborne before being transferring in 1914 to Room 40 of the Admiralty. In 1938, in anticipation of another European war, Denniston enlisted Professor (Sir) Frank Adcock of King’s College, Cambridge, to assemble suitable candidates for cryptographic work so they could be called up and assigned to Bletchley Park at very short notice, without any indication of what their duties were likely to be.

In August 1941 he made the first of three transatlantic visits to America to negotiate signals intelligence agreements, and in 1943 he was placed in charge of GCHQ’s Diplomatic Section in London and effectively removed from the senior management, which caused him much bitterness. The rancor was exacerbated when his deputy, Edward Travis, was placed in charge of Bletchley Park and given a knighthood. After the war Denniston taught French and Latin at a prep school and died in 1961, without any obituary in the Times.

DEPOT OF MILITARY KNOWLEDGE. In March 1803 the quartermaster general, Sir Robert Brownrigg, established a Depot of Military Knowledge to collect intelligence in peacetime and prepare maps. Colonel Lewis Lindenthal was placed in charge of the Library Section, which became the repository of information about topography and enemy forces.

DEPUTY DIRECTOR-GENERAL OF THE SECURITY SERVICE. The deputy director-generals of MI5 have been Eric Holt-Wilson (1909–40), Jasper Harker (1940–47), Guy Liddell (1947–52), Roger Hollis (1952–56), Graham Mitchell (1956–63), Martin Furnival Jones (1963–65), Anthony Simkins (1965–71), Michael Hanley (1971–72), Ronald Symonds (1972–76), John Jones (1976–81), Royd Barker (1981–83), Cecil Shipp (1983–85), David Ranson (1985–91), John Alpass (1991–94), Eliza Manningham-Buller (1997–2000), Fraser Wilson (2000–04), and Jonathan Evans (2004–).

DÉRICOURT, HENRI. A skilled pilot and a supporter of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French resistance, Henri Déricourt was appointed the air movements officer for F Section of Special Operations Executive (SOE) and codenamed GILBERT. Between January 1943, when he was parachuted into enemy occupied France, and April 1944, when he returned to England, Déricourt organized 15 clandestine flights and headed a circuit codenamed FARRIER. However, by his own admission, he was also in constant contact with the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) in the person of Sturmbannftihrer Karl Boemelberg, with whom he had been acquainted in Paris before the war while he had been an Air France pilot and the latter had been attached to the German embassy. GILBERT never elaborated on the nature of their relationship, but he acknowledged having maintained contact with the enemy since “the late spring of 1943” because he was anxious about his wife Jeannot, who continued to live at their apartment at 58 rue Pergolese in Paris. Curiously, Hugo Bleicher, the Abwehr’s counterintelligence expert, was her next-door neighbor at 56 rue Pergolese. In the absence of GILBERT himself, who is alleged to have been killed in an air crash in Laos on 21 November 1962, author Jean Overton Fuller is his principal defender, and she is emphatic that Déricourt admitted only to having known Boemelberg before the war. Boemelberg himself died in December 1946 after an accident near his home in Germany, where he was living as a fugitive, and so never gave evidence concerning l’affaire Déricourt.

The Déricourt controversy centers on his astonishing success in ferrying SOE’s agents in and out of France on each full moon. That Déricourt enlisted the SD’s help to accomplish his mission either demonstrates his undeniably resourceful nature or his treachery.

DEUTSCH, ARNOLD. An Austrian psychologist, Dr. Arnold Deutsch was the NKVD’s illegal rezident in London between February 1934 and 1937 when he was ostensibly undertaking postgraduate studies at London University and living in Hampstead under his own name with his wife and baby daughter. A cosmopolitan figure of great charm, Deutsch was known to his recruits, of whom he found 20, only as OTTO. Among those known to have been in contact with him were Kim Philby, Jenifer Hart, Edith Tudor Hart, and James Klugmann.

According to information supplied to MI5 by Walter Krivitsky in February 1940, Deutsch had acted as a subordinate to the NKVD’s legal rezident at the Soviet embassy, Anton Schuster. According to his NKVD file, which was declassified in Moscow in 1999, Deutsch was codenamed STEFAN, used his wife to operate his wireless transmitter, and had been sent to London to assist the illegal rezident, Alexander Orlov. He is believed to have died at sea when his ship, the S.S. Donbass, carrying him on a mission to the United States, was sunk by a U-boat in November 1942.

DEWAVRIN, ANDRÉ. An engineering officer who had taught at St. Cyr before World War II, André Dewavrin joined the Free French forces in London and was appointed by General Charles de Gaulle as the head of his intelligence organization, the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (BCRA), using the nom de guerre “Colonel Passy.” The BCRA, which liaised closely with the Secret Intelligence Service’s Claude Dansey and the RF Section of Special Operations Executive (SOE), was wracked with dissention and its headquarters at 10 Duke Street and its training camp at Camberley were both centers of political intrigue.

In January 1943 Dewavrin returned to France with Forrest Yeo-Thomas of SOE’s RF Section, and he remained de Gaulle’s chief of intelligence until February 1946. Three months later he was arrested of misappropriating BCRA funds during the war but, having resigned his commission, he was cleared. He later wrote three volumes of war memoirs.

DICKSON CARR, JOHN. A very successful detective thriller writer, John Dickson Carr served in the Security Service before and during World War II. The American-born son of a barrister of Scottish descent, he traveled to Paris after coming down from university and, instead of becoming a lawyer like his father, took up the life of a writer. Aged 21 in 1927, Dickson Carr’s first success was It Walks by Night in 1930, a detective novel that was widely praised. Soon afterward, the thriller writer moved to Hampstead, married an English girl, and had three children. He divided his time between his homes in London and Long Island and became one of the most prolific writers of his generation, using at least two pen names to write nearly 50 books. His novels were tremendously successful but his public never guessed that he had worked for the counterespionage branch of the Security Service before and during the war and had successfully penetrated the Communist Party of Great Britain for MI5. Quite how many of his novels, which included The Lost Gallow, The Case of the Constant Suicide, Till Death Do Us Part, Below Suspicion, and The Third Bullet, depended upon his own experience as an MI5 agent and officer is unknown. Certainly Dickson Carr had worked for Max Knight, MI5’s star agent-runner, until 1942 when he joined the BBC as a playwright, writing radio thrillers “to take listeners’ minds off the blitz.” Dickson Carr, eschewing personal publicity and avoiding the limelight, died in February 1977.

DIPLOMATIC SECTION. The GCHQ branch responsible for decrypting the Foreign Ministry wireless traffic of target countries, headed from 1942 by Commander Alastair Denniston and located in offices above Peggy Carter’s hat shop in Berkeley Street, London. The Diplomatic Section’s first successes included traffic from Sofia to Berlin, Ankara to London, London to Madrid, London to Lisbon, Kuibyshev to Ankara, and Bucharest to Tokyo.

Before World War II the Diplomatic Section had broken the Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Persian, and American diplomatic codes, which were circulated to authorized recipients as BJs. The section’s greatest success was against the German Foreign Ministry one-time pad system, codenamed FLORADORA. In 1943 the most secret subsection of the Diplomatic Section, headed by Bernard Scott and working on traffic codenamed ISCOT, was accommodated in offices on the sixth floor of Allford House, on Rak Lane, where work on Russian ciphers was concentrated in a group of less than two dozen, including Felix Fetterlein.

DIPLOMATIC WIRELESS SERVICE (DWS). Created in 1945 as an amalgamation of Section VIII of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and the Radio Security Service (MI8), the Diplomatic Wireless Service is located at Hanslope Park, an estate purchased in 1939 as a wireless receiving station for the Foreign Office. As well as supervising the communications of the Foreign Office, the DWS accommodates specialist workshops to develop and provide MI5 and SIS with equipment not available on the open market. Because of the nature of its work, DWS has long been a target for penetration, although only one case of espionage, that of William Marshall in 1952, has been discovered.

DIRECTION FINDING (D/F). The technique of triangulating wireless signals so as to locate their origin. Direction finding is a valuable intelligence aid even if the traffic itself cannot be read. The British D/F network during World War I, pioneered by Admiral Sir Reginald Hall, consisted of 19 receiving stations known as “directionals” linked to a central plotting room in the Admiralty, which successfully monitored the movements of enemy U-boats and Zeppelins. During World War II, much of the D/F burden fell on the Admiralty’s Shore Wireless Service, or Y Service, which was composed of civilian operators, WRENS, and naval ratings based at the following stations: Cupar in Fife; Bowermadden, near Wick; Oban; Irton Moor (outside Scarborough); Pembroke in south Wales; Cooling Marshes in the Thames estuary; Ford End, Essex; Goodhavern, Cornwall; Flower-down, near Winchester; Portrush, Northern Ireland; and Lerwick in the Shetlands. Overseas the principal sites were located at Daniel’s Head, Bermuda; Jamaica; Georgetown, British Guiana; Iceland; Freetown, Sierra Leone; Dingli, Malta; Powder Island, Trincomalee, Ceylon; and Alexandria, Egypt.

High-frequency direction finding (HFDF, also known as “huff-duff”) requires very large, circular antenna arrays, often referred to as “elephant cages,” which are distinctive and therefore hard to conceal. In 1943 Beaumanor Hall became part of an HFDF network, linked to similar intercept stations at Thurso, Montrose, Croft Spa, Perton, Sutton Valence, and Chacewater to triangulate enemy stations.

Some D/F operators were assigned frequencies used by fixed targets, such as the Kriegsmarine transmitters at Wilhelmshaven and St. Nazaire, while others scanned the airwaves and reported intercepted signals to the D/F Control Room at Irton Moor, where the bearing coordinates were plotted on a gnomic chart. In 1964 the Shore Wireless Service was absorbed into GCHQ.

DIRECTOR OF MILITARY INTELLIGENCE (DMI). The post of DMI was created in 1888 for General Henry Brackenbury, but was eliminated in 1904 after the Boer War. Under Lord Kitchener’s reforms of 1916, it was reestablished, with Colonel (Sir) George Macdonogh appointed as DMI and George Cockerill as his deputy DMI. Simultaneously, the British Expeditionary Force in France also received a director of intelligence, (Sir) John Charteris being promoted to the post at GHQ in Montreuil.

DIRECTOR OF NAVAL INTELLIGENCE (DNI). The Naval Intelligence Division is the oldest British Intelligence organization, and until reorganization in 1964, was headed by the director of naval intelligence, a post created in 1882, accommodated in Room 39 of the Admiralty, and filled until 1887 by Admiral Sir Reginald Hall’s father. The other DNIs have been Bridge (1887–94), Beaumont (1894–99), Custance (1899–1902), Battenberg (1902–05), Ottley (1905–07), King-Hall (1907), Slade (1907–09), Bethell (1909–12), Jackson (1912–13), Oliver (1913–14), Hall (1914–18), H. Sinclair (1919–21), Fitzmaurice (1921–24), Hotham (1924–27), Domvile (1927–30), Usborne (1930–32), Dickens (1932–35), Scott (1935), Troup (1935–39), Godfrey (1939–43), Rushbrooke (1943–46), Parry (1946–48), Longley-Cook (1948–51), Buzzard (1951–54), Inglis (1954–59), and Denning (1959–64).

DIRECTORATE OF INTELLIGENCE. Headed by Sir Basil Thomson, the Directorate of Intelligence at Scotland Yard existed between April 1919 and October 1921 and was responsible for a civilian staff researching the activities of revolutionary movements in Britain, and Special Branch, then headed by James McBrien. Thomson’s intention had been to create a combined military, naval, and civil intelligence organization, but his plans received considerable opposition. Nevertheless he received reports from the Secret Intelligence Service and deployed agents overseas. One traveled between New York, Paris, and Amsterdam to report on revolutionaries, and another visited Hungary. The organization was absorbed into Special Branch in 1919. The civilian staff was transferred to MI5 in 1931 following a crisis of confidence in Special Branch when MI5 learned that several detectives were in the pay of the Soviets.

DIRECTORATE OF SPECIAL INTELLIGENCE. In April 1915 the War Office created a Directorate of Special Intelligence under the leadership of Brigadier Sir George Cockerill, who supervised MO6 and Captain Vernon Kell’s counterespionage service, MO5, which was strengthened in November 1915 by absorbing the military port control officers. In December 1915 a Military Intelligence Directorate was established, and the MO designated was changed to MI, MO5 becoming MI5.

DIRECTOR-GENERAL OF THE SECURITY SERVICE (DGSS). The post of director-general has existed since the creation of the Home Section-of the Secret Service Bureau in 1909 and is directly accountable to the secretary of state for home affairs, with access when required to the prime minister. The limits of the director-general’s responsibilities were set out by the Maxwell Fyfe Directive, issued by the home secretary in September 1952 and published for the first time by Lord Denning in September 1963. Until the appointment of Stella Rimington in February 1992, the name of MI5’s director-general was unannounced and the subject of a D Notice.

The director-generals have been Vernon Kell (1909–40), David Petrie (1940–46), Percy Sillitoe (1946–53), Dick White (1953–56), Roger Hollis (1956–65), Martin Furnival Jones (1965–71), Michael Hanley (1972–79), Howard Smith (1979–81), John Jones (1981–85), Antony Duff (1985–87), Patrick Walker (1987–92), Stella Rimington (1992–96), Stephen Lander (1996–2000), and Eliza Manningham-Buller (2000–05).

DOLLIS HILL. Originally part of a government radio-location system, linked to Burnham and Baldock, the Post Office Engineering Research Station at Brook Road, Dollis Hill, North London, was the location of some of the most innovative experimental work undertaken before and during World War II on behalf of the Security Service, including the development of telephone tapping equipment and covert microphones. In 1941 it was under the direction of Tommy Flowers. The engineering staff had previously concentrated on high-speed electromagnetic switching gear for telephone exchange, but effectively became GCHQ’s technical laboratory. The researchers at Dollis Hill developed the world’s first programmable analog computer, codenamed COLOSSUS, destined for Bletchley Park. The site, once part of Neasden golf course, was considered so secure that an alternative Cabinet War Room, codenamed PADDOCK, was built deep underground.

DOMESTIC AGENTS. The Security Service has always attempted to recruit staff working in foreign diplomatic missions in London, and domestic servants have proved useful, especially during World War II. A civil servant in the Ministry of Labour, Jimmie G. Dickson, was attached to MI5 for the duration of hostilities to assist in identifying suitable candidates for cultivation. An MI5 report in 1945 noted:

Servants in the embassies are not in a position to obtain high quality intelligence. They can provide details on the social life of the mission and some visitors’ names. In some cases they have been of really valuable service in the sense of obtaining the contents of wastepaper baskets, which have given us either valuable documents or material useful for breaking ciphers. Most embassies, however, are careful to burn such material, and we cannot hope that many of them will be as productively insouciant as the Spanish during. the war.

Mr. Dickson [then head of the agent-running section], moreover, has pointed out that the difficulties of finding suitable agents and putting them in work will grow immensely. During the war, many agents were willing to carry out this kind of work out of patriotic conviction, but they are now hesitating to continue after the war either on moral grounds or because they are trying, quite naturally, to secure better paid and more permanent work for the future. It must also be assumed that it will soon become easier to find servants and that therefore the competition for a particular post will be greater.

DOUBLE AGENTS. No attempts were made by British Intelligence to run double agents during World War I because of a disastrous incident shortly before the war. Captain Vernon Kell successfully recruited a convicted German spy, Armgaard Graves, but once he was released from prison for the purpose of contacting his German controllers, Graves had promptly decamped to New York and published The Secrets of the German War Office, which included an embarrassing account of his encounters with Kell and the assertion that his mission had been authorized personally by the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey. Questions were raised in the House of Commons in June 1913 and deflected by the Scottish secretary.

In May 1939 a French Deuxième Bureau officer visited London and delivered a lecture to an audience of Secret Intelligence Service officers on the subject of “double-crossing agents.” This led four months later to MI5 accepting an offer from SNOW to contact the enemy under MI5’s control, an operation that was to develop into the double cross system.

DOUBLE CROSS. The informal term used to refer to the coordinated exploitation of controlled enemy agents. These operations during World War II were described by John Masterman in The Double Cross System in the War of 1939 to 1945 (1972). Masterman revealed the extent of MI5 double agent operations and the method of supervising them with individual case officers directed by a Double Cross Committee, known as the Twenty Committee, and he described some of their achievements, particularly in the field of strategic deception.

D/P. Special Operations Executive’s designation for the Russian Section, established in 1942 under Major A. D. Seddon. The first air drop undertaken by D/P was WHISKY, which ended when the heavily laden Whitley bomber crashed on takeoff, killing one of the NKVD agents destined for Germany and badly burning the other. A further attempt was made to drop the survivor, a German Communist, in April 1924 after he recovered from his burns, but his Halifax, piloted by Wing Commander Wally Farley, the commanding officer of 138 Squadron, was brought down over Mannheim, killing all aboard.

DRAKE, REGINALD. Seconded from the North Staffordshire regiment to MO5 in 1914, Captain Reginald Drake was among the first officers to join Vernon Kell. Reports written by him during World War I suggest that some attempt was made to control the correspondence of captured enemy agents, even after they had been arrested and their execution had been announced publicly.

DRIBERG, TOM. Best known as the politician who was at one time chairman of the Labour party, Driberg was later ennobled by Harold Wilson as Lord Bradwell. He was also a rampant homosexual and a long-term MI5 mole. Driberg’s involvement in espionage began while he was still at school when he joined the Young Communist League. This was the membership that was to be skillfully exploited by Max Knight, MI5’s star case officer, who specialized in the recruitment and planting of ideologically reliable agents into the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).

As the William Hickey columnist in the Daily Express, Driberg was exceptionally well informed. He heard all the gossip and rumors and was virtually a professional party guest. Among his clubs was the Paternoster, a monthly dining group, of which his close friend Dennis Wheatley was chairman at the beginning of the war and which met at the Cheshire Cheese.

Driberg’s career as one of Knight’s moles was terminated abruptly in 1941 when Percy Glading’s successor, Harry Pollitt, expelled him from the party. When Driberg demanded to know the reason, he was informed that he had been accused of betraying the CPGB’s secrets to MI5 and being an informant codenamed “M8.” When Driberg reported this to Knight, ignorant that his reports had been circulated within MI5 as having come from M8, the latter realized that only someone inside the Security Service could have compromised his agent. Knight died in February 1968 convinced of Soviet penetration of MI5, but he never learned that it was his colleague Anthony Blunt that had been the person responsible. Instead, a Registry secretary, Celia Luke, confessed to leaking the information and was sacked.

In later years Driberg was tempted back into espionage by the Czechs, who paid him handsomely for his political gossip, apparently never suspecting that he was routinely reporting every contact to MI5. One significant mission undertaken by Driberg for MI5 was to travel to Moscow in 1953 to interview his old friend Guy Burgess. This journey resulted in a slim but affectionate biography of the defector, Guy Burgess, which was released in 1954 and was followed by his own autobiography, Ruling Passions. Driberg succumbed to a heart attack in the back of a London taxi in August 1976.

DRONKERS, JOHANNES. In May 1942 Johannes Dronkers, a 46-year-old Post Office clerk, was one of several Dutch refugees towed into Harwich by an armed Royal Navy trawler. At the Royal Victoria Patriotic School, he underwent routine screening and was interviewed by Adrianus Vrinten, a private detective who before World War II had worked for the Secret Intelligence Service station in The Hague. Dronkers claimed to be a member of the anti-Nazi resistance in the Netherlands, but Vrinten recognized him as a leading member of Mussert’s National Socialist party. When challenged, Dronkers admitted he had been sent to England by the Abwehr and revealed his safe-arrival signal, a message to be broadcast on Radio Oranje. Under interrogation at Camp 020, Dronkers confessed that he had been in the pay of the Abwehr since 1938 and, although he had been given a mission in England at that time, he had not fulfilled it. He was allowed to see one of his other companions from the voyage across the North Sea, a half-Javanese named John Mulder, about whom MI5 had some suspicions, but their conversation proved Mulder’s innocence. The microphones picked up Dronkers explaining his true role as a German spy to Mulder, who reacted with undisguised fury; Mulder was released in 1943. Dronkers was sent for trial in November 1942 and hanged at Wandsworth on New Year’s Eve.

DRÜCKE, KARL. In September 1940, Karl Drücke, a German spy, rowed ashore in Scotland with Vera Erikson and Werner Walti. He was arrested at Portgordon, using the alias of a Belgian refugee named François de Deeker, while waiting for a train to Edinburgh and was executed at Wandsworth in August 1941.

DUBLIN CASTLE. In response to the escalation of Fenian violence between 1864 and 1867, the Royal Irish Constabulary established an intelligence department based at Dublin Castle that recruited informants, including Thomas Beach, alias “Major Henri le Caron.” Colonel William Fielding of the Coldstream Guards was assigned to London to work on secret service. Dublin Castle experienced considerable success in foiling various plots, including an attempt to raid the arsenal at Chester Castle in February 1867 and a plan to assassinate Queen Victoria as she returned to London from Balmoral, and was instrumental in the arrest of Fenian leader James Kelly in Manchester in September 1867. Fielding’s Secret Service Department was disbanded at the end of March 1868, the government having concluded that the threat from Irish nationalists was exaggerated.

DUCK. MI5 code name for an agent in the Spanish embassy during World War II who was said in 1945 to be likely to “stay at her post as long as the Franco regime lasts. Her achievements cannot be listed and her value may remain significant even though she recently lost her job in connection with diplomatic reports and cipher-telegrams through no fault of her own.”

DUFF, SIR ANTONY. A former World War II submariner who was awarded the DSO and later a regular diplomat, Tony Duff was intelligence coordinator to the Cabinet during the Falklands conflict and was appointed chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee in 1983 following the recommendation of the Franks Report. In 1985 Duff was appointed director-general of the Security Service upon the retirement of Sir John Jones. He quickly acquired a reputation as a modernizer and persuaded the Thatcher administration to legitimize the organization with the Security Service Bill, passed by Parliament in December 1989.

DUKES, SIR PAUL. The son of a clergyman, Paul Dukes studied music at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire before World War I in the hope of becoming a conductor. However, soon after the Anglo-Russian Commission was established in 1915, Dukes joined it and liaised with the Russian press covering the war. When, in July 1917, there was a need for the commission to install a representative at the Foreign Office in London, Dukes was selected for the task, and there he worked under the supervision of John Buchan, then Lloyd George’s director of information.

Dukes remained in London during the October Revolution but became increasingly determined to return to Russia. In December 1917 Dukes got the opportunity, having volunteered as a king’s messenger to deliver dispatches to Oslo, Stockholm, and Petrograd. While in Russia, Dukes joined an American relief mission to Samara but was recalled to London for a meeting with Admiral Smith-Cumming, who invited him to join the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and fight the Bolsheviks. Dukes accepted the assignment and the code name “ST 25” and made his way to the Allied “intervention” headquarters in Archangel, adopting the disguise of a Serbian commercial traveler for a further journey to Finland to be smuggled over the frontier into Russia. Once on Soviet territory, Dukes acquired the identity of a Ukrainian officer in the feared Cheka, and this lent him some protection. Dukes remained in Soviet Russia until September 1919 and maintained contact with SIS by meeting Augustus Agar’s fast motorboats, which routinely slipped across the Gulf of Finland from their clandestine base on neutral territory. As his colleague Conrad O’Brien-Ffrench remarked, ”Dukes was the answer to a spy-writer’s prayer.”

When Dukes finally emerged from his adventures in Latvia, he reported to the British Legation in Riga and was swiftly shipped to Helsinki and across the North Sea. Upon his return to London he was reunited with Agar and in 1920 decorated with a knighthood by the king. The Story of “ST 25 ”: Adventure and Romance in the Secret Intelligence Service in Red Russia, dedicated to “the chief,” Mansfield Smith-Cumming, was published in March 1938 and was the first authoritative account of the activities of the musician who had become embroiled in espionage almost by accident. In 1940 he wrote An Epic of the Gestapo, his further adventures against another totalitarian regime, and after the war wrote Come Hammer Come Sickle, advocating greater understanding of the Soviet regime. Dukes died in August 1967.

DUNDERDALE, WILFRED (“BIFFY”). Born in Odessa in 1899, Biffy Dunderdale inherited a large fortune from his family’s extensive shipping business in Russia before the Revolution. Despite his thick accent, Dunderdale served in the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet during World War I and then joined the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in 1921. He adopted the role of the quintessential Englishman abroad, driving his Rolls-Royce around France and commuting between the elegant office of SIS in the rue Charles Floquet and his country home, the Château de Chêne in the Loire Valley. During World War II the stylish Dunderdale supervised SIS’s liaison with the Free French and Polish Deuxième Bureaux, and later ran SIS’s signals intelligence operations, in cooperation with the Poles, against Soviet targets as controller, Special Liaison. After his retirement from SIS in 1959, he was appointed British consul-general in Chicago, and he died in New York in November 1990.

DWYER, PETER. The son of a symphony conductor, Peter Dwyer read modern languages at Oxford and edited the student magazine Cherwell before joining Fox Films. At the outbreak of World War II, he was working for Movietone News when he was invited to join the Secret Intelligence Service and was sent to France. In 1940 he was transferred to open a new station in Panama City, where he met his wife, the daughter of a local British bank manager. In September 1945, just as the security liaison officer in Ottawa had left for England, Dwyer went up to Canada to sit in on the interrogation of the GRU defector Igor Gouzenko.

Shortly before the end of the war Dwyer was appointed head of station in Washington, D.C., a post he relinquished to Kim Philby in October 1949 so he could accept the job of head of the Reports Section of the Communications Branch of Canada’s National Research Council, a clandestine cryptographic organization closely allied to GCHQ.

In 1952 Dwyer joined the Privy Council Office to supervise Canada’s security and intelligence apparatus, and six years later was appointed to the Canada Council, where he eventually became director. He died at the end of December 1971.

DZHIRKVELOV, ILYA. In 1943, while still a teenager, Ilya Dzhirkvelov joined the NKVD, having played a role in the resistance to the German invasion of his native Georgia. Both his parents had been active Bolsheviks and he was also a committed member of the Communist party. By April 1944, when the Nazis retreated from Sevastopol, he had been appointed a cadet officer in a small commando unit assigned to clear up what was left of the Waffen SS in the newly liberated areas. He also participated in the ruthless deportation of the Crimean Tartars who had fought alongside the Germans. During the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Dzhirkvelov was one of the guard detachment that maintained security for the visitors, and later in the war he operated against nationalist guerrillas in Latvia.

By the end of the war Dzhirkvelov was back in Tbilisi, only to be selected in September for a course at the NKVD’s training school in Moscow. After two years he and his wife were sent on a short assignment to Romania, which lasted six weeks. He was then posted to the Iranian section of the FCD’s Middle East department, and in 1949, having learned Farsi, he was transferred to Tehran. One of his first missions was to assist in the abduction of a Soviet diplomat named Orlov who was believed to be about to defect to the Americans. Orlov was seized on the street, apparently on his way to the U.S. embassy, and taken to the Soviet embassy where he was interrogated and killed, bludgeoned to death with the leg of a piano. “Even today,” observes Dzhirkvelov, “an official who defects to the West is signing his own death sentence; and it is only a question of when he will be discovered and when the possibility will arise of carrying out the sentence. Exactly how it is done is of no significance—whether it is with an axe, a gun, a dose of poison, a poisoned umbrella or a car accident.”

Upon his return to Moscow, Dzhirkvelov worked in the KGB archives and attended the Higher Party School in the evenings. His career had taken an unexpected turn following the disclosure that his father, whom he had never known, had not died at sea in the way described by his mother. In fact he had been executed in 1937, while serving a 10-year prison sentence for undefined political offenses. Nevertheless, in August 1952, he was rehabilitated and transferred to the FCD’s American department. Later he moved to the newly formed Second Chief Directorate, responsible for the surveillance of suspect foreigners in Moscow, specializing in diplomats from Iran, Egypt, and Turkey. In 1955 he returned to the FCD’s Tenth Department, monitoring the Turkish frontier and liaising with the Georgian KGB in Tbilisi, and in August 1957 was back in Moscow with the Second Chief Directorate.

As part of his cover, Dzhirkvelov worked for Soviet Sport and became general secretary of the Union of Journalists of the USSR, a post he held from 1957 until September 1965 when he joined the TASS news agency. He was assigned as the agency’s correspondent to Zanzibar, where he arrived with his wife in September 1967. There they remained until early 1970, when they moved to Dar-es-Salaam temporarily before taking up a permanent post in Khartoum in May. The Dzhirkvelovs spent just over two years in the Sudan and in April 1974 flew to Geneva as a press officer for the UN World Health Organization. This attractive posting came as a surprise because in that year Dzhirkvelov’s name had been listed in John Barron’s KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents as a KGB asset who had been expelled from Turkey and had been spotted in the Sudan in 1971.

On New Year’s Day 1980, after a minor traffic accident, Dzhirkvelov was accused of drunk driving. He denied the charge but when he declined to resign and insisted on completing his contract, which was due to run until May 1981, he was recalled to Moscow in March. Within hours of landing, he learned that his career was in ruins, so without waiting for the final interview—at which he knew he would be confined to Moscow—he hastily flew to Vienna and took a train back to Geneva where he explained his predicament to his wife and daughter. The same day, all three were granted political asylum in Great Britain.

In his autobiography, Secret Servant, published in 1988, Dzhirkvelov described himself as a reluctant defector. “I was lucky. Had I failed the penalty would have been very severe. As it is, I am listed as a traitor.” The fact that he is thus regarded by the KGB is hardly surprising, considering the detail displayed in his account of Soviet penetration of the United Nations and its institutions.

–E–

E DIVISION. The World War II MI5 division responsible for liaison with defence security officers posted overseas, sometimes known internally as “Overseas Control” or “Alien Control.” Within the division, E1(a) was responsible for dealing with French, Belgian, Norwegian, Danish and Dutch, and American visitors to Britain and E1(b) for monitoring the activities of seamen in Britain. E2, headed by Stephen Alley, was subdivided in E2(a), which monitored visitors from Finland, Poland, and the Baltic states and 2(b), which dealt with Hungary and the Balkans. E3, headed by Kemball Johnson, was responsible for monitoring Swiss and Swedish visitors; E4, headed by Colonel Ryder, for dealing with Aliens War Service permits; E5, headed by J. G. Denniston, for German and Austrian camp administration and intelligence; and E6, under A. W. Roskill, for monitoring Italians in Britain.

EAST AFRICA MISSION. In February 1941 Special Operations Executive established an East Africa Mission in Cape Town, headed by Lieutenant F. Wedlake, who was succeeded in August 1941 by Colonel John Todd. The mission, working under “East African Trade Mission” and then “Imperial Movements Control (Intelligence Section)” cover in Durban, was aimed against Portuguese East Africa, with a subsection dedicated to the Vichy French islands of Mauritius and Reunion. Representatives were dispatched to Beira, Lourenço Marques, Mauritius, Dar-es-Salaam, Cape Town, and Nairobi. In February 1943 the headquarters returned to Cape Town and was renamed the South Africa Mission. As the North African campaign progressed, the role of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services in the region was reduced to intelligence collection for the Secret Intelligence Service, and the mission was finally disbanded in June 1944.

EAST GERMAN INTELLIGENCE SERVICE. The foreign intelligence branch of the East German Ministry of State Security, known as the HVA, ran operations against Britons visiting the German Democratic Republic and maintained an office in the East German embassy in London. The HVA, headed by the legendary Markus Wolf, specialized in the development of illegals, such as Reinhard Schultze, and the cultivation of academics invited to study at East German universities.

EASTON, SIR JAMES. Born in Winchester in 1908, James Easton graduated from the Royal Air Force College, Cranwell, was commissioned in 1928, and flew amphibious bombers. Later he served on the northwest frontier of India. In October 1939, he joined the Air Ministry’s Directorate of Intelligence and was appointed deputy director in September 1941 and director two years later. He served on the Crossbow committee researching V-2 rockets. After the war, Easton joined the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) when the resignations of Lousy Payne and Fred Winterbotham provided a vacancy. When Stewart Menzies retired in 1952, Easton was appointed vice chief on the understanding that he would succeed Sir John Sinclair, but in May 1956 Anthony Eden, infuriated by the Buster Crabb affair, instead appointed Sir Dick White as chief. Easton remained in SIS as White’s deputy for a further two years but in 1958 accepted the post of consul-general in Detroit, where he remained for 10 years. He died in Michigan in October 1990, having played an active role in trade development in the Great Lakes area.

EASTWOOD, DAVID. Director of intelligence in Northern Ireland from 1971 to 1973, David Eastwood was a graduate of St. Edmund’s College, Oxford, and was decorated with the Military Cross in 1944. His subsequent career was in the Security Service, and his retirement from Belfast was marked by his award of a CBE.

ECHELON. A joint U.S. National Security Agency and GCHQ computerized discrimination program intended to assist in the identification of target signal traffic. ECHELON allows intercept operators to screen satellite voice and data circuits so as to focus on, and record, specific channels.

ECONOMIC WARFARE INTELLIGENCE (EWI). One of the two divisions of the Ministry of Economic Warfare’s Intelligence Branch, the EWI in November 1939 took on the role of the Secret Intelligence Service’s Industrial Intelligence Centre and collected economic information throughout World War II for distribution to other government agencies.

EDEN, SIR ANTHONY. As foreign secretary and prime minister, Anthony Eden, later Lord Avon, was an enthusiastic consumer of intelligence, a supporter of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), and a wartime critic of Special Operations Executive. He was severely embarrassed by the Buster Crabb incident at Portsmouth in April 1956. Eden ordered two assassinations by SIS. The first, of Egypt’s Colonel Abdel Nasser, prompted the resignation of his minister of state at the Foreign Office, Sir Anthony Nutting. The second; of Colonel George Grivas, the EOKA leader in Cyprus, was accepted by SIS, although the opportunity to carry out the directive never occurred.

EDMONDS, SIR JAMES. Commissioned by the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) to undertake a report on the failure of British Intelligence during the Boer War, it was James Edmonds who recommended the creation in 1909 of a Secret Service Bureau. His report, submitted to the secretary of state for war, (Sir) William Haldane, was considered by the CID subcommittee consisting of Lord Esher, Mr. Buxton, and Sir Charles (later Lord) Hardinge. Edmonds recommended his former subordinate, Major Vernon Kell, who had served in the Far East Section of the War Office, as leader of the new organization.

In 1891 Edmonds was involved in an exchange of information about Russia between the German and British general staffs, and he acquired an insight into the methods adopted by the German General Staff as a result. On returning from a visit to Russia, which he made for the Intelligence Division of the British General Staff, Colonel Edmonds was ordered to report at the Ministry of War in Berlin and was introduced to Major Dame, head of the German Secret Service in the Herwathstrasse. The Nachrichtendienst then had two branches, one to conduct operations in France, the other in Germany. Edmonds and Dame developed a friendship and remained in contact until 1900, when the latter was removed from his post for being too pro-British; he was replaced by Major Bose, who was known to be anti-British. Soon afterward, Edmonds learned that a third branch of the German Secret Service had been formed to deal with England, according to a British officer serving with the international contingents in Peking, an account corroborated by the French Deuxième Bureau.

In 1908 it was reported that a German espionage system of the kind that had been so successful in France was being established in England. The War Office had received no reports from the police, and although some chief constables had made inquiries when asked to do so, they had done so reluctantly, indicating to the General Staff that it was not really a matter for the police. Late in 1908 the War Office learned that the Nachrichtendienst had established a branch in Brussels to work against English targets and that the head of the branch was to enter England from Ostend. Scotland Yard was asked to watch for the man among the boat arrivals at Dover, but the request was refused on the ground that the man was not a criminal and that if the matter leaked out there might be awkward questions in Parliament. The director of military operations (DMO), when informed of this, considered that, as the spy was probably coming to interview new agents, it was essential to know whom he would contact. The issue was discussed by the DMO, the chief of the general staff, the secretary of state for war, and the Admiralty. While they appreciated the need to acquire the intelligence they wanted from Germany, the local security apparatus made the task difficult, and although they had received approaches from individuals seeking to sell intelligence on Germany, they felt it undesirable for the Admiralty to take up the offers.

The War Office was asked to investigate cases of suspected espionage and Edmonds was selected to prepare a paper on the German and French peacetime espionage systems, and it was this document that led to the creation of the Secret Service Bureau.

ELAS. The Greek guerrilla movement backed by Special Operations Executive (SOE) during World War II. ELAS was a Communist organization, although initially this was not realized. Prior to SOE’s first mission into Greece, HARLING in September 1942, SOE had not the slightest comprehension of the political minefield that awaited its personnel there. The very first reference to EAM, the Communist-run National Liberation Front that controlled ELAS, appeared in an SOE signal to HARLING’S leader, Brigadier Myers, dated 21 December 1942, but it was not until 24 February 1943 that he stated, for the first time, “I believe Communists control EAM unknowst to most members.” By this time the whole of the HARLING mission had been transformed reluctantly and unintentionally, by SOE’s inability to extract its men, into the first British Military Mission, thereby giving de facto official British support to the Communists. This was compounded by Rufus Sheppard, who initially failed to realize that the guerrillas around Mount Olympus to whom he had been parachuted were led by covert Communists. Indeed, they duped him into reporting that EAM was “purely a military resistance movement” with “no political aims whatsoever.” However, Monty Woodhouse concluded that “the staff of SOE, in contrast with those of the Secret Intelligence Service, were amateurs who had to learn on the job: there could naturally be no trained professionals, as in espionage, for a task which only existed in wartime. The main handicap of SOE in Greece was faulty direction, not practical incompetence.”

ELECTRA HOUSE. Known simply as “EH,” this black propaganda department was established during the Munich Crisis of 1938 under the leadership of Sir Campbell Stuart at Electra House on the Victoria Embankment. Absorbed into Special Operations Executive as SO1 in 1940, the Electra House staff was evacuated to Woburn Abbey two days before the outbreak of war and a large transmitter for low-power shortwave broadcasts to Germany was built at Gaw-cott, with a duplicate completed at nearby Postgrove in November 1941. Responsibility for clandestine propaganda moved to the Political Warfare Executive in September 1941.

ELGIN COMMISSION. Following the Boer War, the Elgin Commission was set up to look into lessons that should be learned from the campaign and took evidence from many senior officers before publishing its report in 1903. The commission concluded that the War Office had assessed the enemy’s strength with great accuracy but that the appropriate reports had not been circulated to the Cabinet. In his evidence before the commission, the editor of the Times noted:

We did not spend nearly enough money or send enough officers. The eight or ten who went out did very good work but they were fewer than the men I employed myself as Times correspondents, and I should have been ashamed to have sent correspondents anywhere, or even a commercial traveler, with the sums of money they were given.

ELLIOTT, NICHOLAS. The son of Eton’s headmaster, Nicholas Elliott was working as an honorary attaché at the British embassy in The Hague shortly before the outbreak of war and was present in Holland in November 1939 when two Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officers, Sigismund Best and Richard Stevens, were abducted by Nazi agents and dragged across the frontier into Germany. When Elliott returned to London, he was recruited into the Security Service, but his tenure in B 1 (a), the counterespionage subsection dealing with German double agents, was brief.

Elliott was soon transferred to SIS and posted to Istanbul, which required a lengthy voyage to Lagos and a flight to Cairo. En route he encountered his colleague Graham Greene on the quay at Freetown, Sierra Leone (Elliott later remarked that “his Heart of the Matter represents MI6’s contribution to world literature”). In Turkey in January 1944, with the help of his wife, Elliott pulled off a remarkable coup, the defection of Erich Vermehren, a senior Abwehr official. He was also a witness to the investigation pursued in the aftermath of the CICERO affair, the theft of vital secrets from the British ambassador’s private safe by his valet, Elyesa Bazna.

At the end of the war, Elliott was sent to the SIS station in Bern, Switzerland, and later served in Vienna. In 1956 he was back in London, running operations from SIS’s domestic station, among them being a risky mission to inspect the hull of the Ordzhonikidze, the Soviet cruiser bringing premier Nikita Khrushchev on a state visit to England. The operation proved an embarrassing fiasco after Elliott’s agent, Lionel Crabb, died while still in the muddy waters of Portsmouth Harbor. The incident sparked off a major diplomatic protest from the Soviets, but Elliott survived the subsequent purge that cost Ted Davies, SIS’s liaison with the Naval Intelligence Division, his job.

Elliott was switched to SIS’s station in Beirut and later promoted to regional controller for Africa. During one tour of inspection, in January 1963, Elliott was asked to make a short detour to the Lebanon to confront his old friend Kim Philby with the latest evidence of his treachery. Elliott extracted a partial confession from Philby, but the latter decamped to Moscow before further action could be taken. According to Peter Wright, Elliott’s final encounter with Philby had been recorded, but dismayed counterintelligence experts discovered when the tape was played in London that the voices of the two men had been drowned by the sound of Beirut’s anarchic traffic. Having placed a microphone close to where Philby was intended to sit, Elliott apparently opened the windows of the room, thus rendering the recording valueless.

Elliott eventually retired from SIS in 1968 and joined the board of Lonhro. His eagerly awaited autobiography, Never Judge a Man by His Umbrella, omitted many of the exciting episodes of his life, apparently in respect of SIS’s demand for discretion. For a man who has participated in some of the most thrilling episodes of Britain’s secret history, Elliott is remarkably reticent to reveal what he knows.

ELLIS, CHARLES H. (“DICK”). Born in Australia and educated at the universities of Melbourne and Oxford, C. H. Ellis was recruited into the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) after his military service, which was spent in the Near East. His first posting was to Berlin in October 1923, where he posed as a British passport control officer while helping to run the local SIS station. Later he switched to Paris and, with the help of his White Russian wife’s family, started to collect intelligence from the émigré community. Unfortunately this also brought him into contact with the Abwehr and, short of cash, he sold many of SIS’s secrets. In 1939 he moved to London and was placed in charge of the illicit telephone tap that had been installed on the German embassy’s external lines. Strangely, this particular source, once valued as a window in Joachim von Ribbentrop’s activities, was compromised soon after Ellis had been indoctrinated into it.

After a brief spell in cable censorship in Liverpool, Ellis was posted to the SIS station in New York where, for the duration of the war, he was deputy to William Stephenson, the head of British Security Coordination (BSC). At the conclusion of hostilities, BSC was wound up and Stephenson returned to the business world, but Ellis opted to continue his SIS career, being appointed regional controller for the Far East, based in Singapore, and then chief controller, Pacific, in London. It was not until after Ellis had resigned from SIS, ostensibly to work for SIS’s Australian counterpart in Sydney, that a mole hunt in London accidentally discovered his prewar treachery. Ellis, who was then working on The Expansion of Russia, was confronted with his duplicity and provided a limited confession, which failed to convince all who saw it that he had been entirely candid about his relationship with the Abwehr—and possibly with the KGB, which was suspected of having blackmailed Ellis after the war.

The fact that Ellis had betrayed SIS was kept a closely guarded secret and he was never prosecuted, an omission which led some of his supporters, including his aging former colleague Stephenson, to disbelieve the inevitable leak when it occurred. The news that Ellis had partially admitted his guilt to William Steedman was revealed by Peter Wright, who also subscribed to the view that the KGB would have been bound to exploit his treason immediately after the war, if not sooner. Wright was convinced that because Ellis’s first brother-in-law was a known Soviet agent, it was almost a certainty that he had succumbed to a KGB threat to expose him.

Whatever the truth of the matter, Ellis died in Eastbourne in July 1975 without telling even his family of his disgrace, and there is no hint in his pre-SIS memoirs of his subsequent intelligence career. Nor is there any in his later books, Soviet Imperialism and Mission Accomplished. In 1962 Ellis published an account of his own experiences with the Malleson mission to Meshed and Transcaspia, a notorious British intervention.

ELTENTON, GEORGE. A chemical engineer employed by Shell, George Eltenton had been educated at Cambridge and in prewar St. Petersburg before he moved to Berkeley, California, as a research scientist. In 1943 he was identified by Dr. Robert Oppenheimer as a casual acquaintance who had invited him to pass atomic secrets to the Soviets, using a mutual friend, Haakon Chevalier, as an intermediary. Eltenton and Chevalier were interviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1945 but denied having engaged in espionage and left the country soon afterward. Upon arrival in England, Eltenton was interrogated by MI5 but again refused to make any incriminating admissions. As a result of what was widely perceived as a recruitment pitch on behalf of the NKVD, Oppenheimer was later called to give evidence before a U.S. Personnel Loyalty Board and lost his security clearance.

ELWELL, CHARLES. After World War II, which he spent as a prisoner of war after he was captured in Denmark while delivering an agent on a motor torpedo boat, Charles Elwell joined MI5 and, following a tour of duty in Malaya, was posted to the counterespionage branch. Here he ran several successful anti-Soviet operations, the best known being the Portland spy ring case, which ended in the imprisonment of Harry Houghton, Ethel Gee, Gordon Lonsdale, and the Americans Morris and Lona Cohen. (In his memoirs, Lonsdale described Elwell, whom he knew as “Charles Elton,” a fellow student at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University where they were both enrolled in July 1956, as “formidable.” They were reunited again under entirely different circumstances after Lonsdale’s arrest when he was under interrogation in Wormwood Scrubs.) Elwell also supervised an investigation in the Admiralty, resulting in the arrest and conviction of John Vassall.

Nearly a decade after the Old Bailey trial at which all the Portland defendants were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment, Elwell received permission to publish anonymously a short account of Lonsdale’s background, and this duly appeared in the April 1971 edition of the Police Journal. Barely six pages long, the summary added little to what was already known about the KGB’s star agent, but this was not the first time that Elwell had been published. In 1954, soon after joining the Security Service, Elwell had released Corsican Excursion, a travelogue of a visit he had made to that Mediterranean island in 1949. Illustrated by Edward Lear, it is a delightful recollection of a summer spent following the steps of Boswell, who nearly 200 years earlier had made a similar journey and in 1868 had published a collection of essays in praise of the island and its indomitable inhabitants. In addition to Corsican Excursion, Elwell also published some monographs on the history of the Black Country.

Elwell retired from the Security Service in 1979 but capitalized on his experience in MI5’s countersubversion branch by compiling a highly detailed guide to the “Communist or Revolutionary Marxist Press.” Entitled Tracts beyond the Times and distributed by the Social Affairs Unit in 1983, it documents Britain’s far-left political movements and their publications.

This is the fundamental and irreconcilable difference between two kinds of socialists. There are on the one hand those Social Democrats, for whom the state can be neutral, for whom a class war or struggle is not inevitable and whose policies can be reversed by a constitutional opposition. On the other hand there are the Communists, or Revolutionary Marxists, for whom the state cannot be neutral but must present either the working class or the bourgeoisie (or capitalist or employing class) and for whom socialism can be achieved only when the former has utterly vanquished the latter and when that victory has been consolidated by the exercise of workers’ power, the current euphemism for a dictatorship of the proletariat.

During his retirement, Elwell followed with close interest the debate over the loyalty of his former director-general, Sir Roger Hollis, and in July 1984 wrote to the Times, in what amounted to an attack on his ex-colleague Arthur Martin, complaining that the proposition that MI5 had suffered hostile penetration was unsupported by the evidence. As a stern critic of Hollis’s performance, Elwell’s contribution was not without significance. He also wrote to the Sunday Times later the same year, criticizing Chapman Pincher for poor research.

ENDURANCE, HMS. Ostensibly the Royal Navy’s only guard ship in the South Atlantic, HMS Endurance was a signals intelligence collection platform based in the Falklands Islands gathering Argentine wireless traffic. When the British government’s Defence White Paper in 1981 announced that the ship was to be scrapped and not replaced, the Argentine junta, led by General Leopoldo Galtieri, assumed that Britain effectively was abandoning its commitment to defend the islands and their dependencies. Endurance’s commander, Captain Nick Barker, mounted a fierce campaign to save his ship, which was reprieved when Argentine forces seized and occupied the islands in April 1982. After his retirement, Barker wrote Beyond Endurance, which obliquely referred to the important intelligence role fulfilled by his ship.

ENGLANDSPIEL. The German generic term for the successful penetration and destruction of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) networks in German-occupied Holland during World War II. Masterminded by Major Herman Giskes of the Abwehr, and codenamed NORDPOL (“North Pole”), more than 40 agents were “doubled” against SOE’s N Section and perished. After the war the disaster was the subject of an inconclusive investigation conducted by the Dutch Parliament.

ENIGMA. A German cipher machine, manufactured by Arthur Scher-bius and widely used commercially, especially by Continental banks to transact confidential business. The military version, with the enhanced security of an additional plugboard, was widely introduced into the German army in 1931 and became the target for cryptographic attack, principally by the French and Polish cipher bureaus. The Government Code and Cipher School achieved some success in breaking a few Enigma keys during the Spanish Civil War but the real breakthroughs occurred in 1940. The Enigma machine was examined by the British Admiralty in 1932 and was adopted as the model for the standard British variant, the Typex.

EOKA. The Ethniki Organosis Kyprion. Agoniston (National Organization of Cypriot Combatants, EOKA) was a Greek nationalist movement in Cyprus that conducted a terrorist campaign in support of its objective of unification with Greece. Led by Colonel George Grivas, EOKA was a significant target for British Intelligence, and both MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) attempted to undermine the organization. Grivas himself was never caught, although SIS came close to finding and shooting him (with the authority of the prime minister, Anthony Eden). Nevertheless, Grivas was denied most of his arms shipments from Greece, which were interdicted in the Mediterranean by the Royal Navy, acting on excellent intelligence acquired in Athens by the SIS station commander, Christopher Phillpotts, who was made a CMG in recognition of what he had accomplished.

EPPLER, JOHANNES. A German spy codenamed KONDOR, Johannes Eppler reached Cairo in July 1943, having crossed the desert in an epic, three-week, 1,700-mile journey from Tripoli to Assyut, accompanied by Heinrich Sanstede and the Hungarian explorer Count Al-massy. Eppler was arrested and survived the war to write his memoirs, Operation Condor, in 1977.

EPSILON. Code name for the detention in July 1945 of 10 captured German physicists suspected of having participated in the development of a Nazi atomic bomb. The scientists were flown to Farm Hall, where they were interrogated for six months and their rooms were wired for sound. Among the distinguished figures studied were Professor Otto Hahn, Professor Werner Heisenberg, and Dr. Carl von Weizsacker. The operation was supervised by a Secret Intelligence Service officer, Eric Welsh, and two subordinates, Captain Brodie and Major Rittner, who monitored the conversations, translated the transcripts, and prepared summaries for circulation. In 1992 the transcripts of the recordings, thought to have been lost many years earlier, were declassified and released, demonstrating that the news of the attack on Hiroshima took the German group entirely by surprise and that the Nazis had not been close to achieving nuclear fission. The transcripts also proved that the common assertion that German scientists would never have consented to work on a Nazi bomb was entirely fallacious.

ERIKSON, VERA. A German spy before and during World War II, Vera Erikson was arrested at Portgordon in Banffshire, Scotland, in September 1940 with Karl Drücke, having been landed off the beach by an amphibious aircraft. She was interrogated at Camp 020 and remained in custody at “E” Wing of Holloway Prison until the end of the war, when she was released. Under interrogation Erickson claimed to have lived in London before the war with Sonia, the Countess of Chateau-Thierry, at Dorset House, when she was known as Vera de Cottani-Chalbur, and to have worked as a spy for the Soviets.

ERNST, KARL GUSTAV. When the German kaiser came to London in May 1910 for the funeral of King Edward VII, a member of his entourage, Captain von Rebrur-Paschwitz, was followed by Special Branch detectives late one evening to a barber’s shop in the Caledonian Road where he remained for more than an hour. The German owner, Karl Gustav Ernst, was placed under surveillance and when his mail was intercepted and examined, on a warrant signed by Home Secretary Winston Churchill, his correspondence revealed him and his assistant Wilhelm Kronauer to be at the center of an espionage network. All the members of the organization were watched, and a spy in the Royal Navy, George Parrott, was arrested in November 1912. A British subject born in Hoxton, Ernst was taken into custody on the eve of World War I, along with 21 other suspects, thereby establishing the reputation of Captain Vernon Kell, the first head of the Security Service.

EWER, WILLIAM. A well-known Communist Party of Great Britain member and Daily Herald journalist, William Ewer between 1919 and 1929 worked as a Soviet spy codenamed B-1 and HERMAN and ran sources in the India Office, Home Office, and Scotland Yard. Educated at Merchant’s Tailors, Ewer graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1907 and was known by his nickname “Trilby.” Although Ewer appeared to manage an independent news agency, the Federated Press of America (FPA), it was actually a front for espionage and to facilitate exchanges of information between himself and his principal subagent in Paris, George Solcombe, a Daily Herald foreign correspondent using the alias Kenneth Milton. MI5 became aware of Ewer’s activities in November 1924 when he placed an advertisement in the Daily Herald seeking information about any department of British Intelligence. Intensive surveillance identified Ewer and Rosa Edwards as running the news agency and spotted two former Special Branch detectives, Hubert Ginhoven and Walter Dail, mounting a countersurveillance operation for Ewer. The FPA was raided in April 1929, but no action was taken against Ewer because there was never any evidence that he had gained access to classified information. Instead he traveled to Poland, but returned to England in September 1929 and was interviewed extensively by MI5’s Max Knight in 1950.

EWING, SIR ALFRED. Formerly the director of naval education, Ewing was responsible for developing the cryptographic unit within the Admiralty known as Room 40 during World War I. Under Ewing’s supervision, the Naval Intelligence Division broke many of the enemies’ codes and was responsible for solving the diplomatic cipher used in the Zimmermann Telegram.

–F–

F DIVISION. The wartime MI5 subsection responsible for internal security in the armed forces and government establishments, headed by Colonel W. A. Alexander. Its subsections consisted of F2, responsible for the investigation of Communism and left-wing movements, headed by Roger Hollis; F2(a), responsible for the study of Communist Party of Great Britain policy, headed by David Clarke; F2(b), responsible for the investigation of the Comintern and Communist refugees, headed by Hugh Shillito; F2(c), responsible for the investigation of Russian intelligence operations, headed by Mr. Pilkington; F3, responsible for the investigation of right-wing organizations, Nazi sympathizers, the British Union of Fascists, Scottish nationalists, and German and Austrian organizations, headed by Francis Aiken Sneath; and F4, responsible for the investigation of pacifists, peace groups, and revolutionary movements, headed by Roger Fulford.

F SECTION. The principal Special Operations Executive country section for France, commanded by Leslie Humphreys, Henry Marriott, and finally Maurice Buckmaster. The section operated in parallel to others active in the field, including RF (République Français) Section, which liaised closely with General de Gaulle’s own intelligence agency, the BCRA (Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action).

FALKLAND ISLANDS. Seized in April 1982 by Argentine forces, the Falklands were recaptured by a British task force two months later. The conflict—never formally a war, as neither side wished to alienate potential allies and force them to declare neutrality—was a major challenge for all branches of British Intelligence. Lord Franks presided over a committee of privy councilors that investigated and reported on the background and causes of the invasion. The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), led by Sir Colin Figures, was woefully underrepresented in the region, with a single SIS station on the entire continent—its commander declared to his hosts in Buenos Aires. Although GCHQ had supplied belated evidence of Argentine intentions to invade on 30 March 1982, the Thatcher government had been slow to react and became heavily dependent on intelligence in its effort, codenamed Operation CORPORATE, to recapture the islands. See also HMS ENDURANCE.

FALSE FLAG. An agent-cultivation technique intended to deceive the target about the true identity or nature of his or her recruiter. Thus, KGB personnel occasionally adopted a Polish or Czech identity to make them more acceptable to their intended recruits, and MI5 officers investigating leaks have masqueraded as hostile intelligence officers in the hope of entrapping a spy. In 1945 when Allan Nunn May was identified as a Soviet spy, Iona von Ustinov was deployed, unsuccessfully, to rendezvous with him in the hope of obtaining some incriminating evidence that could be used against him. When Michael Smith was approached in August 1992 by a contact claiming to be a Russian with a message from his former handler, Viktor Oshchenko, he fell for the ploy and incriminated himself to the extent that at his subsequent trial he was sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment.

FAR EAST COMBINED BUREAU (FECB). The GCHQ cover name for its regional headquarters on Stonecutter’s Island, Hong Kong, which opened in 1932 under Captain Arthur Shaw, RN. Later evacuated to Kranji, Singapore, and then Kandy, Ceylon, the FECB maintained a constant radio link to Whaddon Hall.

FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION (FBI). MI5’s Guy Liddell established an excellent rapport with the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover when he visited the United States at the end of January 1938 to brief him on an investigation conducted in Scotland of Jessie Jordan, a widow and hairdresser who was acting as a postbox for the Abwehr, forwarding letters to and from the Continent and the United States. Of interest to Hoover was one of her correspondents, a “Mr. Kron” at an address in New York, who was identified as Gunther Rumrich, a former soldier of Sudeten German origin who was a naturalized American citizen; when arrested, Rumrich confessed to having spied for the Abwehr for 20 months, the FBI’s first example of German espionage since World War I. In 1941 Hoover sent two senior FBI officials to study MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in anticipation of his own Special Intelligence Service, which he established across Latin America in 1942. Simultaneously he posted Arthur Thurston as a “legal attaché” at the U.S. Embassy in London in November 1942, followed by John Cimper-man, to liaise with MI5 and SIS. The reciprocal arrangement has continued ever since.

FEDERATED PRESS OF AMERICA (FPA). Supposedly an independent news agency located at 50 Outer Temple, London, the FPA was a front for Soviet espionage managed by William Ewer and Rosa Edwards. It was created in 1919 and continued until it was raided by MI5 in April 1929. It also ran a branch in Paris and a bureau in New York, headed by Karl Hässler. The FPA employed Walter Holmes, a Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) member and the Daily Herald’s Moscow correspondent. The agency was subsidized by covert payments from the Comintern, channeled through Chesham House, the office of the Soviet Trade Delegation, and by support from Eva Reckitt, a wealthy CPGB sympathizer.

FELL, BARBARA. A British civil servant with 23 years’ experience working for the Central Office of Information, Barbara Fell, OBE, was denounced as a spy by Anatoli Golitsyn. She was interviewed by an MI5 interrogator and admitted that for a period of 17 months, starting in spring 1959, she had had an affair with the press attaché of the Yugoslav embassy, Smiljan Pecjak, and had passed him copies of confidential Foreign Office briefings. In December 1962 she pleased guilty to offenses under the Official Secrets Act and was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.

FERGUSSON, SIR BERNARD. The last director of combined operations during World War II, General Sir Bernard Fergusson was posted to the Palestine Police in October 1946 as assistant inspector-general in charge of the Police Mobile Force, which was soon disbanded on the recommendation of Sir Charles Wickham. Instead Fergusson appointed two of his former Sandhurst pupils, Roy Farran and Alister MacGregor, to run “special squads” against the Irgun. The operation was considered successful until Farran was charged with the murder of an Irgun suspect and fled to Syria; upon his return to Palestine, he was tried and acquitted at a court-martial. Fergusson, later Lord Ballantrae, was transferred to Germany to command a battalion of his regiment, the Black Watch.

FERMOR, PATRICK LEIGH. See LEIGH FERMOR, SIR PATRICK.

FIELD INTELLIGENCE DEPARTMENT. During the Boer War, a Field Intelligence Department was established under Colonel David Henderson to collect and distribute intelligence and supervise press and postal censorship. Henderson, who had participated in the relief of Ladysmith, introduced standard forms of intelligence reporting, assessments of enemy strengths, and lists of suspected rebels and instituted a centralized organization that communicated with a Pigeon Service.

FIELDING, XAN. Xan Fielding was editing a newspaper in Cyprus when World War II broke out and was recruited into Special Operations Executive (SOE) in 1940. In December 1941 he was dropped on a beach in the south of Crete by HMS Torbay to join Monty Woodhouse. He remained on the island for the following nine months, organizing a series of resistance cells in the White Mountains. In August 1942 Fielding was evacuated to Beirut, but by November he had been decorated with a DSO and sent back to Crete on a second mission, which lasted until February 1944.

Upon his return to Cairo, Fielding obtained a transfer to SOE’s F Section, and in August he was dropped from Algiers into a resistance reseau in the south of France. Soon after his arrival Fielding was arrested by the local French police but his freedom was subsequently negotiated by a member of his network. He was released from prison in Digne two days before that city’s liberation. Withdrawn from France, Fielding was sent on a mission to Greece and was one of the first Englishmen to enter Athens after the German occupation. In December Fielding returned briefly to Crete, and in the spring of 1945 was posted to the Far East prior to an assignment in Saigon. After the Japanese surrender, Fielding joined the Secret Intelligence Service in Europe and operated in Germany under British Control Commission for Germany cover.

After his retirement, Fielding moved to Serrania de Ronda, in the south of Spain, and wrote a biography of his old friend Billy McLean, One Man in His Time, but died in August 1991, soon after its publication. In his war memoirs, published in 1954, Fielding made no mention of his postwar role and instead gave a detailed account of his experiences in Crete.

FIFTH COLUMN. The fear that a Spanish-style “fifth column” of enemy collaborators existed in Britain prior to World War II fueled MI5’s efforts to monitor the activities of various suspect organizations, among them the Nordic League, the Link, the Anglo-German Fellowship, the Peace Pledge Union, the Imperial Fascist League, the British Union of Fascists, and the British People’s Party. All were the subject of surveillance and penetration, but no evidence was found of clandestine contact with, or funding by, foreign fascists.

FIGURES, SIR COLIN. Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) from July 1981 to 1985, Colin Figures was educated at King Edward’s School in Birmingham and Pembroke College, Cambridge, and served in the Worcestershire regiment between 1943 and 1948. He joined SIS in 1951 and in June 1953 was posted to Germany, under British Control Commission for Germany cover. In September 1956, in time to be a witness to the Suez debacle, he went to Amman, Jordan, staying until April 1959. In December 1959, Figures was posted to Warsaw, where he was indoctrinated into three cases, all Polish intelligence service officers from the Urzad Bezpiec-zenstwa (UB) who had been “walk-ins.” Of the three volunteers, NODDY, with the rank of colonel, was the most productive, and his information included material he had picked up during his frequent visits to Moscow. Initially, of course, there had been suspicion that NODDY was yet another KGB-orchestrated deception, but Robert Dawson, SIS’s director of production for Eastern Europe, authenticated him, and he proved his worth time and again. Figures’s last overseas posting was to Vienna, between October 1966 and 1969. Over the next 10 years he held senior posts at Century House. In July 1981 he succeeded Dickie Franks as Chief. In April 1982 Figures was plunged into the Falklands conflict, which was to define Prime Minister Thatcher’s government. The conflict with Argentina was a war for which SIS was completely unprepared, and in the first weeks of the campaign it sustained a series of body blows but was able to recover.

Figures was invited to the prime minister’s celebration victory dinner at 10 Downing Street, where he was included in the group photograph, and the following year received his customary knighthood, adding to the perception that SIS had experienced “a good war.” Successful clandestine operations had been mounted at short notice against the Argentines in Paris and Madrid and at the UN Mission in New York, and the principal objectives had been achieved. Upon his retirement in July 1985, Figures succeeded Sir Antony Duff as intelligence coordinator to the Cabinet and passed on the Chief’s baton to a 56-year-old Far East specialist, Christopher Curwen.

FINLAND. British Intelligence operations in Finland have been colored by the assistance given to the withdrawal of British volunteers who fought in the Winter War of 1939–40 against the Soviet Union. The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) station in Helsinki, headed by Harry Carr, was withdrawn to Stockholm, and Special Operations Executive was discouraged from operating in Finland for fear of offending the Soviets. After World War II, SIS regarded Finland as a Soviet satellite, with the SUPO security police heavily influenced by its neighbors. The Helsinki station was headed by Rex Bosley until 1960, when he was transferred to Stockholm. The 1985 exfiltration of Oleg Gordievsky over the frontier at Vyburg-Vaalimaa, to be welcomed in Helsinki by the SIS station commander, Meta Ramsay, is a rare example of such a cross-border operation.

FIRST UNITED STATES ARMY GROUP (FUSAG). Ostensibly commanded by General George Patton, this entirely fictitious American military unit was a key component of the FORTITUDE SOUTH deception campaign, intended to persuade the enemy that the Allied invasion of France would take place in the Pas-de-Calais two weeks after the D-Day landings in Normandy. FUSAG was supported by bogus wireless traffic and assemblies of dummy armor and fake landing craft moored in estuaries in East Anglia. According to captured enemy assessments of the Allied order of battle, the German High Command accepted FUSAG’s existence, which had been reported by double agents.

FISHER, WILLIE. Better known by the false name of Rudolf Abel he adopted after his arrest in New York, Willie Fisher was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1903. Fisher’s father Genrykh had been a Russian revolutionary of German extraction who had settled in England to escape the Okhrana. Willie Fisher fought with Soviet partisans behind the German lines during World War II and had been appointed the KGB illegal rezident in the United States in November 1948. When he was arrested, Fisher used the name of Abel, a former wartime NKVD colleague, to indicate to the KGB that he had been compromised. Sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment in March 1960, he was exchanged for the American U-2 pilot Gary Powers in February 1962. Abel’s true identity did not emerge until some years after his return to the Soviet Union, when it was disclosed by a German journalist with access to the KGB. He died in Moscow in November 1971.

FLEMING, IAN. As an aspiring journalist, Ian Fleming, the future author of the James Bond spy novels, visited Moscow in 1933 for Reuter’s News Agency and pulled off an impressive coup. He was the first reporter to telephone London and dictate an account of the outcome of the famous Metropolitan-Vickers trial at which several Britons, including Allan Monkhouse, were convicted of espionage and sabotage. Fleming had originally hoped to join the diplomatic service, but although he did reasonably well in the Foreign Office examination in 1931, he was not offered an appointment, so he used his mother’s influence with Sir Roderick Jones to find a job with his news agency, Reuter’s. His scoop in Moscow led to an offer of correspondent in the Far East, but he took a better-paying job with a firm of merchant bankers and later switched to stockbroking.

Fleming’s link to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), often euphemistically referred to as “a certain department of the Foreign Office,” certainly predated his Moscow assignment for Reuter’s and can be traced to his long friendship with Ernan Forbes Dennis, with whom Fleming first went to stay in Kitzbühel in August 1924 to improve his grasp of German before he went to Sandhurst; Forbes Dennis encouraged Fleming to sign up for courses at Munich University and the University of Geneva. Fleming had thus established two strong links with SIS, through his mentor Forbes Dennis and later through Reuter’s.

Fleming’s move from the City to Admiral John Godfrey’s staff as personal assistant in the Naval Intelligence Division (NID) was gradual at first, initially spending just three afternoons a week at the Admiralty, which brought him into daily contact with SIS, where in 1941 he routinely met Philip Johns to exchange information. According to Merlin Mishall, an eccentric Naval Intelligence officer who participated in the Iron Gates sabotage fiasco in Romania and later wrote Guilt Edged, Fleming played a part in that operation by supervising the London end of the project that was to be such an embarrassment to Section D. Later in the war Fleming accompanied Admiral Godfrey to the United States, and for a time he was a frequent visitor to the headquarters of British Security Coordination at Rockefeller Center on Fifth Avenue.

Fleming became one of the best-known journalists of his generation, mainly through his authorship of the Bond thrillers. After the war, he was first foreign manager for the Sunday Times, where he was on the editorial board until 1959. For much of this period Fleming was also working for SIS, as he himself acknowledged when, in the summer of 1951, he finally gave up his commission in the Royal Naval Reserve on the grounds that he was unable to spare the mandatory fortnight’s annual training. Fleming made an unsuccessful plea for a special exemption from the irksome requirement, reminding Vladimir Wolfson, the Russian-born NID officer who had been based in Turkey during the war, that “as foreign manager of the Sunday Times and Kemsley Newspapers, I am engaged throughout the year in running a worldwide intelligence organization and there could be no better training for the duties I would have to carry out for the DNI [director of naval intelligence] in the event of war. I also carry out a number of tasks on behalf of a department of the Foreign Office and this department would, I believe, be happy to give details of these activities to the DNI.”

Certainly Fleming incorporated much of the wartime SIS into the Bond series. In Dr. No he referred to the passport control officer as the local SIS representative, a cover that had only recently been discarded in favor of “visa officer,” and described the red light that glowed outside the Chief’s office when he was not to be disturbed. As for the name Bond, most likely it originated with the author of the standard ornithological work on the birds of Jamaica. As an avid reader of John Buchan’s novels, it may well be that there was no single model for Bond, and Fleming simply relied upon his imagination. However, there was an occasion when Fleming stayed in neutral Lisbon while en route to the United States, and it is widely believed that the spectacle of watching Axis spies and diplomats playing roulette alongside their Allied counterparts may have inspired some of the scenes for his first Bond novel, Casino Royale, which he completed in 1952. After its publication he approached his wife’s old friend, Somerset Maugham, for an endorsement that could be used to promote the book, but the old man declined, not because he had not thoroughly enjoyed the book but because he was not prepared to break his rule against advertising other authors. At the end of the war, Fleming returned to Fleet Street before moving permanently to Jamaica, where he had built his famous home, Goldeneye. Fleming died in 1964 aged 56, at the height of his fame, having published 13 Bond thrillers.

FLEMING, PETER. A well-known writer and traveler before World War II and brother of Ian Fleming, Peter Fleming was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, before joining the Grenadier Guards as a reservist in 1930. He saw action in Norway in 1940 and upon his return to England was posted to MI(R) to train Auxiliary Units at a country house in Bilting, Kent. In 1941 Fleming was dispatched to Palestine to recruit Italian prisoners of war for YAK, but when the project failed he took a team of saboteurs to Greece to block the German invasion. His escape took place in the typically elegant surroundings of the British Legation’s yacht. Soon after his return to Haifa, MI(R) was wound up, and Fleming was recalled to London for a new assignment, as head of Allied deception in India and Burma, designated D Division, where he invented numerous ingenious schemes to mislead the Japanese.

FLETCHER, REX. Reginald T. H. Fletcher, known to his friends as Rex, joined the Royal Navy in 1899 at the age of 14 and saw action in destroyers at the Dardanelles and with the Grand Fleet and the Channel Patrol. After World War I he was posted to the Naval Intelligence Division, where, as head of the Near East section, he served under Admiral Hugh Sinclair, soon to be appointed chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). In 1923, as Sinclair took up his post in SIS’s headquarters, Fletcher stood for Parliament and was elected the Liberal MP for Basingstoke. He lost his seat a year later and in 1929 joined the Labour party, for whom he won the Nuneaton seat in 1935. Thereafter he established his reputation as an expert on naval matters—and certainly he was well informed, for he spent each morning at his desk in SIS’s headquarters. Fletcher’s role in SIS was that of a G Officer, one of a small group of senior personnel who supervised the organization’s overseas operations.

Thus it was as a Labour MP and a senior SIS officer that in 1938 Fletcher contributed to a “Penguin Special” book, The Air Defence of Britain, which made a savage attack on the Air Ministry and the aircraft industry. That an MP would make such an attack was itself a matter of controversy, but the really remarkable fact was that Fletcher was also a serving SIS officer, although his brief entry in Who’s Who and the Dictionary of National Biography makes no mention of it whatever. Indeed, in his book he takes care to deny that he had access to any intelligence relating to the relative aircraft strengths of different countries and was relying upon an article in the News Chronicle attributed to Pierre Cot, the French minister of aviation. In reality, of course, Fletcher had all the relevant data at his fingertips because his principal preoccupation at SIS was this very topic.

Soon after the outbreak of World War II, Fletcher resigned from SIS and rejoined the navy. He was initially posted to the East End docks, supervising the arming of the merchant fleet, and was then posted to Grimsby as a staff officer planning East Coast convoys. In May 1940, Fletcher returned to London as parliamentary private secretary to the first lord of the Admiralty, A. V. Alexander. At the end of 1941 Fletcher was elevated to a barony, together with three other Labour MPs, and he took the title of Lord Winster.

When the Labour government was elected in 1945 Winster was appointed minister of civil aviation, a post he held until October 1946 when he went to Cyprus as governor. During the 28 months he was in Cyprus, demands from the Greek population for enosis led to political turmoil and the civil strife that would eventually lead to the declaration of an emergency. Upon his return to London, Winster resumed his seat in the Lords and took an increasingly independent line from the increasingly leftist Labour party. He died at his home in Crowborough, Sussex, in June 1961.

FLOUD, BERNARD. Identified as a covert Communist who had been recruited into the Communist Party of Great Britain at Wadham College, Oxford, Bernard Floud was elected the Labour MP for Acton in 1964. He was interrogated by MI5 following the general election because Prime Minister Harold Wilson wanted to appoint him a minister, but he committed suicide in October 1967 by gassing himself in his London home. MI5 suspected that Floud had been part of the Oxford Ring, a group of undetected spies organized at the university before World War II. He had joined the Intelligence Corps in 1939 and in 1942 had been transferred to the Ministry of Information, so MI5 was also anxious not only to learn of his contacts, but also the extent of the information compromised.

FLOWERS, TOMMY. Employed by the Post Office Engineering Research Station at Dollis Hill, Tommy Flowers was responsible for the development of COLOSSUS, the world’s first programmable analog computer, which was used at Bletchley Park to race through millions of permutations to find the key settings of the enemy’s Enigma cipher machine.

FOLEY, FRANK. The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) head of station in Berlin from 1919 to 1939, succeeding Henry Landau, Frank Foley was educated on a scholarship at Stoneyhurst, trained for the priesthood at St. Josephs, a Roman Catholic seminary in Poitiers, and attended the Université de France. He volunteered for the army in 1915 and was wounded in the defense of Ecoust in March 1918. Evacuated to Cornwall to recover, Foley was transferred to the Intelligence Corps and sent to France under Stewart Menzies. At the end of the war he was recruited into SIS and posted to the Inter-Allied Commission of Control in Cologne, and then appointed passport control officer in Berlin, attached to Lord Kilmarnock’s embassy.

During the 20 years Foley spent in Germany, he recruited many agents, among them Johann De Graaf and Paul Rosbaud. He also became a life-saving source of visas for Palestine for a growing number of Jewish emigrants. At the end of August 1939 the SIS station closed and Foley was withdrawn to Copenhagen, where he was ordered to Norway to take over the Oslo station from Commander Newill. When the Nazis invaded in April, Foley was evacuated to Molde, where he and the Norwegian gold reserves were rescued by the Royal Navy, having provided the Norwegian defense forces with a wireless link to England. Upon his return to London, Foley was placed in charge of a new Norwegian Section, designated A1, with Eric Welsh seconded from the Naval Intelligence Division as his deputy.

In May 1941 Foley was selected to lead the interrogation of Rudolf Hess at Mytchett Place, Aldershot, assisted by Thomas Kendrick. Later he was sent to Lisbon to supervise the double agent HAMLET. He also liaised closely with the Twenty Committee, which he attended occasionally, and with the London Controlling Section over the management of HAMLET and the other members of his network in Portugal.

At the end of the war Foley returned to Germany under British Control Commission for Germany cover as assistant inspector-general of the Public Safety Branch responsible for screening members of the new German administration. He retired in 1949 to his home in Stourbridge, where he died in May 1958.

FOOT. Code name for the mass expulsion of 90 KGB and GRU personnel from London in September 1972 precipitated by the defection of Oleg Lyalin. The 90 Soviets expelled were diplomats working under commercial or other covers in London. A further 15 Soviets who happened to be out of the country at the time were refused readmittance; among this group was Yuri Voronin, the KGB rezident, forcing a very junior subordinate, a security officer at the Soviet Trade Delegation in Highgate, to assume his duties temporarily. The sudden, unexpected removal of more than a hundred intelligence professionals handicapped the local rezidenturas for more than a decade.

FOOTE, ALLAN. Born in Kirkdale, Liverpool, in 1905, Allan Foote was discharged from the Royal Air Force because of his failure to declare his membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He subsequently chose to fight in Spain and in December 1936 joined the British battalion of the International Brigade. Upon his return to London in September 1938, he was recruited as a courier by an experienced GRU agent, Birgette Kuczynski, who was then living in St. John’s Wood. His first assignment was to travel to Geneva and make contact with a woman in the main post office, whom he subsequently learned was Ursula Kuczynski, his recruiter’s sister. She sent him on a mission to Munich, where he fell in love with a beautiful Kommunist Partei Deutschland (German Communist Party) activist who was brutally beaten by the Gestapo and later died in a concentration camp.

When Foote returned to Switzerland, he was trained as a wireless operator and, until his arrest by the Bundespolizei in November 1943, he managed the radio communications for an extensive GRU network based in Lausanne but with contacts in Italy, France, and Germany. Foote was released from jail by the Swiss in September 1944 and reported to the Soviet military mission in Paris, which arranged for him to be flown to Moscow. There he underwent a lengthy period of debriefing and training in preparation for a new appointment as a Soviet illegal in the United States. Foote was intended to travel to America via Germany and Argentina, but when he arrived in Berlin in March 1947 he surrendered to the British authorities. His subsequent interrogation by MI5 formed the basis of his 1949 autobiography, Handbook for Spies, which was largely written by his inquisitor, Courtney Young.

On the basis of Foote’s evidence, the Security Service embarked upon a long investigation of Soviet spy rings in Britain, but although Ursula Kuczynski, who had moved from Switzerland to Oxfordshire, was interviewed, no one was arrested or charged with offenses. Nevertheless, Foote was regarded as a traitor by his former comrades, and he provided MI5 with a wealth of detail about Soviet espionage. When Foote had outlived his usefulness as a source on the GRU, he found a job in the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries and lived in a small residential hotel in North London until his death in August 1956.

FOOTMAN, DAVID. David Footman, who was later to take up an academic existence at Oxford, was a gifted commentator on the world scene and a recognized expert on political trends in Eastern Europe. He wrote several novels while at Broadway, but never divulged any aspect of his operational work. In his curiously intimate autobiography published in 1974, Dead Yesterday: An Edwardian Childhood, in which Footman gave a graphic description of an early homosexual encounter, he also described his political views: “We were dissidents, not rebels; but cracks in the old order were already appearing and we helped to widen them. Whether or not humanity is better for the change is open to argument.”

Footman’s entry into the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) took place in 1935 following 10 years with the Levant Consular Service. Educated at Marlborough and New College, Oxford, Footman had served in France with the Royal Berkshire regiment during World War I and was decorated with the Military Cross in 1916. After working in consular posts in Yugoslavia, Alexandria, and Port Said, Footman left the service in 1929 to be manager of the Gramophone Company in Vienna. That job lasted three years, whereupon he moved to Belgrade to represent the London bank of Glyn Mills. His wife Joan, whom he had married in 1917 when he was 22, divorced him in 1936. When he joined SIS, Footman was already a novelist of some note, having published The Yellow Rock, The Mine in the Desert, Balkan Holiday, and Pig and Pepper. While working for SIS, he released Pemberton and two books of short stories, Half-Way East and Better Forgotten.

Footman’s first post in SIS was to Section I, the political branch created to advise the Chief on developments around the world. In 1944, while heading Section I, Footman published Red Prelude, a biography of Andrei Zhelyabov, and the first of several scholarly books on Russian revolutionary history. Two years later in The Primrose Path, he documented the life of Ferdinand Lassalle, founder of the German Labour Movement and a significant influence on Marx and Engels.

Footman remained in SIS until 1953, when he took up an academic appointment at St. Antony’s, Oxford, in charge of modern Russian studies. A close friend of many leftist intellectuals, the end of Footman’s career in the intelligence field was tainted by his connections with Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess. Indeed, according to Goronwy Rees, when Burgess defected in May 1951, Rees telephoned Footman to warn him that he believed the diplomat’s disappearance was no temporary phenomenon but the carefully planned escape of a traitor. Rees’s assertion that Footman had dismissively brushed the assertion aside was to prove exceptionally damaging to a brilliant intelligence officer. Footman himself was unembarrassed by what some of his more critical colleagues regarded as injudicious friendships, as was demonstrated in 1967 when he published In Memoriam Archie, following the death three years earlier of Archie Lyall.

Footman was a prolific author while studying at St. Antony’s, almost all of his work concentrating on aspects of the Russian civil wars, beginning with The Last Days of Kolchak. In 1956 he wrote a biography of Boris Savinkov, the Menshevik leader (supported by SIS through Somerset Maugham) who had been the assassin of the Grand Duke Serge and the czar’s police chief, Dmitri Drepov. Footman retired as emeritus fellow of St. Antony’s in 1963 and, at the time of his death in October 1983, was still active contributing articles to journals. He had dominated SIS for nearly 20 years and had been a significant influence over his colleagues, most of whom were of rather lesser intellects.

FORBES DENNIS, ERNAN. Of Scottish origin, Ernan Forbes Dennis was wounded in World War I and in 1918 was posted first to Marseilles and then by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) to Vienna under the semitransparent cover of passport control officer. The SIS station was closed temporarily in an economy drive in 1927, leaving Forbes Dennis and his American Quaker wife, who wrote numerous novels and plays under her improbable maiden name Phyllis Bottome, to take in up to 20 young guests at their mountain retreat, among them Ian Fleming and Peter Fleming. Bottome’s 1946 novel The Life Line, about a British Intelligence agent who is fluent in German and “climbs like a mountain goat” may have been the basis of James Bond. Her autobiography, The Goal, gives a detailed account of her husband’s work for SIS.

FORCE 133. Cover name for the Special Operations Executive in the Middle East, based at Rustum Buildings in Cairo. The organization also masqueraded under other convenient covers in the region, among them MO1(SP) and MO4.

FORCE 136. Cover name from March 1944 for Special Operations Executive in the Far East during World War II, Force 136 was headed by Colin Mackenzie and was divided into five sections covering Burma (run by R. E. Forester and later Ritchie Gardiner), Siam (run by A. C. Ponton), Malaya (Patrick Goodfellow), and French Indochina (François de Langlade) and an Anglo-Dutch section headed by Frits Mollinger.

FORCE 137. Cover name for Special Operations Executive’s Far East headquarters in Melbourne following the loss of Singapore, led by Major G. Egerton Mott.

FORCE 139. Cover name for the Special Operations Executive section headed by Henry Thelfall in Monopoli that ran operations into Poland and Czechoslovakia during 1944.

FORCE 266. Cover name for Special Operations Executive’s Yugoslav and Albanian subsections at Bari in 1944, headed by Captain Watrous and John Eyre, later designated Force 299.

FORCE 333. Cover name for the Special Operations Executive section located at Torre di Mare in 1944, responsible for logistical support to Albania and Yugoslavia, commanded by Brigadier Miles.

FORCE RESEARCH UNIT (FRU). The cover name of a British military intelligence organization in Northern Ireland responsible for the recruitment of sources within loyalist and republican paramilitary groups during the 1970s and 1980s. Subdivided into three detachments, often called the “Dets”—at Belfast (South), Londonderry (North), and Enniskillen (West)—the FRU assigned code numbers to individual agents, the first two digits of which indicated the particular unit handling the source. Largely staffed by noncommissioned officers, the FRU proved very successful at penetrating its targets and exploiting intelligence, but fell victim to allegations of collusion with terrorists, especially following the murder of a Belfast solicitor, Pat Finucane, and the conviction of an FRU agent, Brian Nelson, on charges of conspiracy to murder. At the time of Nelson’s recruitment, the FRU was commanded by Colonel Gordon Kerr, of the Gordon Highlanders, and an independent investigation was conducted by a team of mainland detectives led by (Sir) John Stevens. In 2003 Stevens completed his inquiry, which had lasted more than 10 years, and recommended the prosecution of several former members of the FRU.

FOREIGN OFFICE ADVISER. The (traditionally unavowed) post of Foreign Office adviser to the Secret Intelligence Service developed from the appointments during World War II of Robert Cecil and later Sir Patrick Reilly to assist the Chief and liaise closely with the permanent undersecretary’s department. The purpose was to give the Foreign Office advance notice of risky operations and a consultation channel to prevent misunderstandings. Among those holding the post have been George Clutton (1952–55), Michael Williams (1955–56), Geoffrey MacDermott (1956–58), Leonard Hooper (1958–60), Sir Peter Wilkinson (1960–62), Nicholas Henderson (1962–63), and Christopher Ewart–Biggs (1966–70).

FORTER, ALEXIS. Of White Russian extraction and a former Royal Air Force officer, Alexis Forter was a legendary Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer who had made his reputation as a case officer in the Middle East. In 1982 he was the SIS station commander in Paris, where he ran some imaginative operations intended to deny the Argentines Exocet missile reloads during the Falklands conflict.

FOURCADE, MARIE-MADELEINE. After the French collapse in 1940, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade moved from Paris, where she had been a secretary for a group of magazines, to a small town near the foothills of the Pyrenees to be with her former boss, Georges Loustaunau-Lacau, who had been wounded. Loustaunau-Lacau, who had an impressive record from World War I, was a determined anti-Fascist and anti-Communist and, adopting the nom de guerre Navarre, he began organizing an intelligence network in Vichy territory under cover of an ex-serviceman’s group. His link with London depended on a Canadian diplomat based in Vichy, but his refusal to work for General Charles de Gaulle’s exiled intelligence apparatus brought him to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). In March 1941 he received a radio and an operator from London and began operations with a measure of protection from the Vichy Deuxième Bureau. However, he was arrested in May 1941 while planning a scheme for an insurrection in North Africa, leaving Fourcade to take over the network.

She reestablished contact with SIS and traveled to Lisbon for a rendezvous with Kenneth Cohen. Until they actually met face to face-SIS-had-no-idea-that-their-star-agent-was-a-glamorous-32-year-old mother of two. The circuit was known in London as ALLIANCE but to Fourcade, who had assigned the name of an animal to each of her agents, it was “Noah’s Ark,” which subsequently became the title of her autobiography. In a passage from her memoirs, she describes the British traitor codenamed BLA, an SIS agent who was accepted for training despite his record as a Fascist. Although she did not reveal it in her book, his true name was Bradley Davis, and when it became clear he had switched sides, she was eventually forced to have him assassinated.

The ALLIANCE network grew to include some 3,000 members, operating wireless transmitters, and in July 1943 she reluctantly agreed to be flown out of France to escape the German net closing around her. After the war Fourcade, a doughty supporter of President de Gaulle, became a member of the European Parliament. She died in July 1989.

FOXLEY. Special Operations Executive code name for a plan hatched by X Section to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944. Although opposed by the section’s head, Colonel R. H. Thomley, various options were considered, including the infiltration of two snipers into the grounds of the Berghoff at Berchtesgaden, ambushing Hitler’s motorcade, or sabotaging his private train. The idea was eventually abandoned, but the file was declassified in 1998. A similar plan to eliminate members of Hitler’s entourage, including Joseph Goebbels, was codenamed LITTLE FOXLEYS.

FRANCE. The relationship between British Intelligence and its French counterparts has not always been strained. During World War I, many personal friendships were established with the Deuxième Bureau and afterward both MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) maintained close links with the civilian and military intelligence organizations in Paris, where Biffy Dunderdale was a popular head of station. After the Nazi occupation in 1940, one official French agency, the Service de Renseignements, and its cryptographic branch, kept in clandestine contact with London until the Vichy regime closed it down.

In London, SIS’s P1 production section, the Vichy French country section headed by Kenneth Cohen, was subdivided into P1a (North Africa), P1b (Non–Free French), and P1c (Free French). In addition, Dunderdale’s P5 was in touch with the substantial Polish networks in France, and J. M. Langley’s P15 organized escape routes (and later became MI9). Naturally this profusion of intelligence activity in France became a source of concern to General Charles de Gaulle, to the point that Special Operations Executive (SOE) dedicated MO (later RF) Section to liaising with his Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action. In addition, SOE ran the independent F Section, EU/P for the Poles in France, DF for the escape lines, and AMF in Algeria operating into southern France. With so many overlapping networks and given the added ingredient of French politics, it is not surprising that relations between the competing agencies and sections occasionally reached a breaking point.

After the war, SIS reestablished a station in Paris, with Barley Alison and Tom Green, and MI5’s Jasper Harker was also given diplomatic status at the embassy. Liaison between SIS and the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionage (later Direction-Générale de Services Extérieure), and MI5 with the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, remained cordial but distant throughout much of the Cold War because of the belief, based on defector testimony, that Communists had penetrated every level of the French government. The cooperation given to SIS during the Falklands conflict in 1982 served to restore trust, although the continued, overt presence of Algerian GIA terrorists in London remained a cause for complaint until the Terrorism Act tightened Britain’s antiterrorist laws in 2000.

FRANCK, LOUIS. A member of Section D, Louis Franck was sent on a successful mission to Brussels in May 1940 to prevent the Bank of Belgium’s gold reserve from falling into German hands. Franck later joined Special Operations Executive (SOE) and was posted to British Security Coordination, where he headed the organization’s operations in West Africa. Subsequently he was to be transferred to Italy to supervise SOE’s operations run from the forward base in Bari.

FRANKS, DICKIE. Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) from 1978 to 1981, Arthur (“Dickie”) Franks had joined the organization in 1949 after his education at Rugby and Queen’s College, Oxford. He served in the army and then Special Operations Executive between 1940 and 1946, and his first overseas posting was to the SIS station in Cyprus, operating under British Middle East Office cover, in 1952. The following year he was sent to Tehran, where he remained for four years, playing a key role in BOOT, the plan that overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mossadeq and established the Shah. In 1956 Franks returned to Broadway as controller, Middle East. Later, as head of the London station, he laid the foundations of the operation to run Colonel Oleg Penkovsky by recruiting Greville Wynne as an agent and courier in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; Penkovsky turned out to be a veritable goldmine of intelligence but was arrested in 1962. In the aftermath of the Penkovsky affair, when Wynne supposedly had been resettled and compensated, Franks was posted in 1962 to Bonn. In November 1966 he returned to London, and 12 years later he was appointed Chief.

FRANKS, LORD. Following the Falklands conflict in 1982, Lord Franks chaired a committee of privy councilors to investigate the cause of the war and took evidence from all the intelligence agencies. His conclusions, that the war could not have been predicted or avoided, were widely criticized.

FRIEDMAN, LITZI. Married to Kim Philby in Vienna in 1934, Litzi Friedman was a Communist activist who is credited with having introduced her husband to Edith Suschitzky, an experienced NKVD agent who in turn arranged for Philby to meet his recruiter, Arnold Deutsch, at a rendezvous in Regent’s Park. Later divorced from Philby, Friedman returned to East Germany after the war and now lives in Vienna.

FRIENDS. Originally a term within Special Operations Executive to refer to the Haganah, the military arm of the Jewish Agency, but after World War II, “friends” was, and remains, the euphemism adopted by the Foreign Office for the Secret Intelligence Service.

FROLIK, JOSEF. Josef Frolik joined the Ministry of State Security in December 1952 and eight years later had risen to be head of the department supervising espionage by the Czech Intelligence Service (StB) in Britain. In 1964 he began a two-year tour of duty in London, attached to the Czech embassy under diplomatic cover as labor attaché. In mid-1968, having returned to headquarters in Prague, Frolik was informed that his career in the StB had come to an end and that from August he would be unemployed. This news prompted him to contact the Central Intelligence Agency in Prague, which arranged for the exfiltration of Frolik, his wife, and his son while they were on holiday in Bulgaria. Together they kept a rendezvous with a fast speedboat, which collected them off the beach and carried them across the Black Sea to Istanbul, whence they were flown to the United States.

During his debriefing, Frolik identified several StB assets in London, including three Labour members of Parliament, Sir Barnet Stross, John Stonehouse, and Will Owen. Although Stross had died in May 1967 and Stonehouse denied any contact with the Czechs, Owen was charged with having sold secrets from the Defence Estimates Committee to Frolik’s colleagues, Colonel Jan Paclik and Robert Husak. Owen was acquitted, but later admitted his guilt. Also arrested was Nicholas Prager, a former Royal Air Force technician who had betrayed details of various classified radar systems. He was sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment and deportation to his native Czechoslovakia.

Frolik’s autobiography, The Frolik Defection, published in 1975, was heavily sanitized by the British Security Service because several of the StB and KGB assets identified by the author, particularly those within the trade union movement, had been run by MI5 as double agents. However, while he was en poste, Frolik found some obstacles in his attempts to approach union leaders like Ted Hill because, as he was advised, they were “horses being run by another stable,” meaning they were already controlled by the KGB. Today Frolik lives in the United States.

FULFORD, ROGER. President of the Oxford Union in 1927, Roger Fulford was a lifelong supporter of the Liberal party and stood unsuccessfully for Parliament three times, in 1929, 1945, and 1950. In 1933, at age 29, he joined the Times and published his first book, Royal Dukes. This was followed two years later by a biography, George IV, and coincided with his appointment as a lecturer in English at King’s College, London. Fulford became a recognized authority on the history of the royal family and was invited by his friend Guy Burgess to give a BBC radio talk on the coronation of George IV.

When World War II broke out, Fulford worked as a censor and was soon transferred to the Security Service, where he worked in the F4 subsection of the division led by Roger Hollis, whom he had known for some years and had once turned down for a job at the Times. Fulford’s role was to monitor the activities of pacifists, peace groups, and revolutionary movements, all of whom were regarded as potentially subversive. After two years he switched to the Air Ministry, where he was assistant private secretary to Sir Archibald Sinclair, the secretary of state for air, until the end of the war. Upon his return to civilian life, Fulford published The Right Honourable Gentlemn and continued thereafter to work as a historian and biographer. Despite his election defeats, his commitment to the Liberal cause was undiminished and his loyalty to the party was rewarded in 1980 with a knighthood, just three years before his death in May 1983.

FUNNY NEUK. Purchased in 1938 by the Chief, Admiral Hugh Sinclair, Funny Neuk was a former army camp in Woldingham, Kent, occupied by the Secret Intelligence Service’s Section VIII as a wireless station to serve the War Station at Bletchley Park. However, with the development of Whaddon Hall, the site became redundant, and it was loaned in 1940 to Frantisek Moravec’s Czech Intelligence Service for the duration of World War II.

FURNIVAL JONES, SIR MARTIN. Director-general of the Security Service from 1965 to 1972, Martin Furnival Jones was educated at Highgate School and won a scholarship to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read modern and medieval languages and law. In 1937 he qualified as a solicitor and joined Slaughter & May. On the outbreak of World War II, Furnival Jones was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps, transferring to MI5 in 1941. At the end of the war, he remained in MI5, working in the protective security division based in Cork Street, Mayfair. In 1953 he was appointed director of C Branch. Three years later he replaced Graham Mitchell as director of D Branch, and then in September 1963 replaced him again as deputy director-general when Mitchell took early retirement. Furnival Jones’s name became known to the public when he gave evidence to the Franks Committee on the Official Secrets Acts, but he remained silent in his retirement, spent at his home in Sandy, Bedfordshire, where he indulged in his passion for bird watching. He died in 1996, aged 84.

–G–

G OFFICERS. At the outbreak of World War II the Secret Intelligence Service was divided into “Y,” or headquarters, posts and “YP,” or Production; representing the overseas stations. The YP organization was further divided into numbered G Sections: G1, headed by Captain Taylor, covering the Far East and North and South America; G4, under Leslie Nicholson, for Aden, Iran, Iraq, and East and West Africa; G5, led by Basil Fenwick, for Spain and Portugal; G7, under Commander Bill Bremner, for Egypt, Malta, Palestine, and Turkey; and G8, headed by Frank Giffey, for Sweden, Finland, and the USSR. Other prewar G officers included Cuthbert Bowlby and Frank Slocum.

GALLEGOS, ADRIAN. Originally recruited into H Section of Special Operations Executive (SOE), Adrian Gallegos intended to sabotage the bridges and railway lines of southern Spain in the event of a widely predicted Nazi thrust through Catalonia to Gibraltar. That attack never materialized, and Gallegos was transferred to Algiers where, as a lieutenant in the naval reserve, he was assigned to a Special Forces unit in Sicily. After the island had been liberated, he was dispatched as an advance party to Capri and began to plan operations against the mainland, but during his first reconnaissance to the Italian coast, his fast motorboat struck a mine. Gallegos and the 16 surviving crew members climbed into three dinghies and were rescued by the German navy. Gallegos, having spent much of his life in Italy, pretended to be an Italian, and was accepted as such by the Germans, who sent him as a prisoner of war to the Regina Coeli prison in Rome.

In December 1944 Gallegos was moved to a PoW camp near Munich, where he attempted to escape but was caught while seeking new papers from the local Italian consulate. After his arrest he made a second escape, from the train taking him to a concentration camp, but he was again intercepted close to the Swiss frontier. Imprisoned at the Reichenau Straflager, Gallegos persuaded his captors that he was a civilian worker who had lost his papers and, after five weeks, he was released to find a job in Innsbruck. Instead he took a train to Milan and, in September 1944, walked into the mountains to find the partisans. Having contacted a band of guerrillas, the British liaison officer, Gordon Lett, signaled Gallegos’s arrival, and his identity was confirmed even though he had been reported lost, believed dead, more than a year earlier. Accompanied by a group of partisans and Allied ex-PoWs, he then made his way to Rome, where he reported to the local SOE commander, Gerald Holdsworth. He was flown back to London, where he was interviewed by General Pug Ismay and posted back to Italy, to the Special Forces headquarters in Florence.

After the war Gallegos switched to the Secret Intelligence Service and operated under diplomatic cover in Madrid during the mid-1950s.

GAMBIER-PARRY, SIR RICHARD. Originally a BBC public relations officer, Richard Gambier-Parry moved to the Pye electronics firm in 1931 and then in 1938 joined the Secret Intelligence Service to modernize its overseas wireless organization. An Old Etonian who had served in the Royal Flying Corps during World War I, Gambier-Parry established his headquarters at Whaddon Manor and built large dedicated stations for Section VIII at Hanslope Park, Nash, and Forfar. At the end of World War II, Gambier-Parry supervised the transfer of Section VIII’s assets to the newly created Diplomatic Wireless Service.

GAME BOOK. An annual report of successful espionage investigations and prosecutions compiled by MI5 while Sir Vernon Kell was director-general. Now declassified, it may be inspected at the National Archives at Kew.

GARBO. When Juan Pujol, motivated by his harrowing experiences in the Spanish Civil War, offered his services to the British embassy in Madrid in 1940, he was rebuffed. Dismayed by the rejection, Pujol made a similar approach to the Germans, falsely claiming to be a Nazi sympathizer. The Abwehr accepted him at face value and trained him to be a spy with the intention of dispatching him to England where Pujol alleged he had strong business connections.

Although he reported to his Abwehr controller that he had reached London, Pujol in fact took up residence in Lisbon from where he concocted some highly imaginative messages purportedly based on his observations in England. This deception went unnoticed by the Germans, eager for any intelligence from Britain, but it was spotted by MI5, which was routinely tapping the enemy’s wireless communications. As the volume of German intercepts referring to the master spy increased, the Security Service redoubled its efforts to trace the agent in Britain.

While MI5 scoured the intercepted messages for clues to his identity, Pujol made a second attempt to join the Allies by visiting the British embassy in Lisbon. Once again he was turned down, but the American naval attaché who interviewed him was impressed by the Spaniard’s insistence that he had been enrolled as an Abwehr agent. Signals were exchanged with London and the Security Service belatedly realized that the enigmatic spy codenamed ARABEL in the enemy’s wireless traffic was really an elaborate hoax.

In April 1942 Pujol was flown to Plymouth, together with his wife and child, where they were met by Cyril Mills. They were accommodated at a house in North London recently vacated by MUTT and JEFF, two of MI5’s star double agents, and contact was resumed with the enemy. MI5 assigned Pujol the code name GARBO, because he was “the best actor in the world,” and introduced him to Thomás Harris, the head of MI5’s Spanish subsection. Harris and Pujol took to each other instantly and together they created one of the most brilliantly successful strategic deceptions of all time. Pujol stepped up his reports to the enemy and developed a wholly fictitious network of 23 subagents who all submitted reports for onward transmission to Madrid.

GARBO’s presence in England neatly coincided with the start of a lengthy and sophisticated campaign to persuade the Germans that the long-expected invasion across the Channel would concentrate on the beaches of the Pas-de-Calais. GARBO’s vital contribution to this operation was to provide the evidence to support a completely bogus Allied order of battle that included a nonexistent First United States Army Group located in southeast England, poised in readiness for an assault on northern France. When the real invasion got under way in June 1944, GARBO assured his enemy contacts that this was a mere feint intended to divert the defenders away from the real target further north, which would be attacked a fortnight later.

GARBO’s colorful messages to his Abwehr controller made a dramatic impact on the success of D-Day and were the cause of a significant delay before the Wehrmacht launched a counterattack in Normandy. Despite his catastrophically misleading advice, GARBO was decorated by the Germans, and he also received an MBE from the grateful British government. His true name remained a closely guarded secret and was not disclosed until his return to London in 1984. In the meantime he was praised by such authorities as John Masterman, Dennis Wheatley, Anthony Blunt, and even Kim Philby, who described his ring as “one of the most creative intelligence operations of all time.”

After the war Pujol and his family were resettled in Venezuela, working for a British oil company, his true identity protected by the Security Service. However, in 1984 he returned to London to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the D-Day landings and was escorted to Buckingham Palace to meet the Duke of Edinburgh, who thanked him for his unique contribution to the Allied victory. Following his visit to the Normandy beaches in 1984, GARBO wrote an account of his extraordinary career as a double agent.

GARBY-CZERNIAWSKI, ROMAN. Soon after the fall of France, Roman Garby-Czerniawski, a Polish air force pilot, went underground and played a key role in a stay-behind network set up by the Polish Deuxième Bureau. Radio contact direct to London was established in January 1941 between Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and the network, which SIS codenamed TUDOR. At the time, TUDOR represented SIS’s virtually sole source of reliable information from occupied France, so Garby-Czerniawski was held in high regard in London and was given a hero’s reception when he was flown over for secret consultations in October 1941. General Wladislaw Sikorski awarded him Poland’s highest decoration for gallantry and for nine days he was feted by SIS.

Unfortunately, during his brief absence in England, Garby-Czerniawski’s cipher clerk, who also happened to be his mistress, betrayed him to the Abwehr, and soon after his return he was arrested together with most of the members of his group. This impressive German coup allowed them to continue to run the network with the intention of duping SIS, and for a period the deception succeeded. Meanwhile Garby-Czerniawski was offered a tempting proposal by his captors: If he would travel to England and spy for the Abwehr, the lives of his colleagues in prison in Paris would be spared and they would be treated as regular prisoners of war. Garby-Czerniawski accepted the deal and arrangements were made for the pilot to make an authentic-looking escape from his incarceration in Fresnes.

In October 1942 Garby-Czerniawski reached Madrid, where he was interviewed by Kenneth Benton, but he gave no clue to the SIS officer that his dramatic escape from the enemy had been anything other than genuine. However, by the time he reached London, MI5 had heard from three other Polish officers that there was something fishy about the pilot’s miraculous appearance in the Spanish capital. Challenged by his interrogators, Garby-Czerniawski revealed his secret compact with the Abwehr and was enrolled as a double agent with the code name BRUTUS. He continued to maintain contact with his German controllers until January 1945 through his wireless operator CHOPIN, without arousing their suspicion, and thereby saved the lives of his fellow workers in the TUDOR network.

At the end of the war, Garby-Czerniawski remained in London and worked as a printer in Fulham. He was also appointed minister of information in the Polish government-in-exile, a post that he retained until his death. In his memoirs, published in 1961, Garby-Czerniawski gave his version of the events that led to the betrayal of the TUDOR network in 1941. His cipher clerk, Mathilde-Lily Carré, had acquired considerable notoriety as a result of the publicity given to her trial in Paris on collaboration charges in 1945, but his name had not been revealed in open court. There had been much speculation about the identity of her lover, the mysterious Polish spy who had been the principal victim of Carré’s treachery, but Garby-Czerniawski was later to maintain that his relationship with the traitor had been misrepresented. Several books were written about the episode, including an autobiography written by Carré herself after her release from jail, and although Garby-Czerniawski was eventually to admit their relationship, he chose to draw a veil over his subsequent activities in London as a double agent for MI5.

GAUNT, SIR GUY. Born in 1870, the son of a judge in Australia, and educated in Melbourne, Guy Gaunt saw action on HMS Swift in the Philippines in 1897 and commanded the British consulate in Apia, Samoa, during the rebel uprising two years later. He commanded HMS Vengeance during the Russo-Japanese War and later served on the Royal Navy’s China Station. In 1914 he was appointed British naval attaché in Washington, D.C., and throughout World War I ran propaganda operations against the Germans in the United States. In 1918 he saw action on convoy duty on HMS Leviathan and was posted to the Naval Intelligence Division. He retired with a knighthood and the rank of vice admiral in 1928.

GCHQ (GOVERNMENT COMMUNICATIONS HEADQUARTERS). Current name of organization previously called GC&CS (Government Code & Cipher School). See also Government Code and Cipher School.

GERMAN AGENTS. Before and during World War I, the German Admiralty established close links with the central police departments in Hamburg and Berlin, and in the interwar period the Abwehrstelle in Hamburg continued to conduct espionage operations against Great Britain and the United States. MI5’s knowledge of the enemy’s staff in Hamburg and Cologne was confined to the cover names used in correspondence and a few personal descriptions provided by some of their agents from their recruitment interviews.

In the interwar period, MI5 identified 30 German agents or persons at whom the Germans had made a pitch. Twenty-one were British, many of whom made no attempt to collect intelligence of value to the Germans but simply passed on items of little significance in a bid to get maximum reward for minimum effort. They had received no training at all, and the Abwehr’s methodology appeared inept. Half of the cases involved individuals who were never in a position to procure intelligence of any value. Among the more suitable people the Germans recruited or attempted to recruit were four ex-officers, four businessmen, and four members of the armed forces; most of them reported the approach to the authorities immediately.

The Germans recruited by responding to small ads in the newspapers, especially those from ex-officers, businessmen, and specialists with a technical knowledge seeking jobs. The Germans themselves also placed advertisements in British papers offering jobs for commercial and technical experts. From 1936 the Hamburg Abwehrstelle stepped up its efforts, so that 26 of the 30 known cases came to MI5’s notice between 1936 and the outbreak of war. Of these, three occurred in which Germans acted as recruiters and their addresses (one in England, one in Scotland, and one in Eire) were used by the Hamburg Abwehrstelle as mail drops where it received messages from agents in the United States and France.

Of the 30 agents identified, 11 told MI5 about the German approach, nine were exposed by mail intercepts, five were denounced by private individuals whose suspicions had been aroused, one was reported by an immigration officer, and one was denounced by an anonymous informant; the other two were uncovered by accident. Of the 11 agents who reported they had been recruited by the Germans (who would probably have escaped detection), six were approached via a personal contact.

Three post office boxes, registered in the names of different women, yielded a great deal of information. Mrs. Duncombe in London received intelligence collected in France. Mrs. Jessie Jordan was used as a mail drop in the United States for Gunther Rumrich. When Rumrich’s brother was arrested in Prague, he was found to be in possession of the address of a Mrs. Brandy in Dublin; this was the third mail drop. Clandestine examination of her correspondence showed that she was receiving accurate and therefore dangerous intelligence messages from a French merchant navy officer named Aubert, who was arrested at the end of 1938 and shot.

GIBRALTAR. During and after World War II, Gibraltar was an important strategic base for British Intelligence. Various agencies were represented there, including MI5 in the person of the defence security officer, Colonel H. G. (“Tito”) Medlam; his deputy, Philip Kirby-Green; the Secret Intelligence Service’s head of station, Colonel John Codrington; and his subordinate, Donald Darling, looking after the interests of MI9. In addition, early in the war Special Operations Executive posted an H Section mission on the Rock, headed by Peter Kemp, which was withdrawn when the danger of a German occupation of southern Spain diminished.

After the war, the Strait of Gibraltar continued to have a strategic significance as a choke point for the Mediterranean and the terminal for a SOSUS underwater array stretching into the Atlantic.

GIBSON, WILLIAM. Born in Canada, William Gibson was with his parents in St. Petersburg when World War I was declared in August 1914. Upon hearing the news, he went to the British embassy to demand a commission and, having been turned away by the military attaché, volunteered for the Russian army as a motorcycle dispatch rider. Gibson fought in Poland and on the Russian-Bulgarian border until the end of 1915, when he took his German fiancée to London. There, in March 1916, he visited the War Office and offered his services.

Eventually I was received in one of the offices with great courtesy by an impressive-looking Intelligence colonel, who informed me after a little conversation that I was exactly the man who was wanted, and that all I had to do was to go back to my hotel and await instructions. Full of joy, I did as he requested—and I was still sitting in my hotel five weeks later.

Instead of working for the War Office, Gibson accepted a job with a small trading company and was told to return to Petrograd and have the “office in running order by the time my chief, C——, arrived on the scene.” Gibson, accompanied by his wife, arrived in Petrograd in March and his “reputation of ‘mystery man’ grew by leaps and bounds, as we learned later. As a matter of fact, I was, unknown to myself, about to become a real mystery man.” The cause of the mystery was Colonel Sergei Rudniev’s offer to Gibson to join the Russian Secret Service, a proposition that the young man accepted. Thus Gibson embarked upon a mission to Tashkent in Central Asia as a Secret Intelligence Service agent and as “spy upon spies number 41” for Colonel Rudniev.

Gibson succeeded in his assignment and in mid-1917 was back in London, ready for a new mission. He traveled to Finland and was then smuggled over the frontier into Russia to reestablish contact with Rudniev, who had retained his post in the secret police under the new regime headed by the Social Democrats. The colonel supplied Gibson with papers identifying him as a police commissar, which allowed him the freedom to travel, but when Rudniev was himself arrested by the Cheka, Gibson fled to Finland. Once back in London, Gibson received a commission from the Air Ministry and was posted as an intelligence officer to Taranto, Italy. Gibson complained about his new job and was sent to another backwater, Malta. Finally, in November 1918, he was transferred to Sir Hugh Trenchard’s air intelligence staff in Paris.

In February 1919, following the armistice, Gibson was demobilized and obtained a job as the Mond Nickel Company’s representative in the Black Sea region, selling copper sulfate. This took Gibson across Asia Minor, and in 1920 he was back in London, ready to undertake another mission to Russia, buying gold in Moscow and smuggling it to Sweden. Gibson was to have adventures in the southern Soviet republics, where he continued to trade in valuable commodities, experience suspicion and hostility, and on one occasion endure arrest and interrogation at the hands of the Cheka.

In his autobiography, Wild Career: My Crowded Years of Adventure in Russia and the Near East, published in 1935, Gibson recalled his commercial activities, which left him nearly bankrupt in Istanbul following the collapse of one of his partners.

GIDEON. A double agent recruited by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Security Service, GIDEON was Yevgeni Vladimirovich Brik, a Soviet illegal using the alias David Soboloff who surrendered in Ottawa in November 1953. He was assigned a case officer, Charles Sweeney, and for the duration of the operation, codenamed KEYSTONE, he was supplied by his Soviet contacts with three sources to service. One, codenamed GREEN, who was connected to the Canadian Communist party, worked for the Avro Aircraft Company and passed him blueprints of the advanced Avro Arrow jet fighter. The fact that the Soviets used GIDEON as a conduit to such an important asset demonstrated that, despite his laziness and his poor timekeeping in maintaining his radio schedules, he was completely trusted by the Illegals Directorate at Moscow Center.

The son of a onetime Amtorg official who had been based in New York, Brik spoke English with a slight Brooklyn accent and had landed from a ship in Halifax on his mission to be the KGB illegal rezident in Canada. In Canada he used the identity of David Semyonovich Soboloff, a Canadian-born “live double” who had returned to the Soviet Union as a youth. After traveling across Canada to acquaint himself with his “legend,” he settled in a Montreal suburb under the cover of a photographic studio. In November 1953, at the urging of his lover, the wife of a Canadian army noncommissioned officer, he turned himself in to the RCMP in Ottawa.

When in October 1955 he was recalled to Moscow, Brik was reluctant to go, but he was persuaded that a Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) representative would maintain contact with him. However, at the appointed rendezvous, GIDEON appeared accompanied by an unknown woman, and SIS assumed he had been compromised. The SIS station commander in Moscow at the time was Terence Tear O’Bryan, assisted by (Sir) Alan Urwick and (Dame) Daphne Park. In 1992 GIDEON was traced in Russia, where he had served a prison sentence of 15 years, and he accepted an invitation to return to Ottawa on a Canadian pension.

The case was considered significant in London because of the possibility that GIDEON had been betrayed by a mole inside MI5 or SIS. Furthermore, Terry Guernsey, the RCMP Security Service director, recalled having confided details of the GIDEON case to Roger Hollis. A later investigation codenamed LONGKNIFE concluded that a Mountie named James Morrison had sold details of KEYSTONE to the KGB in Ottawa for $3,500. In January 1986 Morrison pleaded guilty to charges of having passed information to the Soviets between 1955 and 1958.

GINHOVEN, HUBERT. A detective inspector in Special Branch, Hubert Ginhoven was sacked after he was arrested in April 1929. He had been identified by MIS as a possible source of a leak from Scotland Yard to William Ewer, a Soviet spy who headed the Federated Press of America news agency and employed several former detectives dismissed following the 1919 police strike. No further action was taken against either Ginhoven or Detective Sergeant Jane.

GIRAFFE. MIS code name for a Czech soldier and member of the French Foreign Legion, Georges Graf, who was recruited by another MI5 double agent, SWEETIE. Graf arrived in England with Ivan Spanehl and sent letters in secret writing to his Abwehr contact until he was posted to the Middle East to serve with the Free French forces. GIRAFFE was so trusted by the Abwehr that his name and address was supplied by his Abwehr controller to TRICYCLE.

GLAD, TOR. See MOE, JOHN.

GLADING, PERCY. A former employee of the Woolwich Arsenal, Glading was a Communist Party of Great Britain activist and the party’s former national organizer who was convicted in 1938 of running a Soviet spy ring. Glading’s arrest came after a lengthy penetration operation conducted by MI5’s Max Knight, who recruited Olga Gray, a young woman whom Glading trusted completely and used as a courier. Although MI5 succeeded in breaking up Glading’s spy ring and obtaining three convictions, it failed to catch any of his Soviet contacts and also overlooked clues to the involvement of Melita Sirnis and Edith Tudor Hart. After his release from prison, Glading moved to China, where he died.

GLOVER, SIR GERALD. Gerald Glover’s introduction to intelligence work took place in the Balkans in 1938 when, in the guise of a king’s messenger, he was dispatched by MI6 to Budapest with a diplomatic bag full of explosives. During the following months he made three further trips, to Bucharest and Belgrade, but after the fall of France and a couple of clandestine courier missions to Eire, he was invited to join the Security Service. The alternative was a Secret Intelligence Service appointment in the Middle East and as this did not appeal he was posted to the southeast of England in the role of regional security liaison officer (RSLO). The task of MI5’s network of 12 RSLOs was to liaise with the local police and military authorities and represent the Security Service whenever the need arose. During the invasion summer of 1940, this meant coordinating the counterespionage and countersabotage activities of the Home Guard, chief constable, and senior military commander from a base in a suburban house in Tunbridge Wells. After 18 months as the RSLO in Kent, Glover was put in overall command of the RSLOs, and he remained in that post, supervising the security arrangements for D-Day until late in 1944 when he returned to civilian life as a leading solicitor specializing in the negotiation of property deals. A highly successful racehorse owner, he was knighted in 1971 and his home at Pytchley became a center of Conservative politics in Northamptonshire. Glover died in December 1986, having privately published memoirs, entitled 115 Park Street.

GODFREY, ADMIRAL JOHN. Director of naval intelligence (DNI) during the first three years of World War II, Admiral Godfrey was transferred to the Indian Navy in September 1942 and did not receive the knighthood customarily given to DNIs. In May 1941 he flew to the United States, accompanied by his assistant Ian Fleming, and advised the Americans to establish a unified intelligence service. Always abrasive, he was unpopular among his fellow directors and gained a reputation for intellectual superiority and arrogance. According to reports from the Joint Intelligence Committee, their meetings went much more smoothly when he was not present. He died in August 1971, aged 83, and his biography, Very Special Admiral, was written by Patrick Beesly in 1980.

GOLENIEWSKI, MICHAL. A defector from the Polish SB, Michal Goleniewski was an especially important figure because he was also a KGB agent. Goleniewski volunteered information anonymously from Warsaw to the Central Intelligence Agency, which codenamed him SNIPER, and then escaped to Berlin in January 1961. Among those whom he identified as KGB agents were Secret Intelligence Service officer George Blake; Harry Houghton, who was based at the Royal Navy’s Underwater Weapons Research Establishment at Portland; Colonel Stig Wennerstrom of the Swedish Air Force; Heinz Felfe and Hans Clemens of the BND; Dr. Israel Beer; and a U.S. diplomat, Irwin Starbeck. After his arrival in the United States, Goleniewski announced that he was the czar’s son and demanded to be recognized as Prince Alexei Romanov. Much embarrassed, the CIA prevented Goleniewski from giving evidence to Congress. He now lives in New York, still convinced of his claim to royal lineage.

GOLITSYN, ANATOLI. A KGB defector who sought asylum with the Central Intelligence Agency in Helsinki in December 1960, Major Anatoli Golitsyn was brought to England in 1963 to review MI5’s files because of the suspicion of high-level penetration of the Security Service. Codenamed KAGO, Golitsyn was obliged to return to the United States in July when news of his presence in London was reported by the Daily Telegraph. Golitsyn’s belief that MI5 harbored a Soviet spy persuaded several counterintelligence experts at MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service, and two in particular, Arthur Martin and Stephen de Mowbray, helped edit his book New Lies for Old.

GOOSE. MI5 code name for Karl Grosse, a German spy who parachuted into Northamptonshire in October 1940 equipped with a British passport in the name of Alfred Phillips and was known to TATE. Grosse had arrived with a one-way wireless set and maps of Liverpool area. His instructions were to hike about and report on morale (or as he put it, “morals”), roadblocks, and weather conditions. He was arrested by a farmer within hours of landing and was interrogated at Camp 020, where he revealed that he had spent three years as a student of geology in the United States and was a member of the Brandenburg Lehr regiment, a military unit closely associated with the Abwehr. Although GOOSE expressed his willingness to act as a double agent and professed himself to be an anti-Nazi who only wanted to return to America, radio contact could not be established and he remained confined until the end of the war, having made a futile attempt to bribe a guard to send a letter to the German embassy in Dublin.

GORDIEVSKY, OLEG. A career KGB officer, Oleg Gordievsky was recruited as a British agent while he was serving under diplomatic cover in Copenhagen in 1974. For the next 11 years he supplied his Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) handlers with large quantities of information from the First Chief Directorate and from the rezidentura in London, where he was posted in 1982. In May 1985, having been named the rezident-designate, Gordievsky was unexpectedly summoned home to Moscow and accused of being a spy. He denied the accusation and resisted his interrogators, who used drugs to extract a confession. Although under heavy surveillance, Gordievsky was able to make contact with SIS and was exfiltrated in a British embassy car to Finland. In his absence he was sentenced to death.

Gordievsky was responsible for tipping the British off to the existence of Arne Treholt, the Soviet mole in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and to Michael Bettaney, who attempted to pass MI5 secrets to the rezident, Arkadi Gouk. Gordievsky has often speculated about how the KGB learned of his duplicity, and it has been widely assumed that he was compromised by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Aldrich Ames, who revealed that a source codenamed AE/TICKLE had penetrated the KGB in Denmark and London. Resettled under a new identity near London, Gordievsky was divorced by his wife Leila, subsequently married an English school matron, and wrote his memoirs, Last Stop Execution.

GORSKY, ANATOLI. Having worked at the Soviet embassy since 1936 as a technician without diplomatic cover with the alias Anatoli Gromov, Anatoli Gorsky was appointed the NKVD rezident in London in 1938 following the withdrawal of Grigori Grafpen. Gorsky inherited the management of the networks built up by Theodore Mally and Arnold Deutsch. Between February and December 1940 he was recalled to Moscow by Lavrenti Beria, who mistakenly believed the rezidentura had been penetrated, but upon his. return he supervised John Cairncross, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and Kim Philby.

In July 1944 Gorsky was transferred to Washington, D.C., to maintain contact with Donald Maclean, leaving Boris Krotov as his replacement in London. According to Oleg Gordievsky, Gorsky’s father had been a police officer under the czar, and because he had always described him as a schoolteacher, he was dismissed in 1953 when this discrepancy was discovered as he was about to be appointed head of the First (American) Department of the First Chief Directorate. Gorsky was eventually identified to MI5 by Blunt in 1964 as his contact whom he knew only as HENRY.

GOUK, ARKADI. The KGB rezident in London in 1983, Arkadi Gouk consulted his subordinate, Oleg Gordievsky, when he received a collection of authentic secret MI5 documents from Michael Bettaney through the letter box of his apartment in Holland Park. Unaware that Gordievsky was a Secret Intelligence Service agent, Gouk accepted his advice that the offer was a deliberate provocation and declined to respond. When Bettaney was eventually arrested, Gouk was declared persona non grata and expelled, thereby enhancing the status of Gordievsky, who was appointed rezident in his place.

GOUZENKO, IGOR. A 26-year-old GRU cipher clerk based at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Igor Gouzenko was scheduled to return to Moscow in September 1945 at the end of a tour lasting three years. However, he decided to stay in Canada with his wife, Svetlana, and his daughter, and over a period of weeks he smuggled documents from the closely guarded referentura in which he worked to give himself something to bargain with. In total, he removed from the building and hid in his home 109 items, including copies of telegrams to Moscow and file entries relating to individual NKVD and GRU sources, among them a member of Parliament, Fred Rose, and numerous Communists.

As soon as the Soviets realized Gouzenko had gone missing, they broke into his apartment and reported to the Canadian authorities that he was wanted for the theft of money. Belatedly the Canadian government realized Gouzenko’s value and he was granted full protection. The implications of the material he had purloined were far-reaching: The atomic scientist Allan Nunn May was identified as a Soviet spy and in February 1946 more than a dozen others were arrested and accused of supplying secrets to the Russians. A Royal Commission was empaneled to examine Gouzenko’s compelling evidence, and when its report was published, complete with facsimile reproductions of secret Soviet files, 12 suspects were convicted.

Gouzenko enjoyed his newfound fame and courted publicity. He sold interviews to magazines, appeared on television with a pillowcase over his head, and even sold the movie rights to his story, The Iron Curtain, to Twentieth Century-Fox. However, for his Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) bodyguards, he proved very difficult to handle. With the help of his RCMP interpreter, Mervyn Black, and two journalists, John Dalrymple and Laurie McKechnie, he wrote a novel, Fall of a Titan, and an autobiography, This Was My Choice, both of which were best-sellers. His wife also wrote a book, Before Igor.

The question of exactly what motivated Gouzenko to defect remains unresolved. At times, he said it was the burden of knowledge he had accumulated, but this was not what he said in This Was My Choice of what he had told the Royal Commission. According to one transcript, in October 1945 he claimed that, “convinced that such double-faced politics of the Soviet Government towards the democratic countries do not conform with the interests of the Russian people and endanger the security of civilization, I decided to break away from the Soviet regime and announce my decision openly.” In his 1948 autobiography, Gouzenko stressed the ideological nature of his conversion: “Instead of convincing myself that doctrines instilled by the Soviet Union were still sound, I had found my thoughts drifting towards the democratic way of life.” The most likely explanation is that Gouzenko, who was from typically Slav peasant stock, simply wanted to improve his life and that of his family. He knew that only austerity and hardship awaited him at home, whereas Canada offered living conditions that could never be matched in the Soviet Union.

In terms of the damage Gouzenko inflicted, his testimony and the evidence of his stolen files probably did more than any other single event to alert the West to the nature and scale of the espionage offensive waged by the Kremlin. Apart from the dozen or so defendants convicted of spying, Gouzenko wrecked an organization that had taken years to develop, exposed the penetration of the atomic weapons Manhattan Project, and demonstrated the very close relationship between the Canadian Communist party and Moscow.

Surprisingly, although Gouzenko’s subsequent whereabouts in Canada were something of an open secret, no attempt on his life was ever uncovered and, despite the dangers, he frequently courted publicity. In 1955, for example, he volunteered testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Gouzenko was provided with the identity of a Canadian of Ukrainian extraction who had been born near Saskatoon in Saskatchewan and lived off his royalties and a generous government pension. He died at his home outside Toronto in June 1982, blinded by a combination of diabetes and alcohol and embittered that his literary merits, which he regarded as on a par with Tolstoy, had gone largely unrecognized by anyone apart from his loyal wife and children.

A fictionalized account of Gouzenko’s defection, entitled The Network , was published by a former Secret Intelligence Service officer, Evan Simpson, under the pen name Evan John.

GOVERNMENT CODE AND CIPHER SCHOOL (GC&CS). The British Intelligence organization responsible for the development of Britain’s secure codes and the principal cryptographic agency. GC& CS was created after World War I from Room 40 and was led by Commander Alastair Denniston until 1943. Denniston was succeeded by (Sir) Edward Travis, and the organization was renamed the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), a title which remains to this day. Originally located in Queensgate, South Kensington, GC&CS moved to Bletchley Park in 1938.

G(R). Before the Middle East Mission of Special Operations Executive (SOE) was formally established in Cairo, there were several competing clandestine organizations based in Egypt, among them MO4 and G(R), both created under the auspices of the War Office. G(R), an abbreviation of “General Research,” was also known as GSI(R) and “the Jerusalem Bureau,” and in 1942 it was the last of the independent covert bodies to be absorbed into SOE. G(R) initially developed as the Middle East cover of Joe Holland’s MI(R) and was led by Peter Fleming, who promoted YAK, a project to recruit anti-Fascists from among Italian PoWs. Fleming’s team consisted of Bill Stirling and four other instructors from Lochailort, but their scheme failed through a total lack of committed volunteers among the prisoners, so instead they moved to Greece to prepare a stay-behind network. They were obliged to withdraw, on the British Legation’s yacht, almost as soon as they had arrived, and upon their return to Palestine, established a training school at Haifa. Finally, Fleming was recalled to England, and Stirling moved on to the Long Range Desert Group.

GRAND, LAURENCE. A charismatic Royal Engineers officer educated at Rugby and Woolwich, Colonel Laurence Grand masterminded the creation of the Secret Intelligence Service’s Section D (for “destruction”) in March 1938, intended as a sabotage organization to undertake deniable operations in Europe, the Balkans, and the Near East. Section D was absorbed into Special Operations Executive in June 1940, and Grand was posted to India with his regiment for the remainder of the war. After the war, Grand was appointed director of fortifications and works at the War Office, a post he held until his retirement in 1952.

GRAVES, ARMGAARD. Although previously denounced as a spy by his Edinburgh landlady, Dr. Armgaard Graves was not arrested until April 1912 in Glasgow when one of his letters, with a false return address, was handed in to the police and found to contain money and espionage instructions. A search of his hotel room revealed information about the new 14-inch naval gun under construction at William Beardmore’s munitions plant in Glasgow, and Graves, who claimed Dutch nationality, was convicted in July of offenses under the Official Secrets Act and sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment. He was secretly released from Barlinnie Prison in December, having accepted the offer to work for Captain Vernon Kell as a double agent against his German controllers, but in June 1913 he was in New York for the publication of his memoirs, The Secrets of the German War Office, in which he revealed his brief role as a double agent. In 1915, while still in New York, Graves wrote a further memoir, The Secrets of the Hohenzollerns.

GRAY, OLGA. An MI5 agent recruited by Max Knight to penetrate the Anglo-Soviet Friendship Society, which was suspected as a front for the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and Soviet espionage, Olga Gray proved hugely successful and was employed by the CPGB’s national organizer, Percy Glading, as a courier. In 1938, as “Miss X,” she gave evidence against Glading and ensured his conviction on charges under the Official Secrets Act.

GREECE. The Greek Section of Special Operations Executive (SOE) had its origins in the efforts in 1941 of Peter Fleming and an archaeologist, Nicholas Hammond, who had made a start at preparing a stay-behind network, training local Communists in wireless techniques. The Axis onslaught of April brought their meager efforts to an abrupt end, however, forcing the senior SOE officer in Athens, (Sir) John Stevens, to withdraw his staff of Ian Pirie and Bill Bar-brook to Crete at short notice just as the Germans entered the capital. There they found John Pendelbury, the distinguished archaeologist with a glass eye and swordstick who had previously been the curator of Knossos and had been active on the island for Section D. Unfortunately, his embryonic organization, which included two academics, Terence Bruce-Mitford from St. Andrews and Jack Hamson from Cambridge, disintegrated after he was killed by German paratroopers in May. Thereafter, effectively starting from scratch, SOE’s Greek subsection sent three resourceful officers to the Special Training School (STS) at Haifa to instruct agents for clandestine insertion back into Greece. They were Hammond, the Cambridge don who had been studying the archaeology of southern Albania and northeast Greece since 1930; the Honourable Monty Woodhouse; and travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor.

While SOE opted to associate itself with the Greek Left, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) concentrated its efforts in Athens on liaison with the Greek intelligence services, run collectively by General Demetrius Xenos. The local British passport control officer, Albert Crawford, was responsible for cultivating this overt contact, but when the legation was evacuated, the Passport Control Office was closed, leaving its assets unsupported and its few individual agents to fend for themselves. A parallel SIS network, run under commercial cover by Roland Gale from a shipping office, was also obliged to abandon its sources, thus leaving the field to SOE which, in the short time available, established good links with the Communists and other antimonarchists, not realizing that there was even the remotest prospect of a Greek government-in-exile being established under King George.

One significant problem confronting SOE was a contradiction within the reports received from PROMETHEUS II, which suggested that ELAS—the guerrilla wing of the Greek National Liberation Front, EAM—enjoyed more local popularity and constituted a better organized resistance movement than its more right-wing rival, the antimonarchist resistance front EDES. Accordingly SOE sent two missions into northwest Greece to liaise with EDES, led respectively by Hammond and Rufus Sheppard, a lecturer at Cairo University who had fought in the Abyssinian campaign. Sheppard’s group of two Greeks and an English wireless operator was dropped during the first full moon of 1943. It was followed the next month by Hammond and three Greeks, all of whom Hammond had trained at Haifa and then accompanied on a parachute course at Kabrit. Sheppard’s task was primarily political, to establish contact with ELAS and report on them, whereas Hammond was given a military objective by Brigadier Keble, the destruction of a strategically important railway bridge over the River Peneus in the Vale of Tempe.

The insertion of this second and third mission into Greece caused complications for Brigadier Myers, who had not been consulted in advance and was anxious not to give support inadvertently to an unknown guerrilla group. Accordingly he established himself as the senior British military liaison officer, taking Woodhouse as his second in command, and divided up the country into four regions, which he assigned to two Royal New Zealand Engineers, Tom Barnes and Arthur Edmonds, and the two academics Sheppard and Hammond.

Under these new arrangements, a second operation was.launched to sabotage the key north-south rail link over the Peneus, which had been repaired. A mission consisting of Major P. Wingate and two sappers, Captains Scott and McIntyre, was dropped into the territory controlled by a tough ex-commando, Geoffrey Gordon-Creed. Together they mounted an attack on the heavily defended bridge at Asopos. After they were joined by another commando, Donald Stott from New Zealand, and an escaped PoW, Lance-Corporal Chester Lockwood, they finally succeeded at the second attempt in June 1943. The structure was almost unapproachable, as it spanned a deep chasm between two long tunnels, with 40 German sentries armed with machine guns posted at both entrances. The only possible approach was a near suicidal frontal attack up the gully with the saboteurs climbing the ironwork to attach their charges. Gordon-Creed’s team, unarmed apart from rubber coshes, braved a torrent of floodwater to carry five packages of high explosives to the base of the cantilevered bridge. One inquisitive enemy picket was dispatched silently, and the party placed their charges on a guard platform directly under the main span and retired. An hour and a half later, the delayed-action charges detonated, transforming the fortified viaduct into a mass of useless ironwork. It was later reported that the Germans were so convinced that only treachery could have enabled the saboteurs to destroy the viaduct that they executed the entire guard detachment.

News of Gordon-Creed’s success was well received in Cairo, but the celebrations were short lived. Soon afterward Donald Stott made his way into Athens on a sabotage mission and found himself negotiating with the German occupiers through the offices of the mayor of Athens. When word of his initiative had spread, SOE was denounced for colluding with the enemy, and Cairo ordered him to extricate himself immediately without compromising SOE any further.

Relations between SOE’s men in the field and the desk men in Cairo were always strained, sometimes unnecessarily so. The pressure of operating in enemy territory, constantly at risk from betrayal and ambush, made the agents hypersensitive to the need for security. A signal addressed to Denys Hamson, a former Section D adventurer in the Balkans, once asked for his true name and those of the rest of his team, which consisted of the New Zealander engineers Barnes and Edmonds, five months after they had landed. Cairo explained, less than tactfully, that “owing to reorganization, previous records had been mislaid” and headquarters needed to know with whom it was communicating. Apparently Colonel William Hamilton and Major Derek Lang, the two SOE officers responsible for mounting the operation, had been transferred soon after Hamson and his men were dispatched and SOE had been unable to establish the mission’s composition. Not surprisingly, they were bitter at their treatment.

Nor were all the British liaison officers prepared to tolerate ELAS’s ruthless tactics. Hammond requested to be withdrawn from the field, prompted by a fleeting visit to his mission by Karl Barker-Benfield, Keble’s successor at SOE Cairo, who countermanded Hammond’s instructions and gave concessions to ELAS. Of this episode, Hammond says:

It was thought in military circles that [Woodhouse] and I had had become embittered by too long an experience in the field, and that our view of ELAS had grown distorted and biased. [Woodhouse] had fought against this attitude in the Middle East and in London but without success.

Once in Italy, Hammond went to see General Stawell, but found him “a tired man with little fight in him, and he made it clear that he adhered to Barker-Benfield’s views and to those of the higher command.” Nor did he have much confidence in the head of SOE’s Greek subsection, the solicitor John Stevens, whom he believed to be

unduly favorable in his opinion of ELAS, partly as a result of an initial prejudice, and mainly from the very brief experience he had had in Greece.... He was a clever, quick-witted man of eager temperament and quick enthusiasms.

The paucity of information reaching SOE from the field was intended to be rectified by a tour of inspection undertaken by Stevens and a similar mission completed by Major David Wallace of 60th Rifles in July 1943 on behalf of the Foreign Office. Wallace was sent as Anthony Eden’s personal emissary to see what was happening on the ground and, according to Myers, Wallace was quite surprised by what he found during his fortnight with ELAS.

It seemed that neither he nor the political authorities in either Cairo or London had any idea that EAM and its armed forces, ELAS, had such an extensive grip on the people in the mountains, and such extreme Left-wing political control. He appeared surprised at the way that, time and again, I had turned a blind eye to their behavior, when it had not critically affected operational plans, in order to remain in their confidence and to get the best value militarily.

When Myers and Wallace arrived in Egypt in August 1943 they discovered that they were the first members of the British Military Mission in Greece to return from the field. Stevens, who had been dropped in the previous March, had left by caïque and had been delayed in Turkey. This caused considerable difficulties because both SOE Cairo and the Foreign Office still seemed to be backing the Greek government-in-exile, led by the king, which was completely out of touch and out of favor with the men in the mountains. Worse, Myers had been accompanied to Cairo by Communist-backed ELAS delegates, who did not know what to make of the ambiguity of the British position and were as keen to be rid of the king as they were of the Axis. Cairo, however, had not been given advance warning of the arrival of the leftist delegates and a political row ensued, which went right to the top. Woodhouse recalls:

Both sides accused each other, and both suspected the British authorities of bad faith and ulterior motives. The atmosphere of Greek politics in an Egyptian summer made it easy to believe almost anything of almost anybody.

Instead of returning to Greece, Myers was posted to the STS at Haifa. While Myers had been in London, the king of the Hellenes had issued an ultimatum: If Myers was sent back to Greece, the king would abdicate. This was proof enough for London that SOE had been meddling in local politics, and Lord Glenconner was replaced as head of SOE Cairo by Major General William Stawell.

Altogether about 400 British officers and other ranks went to Greece, but a proportion of the casualties were the victims of internecine strife rather than enemy action. An SOE officer in charge of a stay-behind network had been captured early on, soon after the evacuation from Athens; a second, Mark Ogilvie-Grant, was caught after a clandestine landing by submarine in the Peloponnese; and another was arrested on Antiparos “in conditions that brought disaster on several Greek agents in Athens.” Some 120 partisans were transported to concentration camps following the discovery of an arms dump on Andicythira, and another large cache fell into enemy hands on Samothrace, near the Turkish coast. Later, Michael Cumberlege was captured while preparing to block the Corinth Canal, but it was the death of a New Zealander, Lieutenant Hubbard, shot by ELAS forces at Triklinos at the beginning of the civil war, that really created a furor, both locally and in the House of Commons; Hubbard had apparently been shot accidentally by an ELAS gunman but, according to Woodhouse, he had been killed “by criminal negligence.” In addition, Sheppard was blown up when he stepped on one of his own mines, also at the outbreak of the civil war, soon after he had firmly given his support to the Communists.

When the Germans finally withdrew from Greece in the autumn of 1944, ELAS launched an offensive, not against the retreating Wehrmacht columns but on EDES. Using weapons and money largely supplied by SOE, ELAS tracked down numerous EDES groups and engaged them in battle, thereby sparking off the Greek Civil War, which nearly caused postwar Greece to become a Communist state and Soviet satellite. See also HARLING.

GREEN INK. One of the traditions of the Secret Intelligence Service, inherited from Mansfield Smith-Cumming, is that the Chief writes, and signs his name, in green ink.

GREENE, GRAHAM. Novelist Graham Greene’s career as a Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer was, as he admitted, wholly undistinguished. Soon after the release of his magnificent The Power and the Glory, he was invited to move from the Ministry of Information to join his sister Elizabeth in SIS. Elizabeth, who had married Rodney Dennys, was also responsible for obtaining a similar transfer for Malcolm Muggeridge. While Muggeridge encountered no difficulty in joining SIS, Greene’s application was complicated by an adverse MI5 dossier, which correctly reported that he had bankrupted a magazine by losing an expensive libel action to Shirley Temple, the American child star whom he accused of being sexually provocative.

Graham’s original appointment in 1941 was to Section V, the signals intelligence exploitation unit based in St. Albans where his friend Kim Philby analyzed intercepted enemy wireless messages and distributed them to the appropriate SIS stations in Spain, Portugal, and North Africa. Following his work in the Iberian subsection, Greene was sent to West Africa, where he languished in a villa overlooking Freetown’s harbor until his recall to London in 1944.

While in Sierra Leone, Greene wrote The Ministry of Fear and The Heart of the Matter but, despite the prewar success of Brighton Rock, he was still uncertain about his financial future and in 1944 signed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for a series of film scripts, including his hugely successful The Third Man. During this period, he sketched a treatment entitled Nobody to Blame about Richard Tripp, the SIS head of station in an unnamed prewar Baltic capital. The intended director for the film was Alberto Cavalcanti, who submitted the idea to the British Board of Film Censors, which rejected the idea with the rebuke that “they could not grant a certificate to a film making fun of the Secret Service.” Ten years later Greene was to take his revenge with Our Man in Havana, a splendid spoof of SIS, but one which nearly landed him in trouble.

There is no censorship for novels but I learnt later that MI5 suggested to MI6 that they should bring an action against the book for a breach of official secrets. What secret had I betrayed? Was it the possibility of using bird shit as a secret ink? But luckily C, the head of MI6, had a better sense of humor than his colleague in MI5, and he discouraged him from taking action.

To what extent Greene was influenced by his long friendship with Philby is hard to determine, but their relationship survived the traitor’s defection to Moscow in January 1963. Greene’s decision to contribute an uncritical foreword to Philby’s memoirs, My Silent War, enraged his former colleagues in SIS, who suspected that he had played a significant role in delivering the manuscript to the offices of Philby’s literary agents in Paris, and MI5 mole hunters hinted darkly about Greene’s dubious loyalty. The attitude of Greene himself toward SIS veered from the ridicule of Our Man in Havana—which he introduced with a foreword claiming that he had committed no breach of the Official Secrets Act, an opinion not shared by some senior but humorless MI5 officers—to the baseless accusation in The Human Factor that SIS indulged in murder.

Greene died at his home in Antibes in April 1991. One of the last of his books published before his death was a long-forgotten novel, The Tenth Man, which he had written for a movie studio in Hollywood after the war. Discovered by publisher Anthony Blond, it also contained a treatment for a film that was never made.

GROVE PARK. In 1923 a secret intercept station was established by the Metropolitan Police at 113 Grove Park, Camberwell (also referred to as Denmark Hill), to monitor Comintern wireless signals broadcast from an illicit Communist Party of Great Britain transmitter located in Wimbledon. Headed by Commander Harold Kenworthy of Marconi and assisted by L. H. Lambert, the station began to read some of the traffic in 1932. The messages decrypted by Government Code and Cipher School were codenamed MASK. Grove Park remained in operation as a classified site until long after World War II, when it was returned to the Metropolitan Police.

GRU. The Soviet military intelligence service Glavnoye Razvedyvatel-noe Upravlenie (GRU) has operated an independent rezidentura in London under diplomatic cover since 1935 and has been a principal adversary and target of British Intelligence. No GRU defector has deserted in London, and the organization has suffered comparatively little hostile penetration compared to the KGB and the SVR (Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki, the current Russian foreign intelligence service). In 1940, when the NKVD suspected incorrectly that its London rezidentura had been penetrated, the NKVD rezident was withdrawn, leaving the GRU rezident, Simon Kremer, to operate alone. Very little is known of the GRU’s operations in London apart from clues offered by the VENONA traffic, which suggests more than 40 GRU agents were active in 1940 and 1941.

GUBBINS, SIR COLIN. Educated at Cheltenham College and Sandhurst, Colin Gubbins fought in World War I in France, Belgium, and North Russia, winning the Military Cross. In September 1939 he was sent to Warsaw on behalf of MI(R), but was obliged to evade the Germans by making his escape through Romania and Cairo. In November 1941 he was appointed Special Operations Executive’s AD/E supervising operations in Europe, in succession to Harry Sporborg, and in September 1943 he took over from Sir Charles Hambro as “CD.” After his death in Stornoway in February 1976, his widow began writing his biography, a task completed by Sir Peter Wilkinson and Joan Bright Astley in 1993.

GULBENKIAN, NUBAR. Often described in the press as the richest man in the world, Nubar Gulbenkian was an unlikely candidate for a secret agent, but his strongest asset was his diplomatic status. His father, Calouste Gulbenkian, the founder of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company also known as “Mr. Five Percent,” was the Iranian ambassador in Vichy France during World War II. This allowed the diplomat’s son to travel with the rank of commercial attaché to and from France’s unoccupied zone without restriction. Accordingly Donald Darling, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer responsible for representing P15 in Lisbon, routinely used Gulbenkian as his courier, maintaining contact with the Allied escape lines.

It was because Gulbenkian was such an improbable secret agent that he was so successful. On every mission Gulbenkian, who was renowned for wearing an orchid in his buttonhole, was accompanied by his English valet and became renowned for flourishing a $500 note. Educated at Harrow, Bonn University, and Trinity College, Cambridge, Gulbenkian was called to the bar by the Middle Temple but devoted much of his life, like that of his father, to the oil business, in which he was hugely successful. He was later to remark that even his recruitment into SIS, by Captain Eddie Hastings while out cub hunting with the Old Berkeley near Bletchley Park, had been unorthodox. His original intention had been to travel to Berlin to sell oil but this plan was shelved after the abduction of Sigismund Best and Richard Stevens on the Dutch frontier in November 1939. According to Gulbenkian’s slightly extravagant account of the incident, the SIS officers had gone to the border to meet an English agent who had been on a mission to Germany. “A Dutch Customs official who tried to protest was shot dead and the Germans carried off, back into Germany, a very important agent.” In reality, of course, there was no agent involved, but both Best and Stevens were seized.

Gulbenkian’s first mission was to fly to Lisbon to be briefed by Darling. Then he traveled via Barcelona to Perpignan, France, where he made contact with a P15 agent who was later to convey dozens of evaders across the French frontier. The Armenian billionaire was to make a further journey to Perpignan to confirm the financial reward for P15’s agent, a garage proprietor.

In his memoirs, which were published seven years before his death in January 1972, Gulbenkian describes his role as an SIS agent, but is discreet in identifying his SIS case officer only as “Didi”—which to the cognoscenti only was recognizable as Donald Darling’s initials.

GUN, KATHARINE. A 29-year-old Mandarin linguist employed by GCHQ in Cheltenham, Katherine Gun was arrested in February 2003 and charged eight months later with having leaked a confidential memo from Frank Kozo, a senior U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) official, seeking to monitor the communications of UN Security Council delegates in the run-up to the war in Iraq. Gun, who was married to a Muslim, was arrested when it was reported that the NSA had been conducting a secret surveillance operation, bugging UN delegates’ home and office telephones and emails. The NSA told GCHQ that the particular targets of an eavesdropping “surge” were the delegates from Angola, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Chile, Guinea, and Pakistan—the six crucial “swing votes” on the Security Council. Gun was charged under Section 1 of the 1989 Official Secrets Act, which makes it an offense to disclose security and intelligence information without authorization.

Gun said she would plead not guilty and indicated her intention to expose serious wrongdoing by the U.S. and British governments. In a statement when she was charged, Gun declared, “Any disclosures that may have been made were justified because they exposed serious illegality and wrongdoing on the part of the U.S. government, which attempted to subvert our own security services. Secondly, they could have helped prevent wide-scale death and casualties amongst ordinary Iraqi people and UK forces in the course of an illegal war.”

Prosecution potentially would have been hugely embarrassing for the government and could have opened up GCHQ operations to unwelcome publicity. Also damaging and politically threatening was her plan to seek the disclosure of the full advice from the attorney-general, Lord Goldsmith, on the legality of the war against Iraq. The government would almost certainly have refused to disclose such advice, arguing that opinions of its law officers are traditionally privileged, in which case Gun’s lawyers would have argued she could not get a fair trial without seeing the attorney’s advice on the war and the disclosure of GCHQ’s activities. Ben Emmerson QC, her counsel, told London’s Bow Street magistrates court in January that she was being prevented from saying anything to her lawyers about her work at GCHQ. Thus, when the case came to trial in February 2004, the prosecution abandoned it on the advice of the attorney-general on the basis that there was not a reasonable prospect of obtaining a conviction, thereby prompting a major political controversy.

Senior Mexican and Chilean diplomats at the United Nations have since claimed their missions were spied on. The former Mexican ambassador to the United Nations, Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, claimed that American officials intervened last March—days before the war was launched against Saddam Hussein—to halt secret UN negotiations for a compromise resolution that would have given weapons inspectors more time to complete their work. He claimed the intervention could only have come as a result of secret surveillance of a meeting where the compromise was being worked on.

–H–

HAGANAH. The paramilitary branch of the Jewish Agency in Palestine, dedicated to the protection of Jewish settlements during the British Mandate. Although the Haganah was declared illegal, many of its members were enrolled as special constables by British authorities and armed during the 1936–39 period when Jewish property was under attack from Arabs.

During World War II some 120,000 Palestinian Jews fought in the British army, and both Secret Intelligence Service and Special Operations Executive trained volunteers from the Jewish Brigade as agents for parachute operations (with 20 dropping into Nazi-occupied territory) or, like Moshe Dayan, to be organized in stay-behind networks. Capitalizing on the knowledge acquired, the Haganah developed a commando unit, the Palmach, and an intelligence branch, the Shai, and played a key role in the creation of an underground railroad guiding Holocaust survivors from Central Europe to the Adriatic for transport to Palestine.

HALDANE, J. B. S. Educated at Eton and New College, Oxford, Professor J. B. S. Haldane was known by MI5 to be a Communist Party of Great Britain supporter of long standing, although he did not join the party formally until 1942. However, until MI5 studied the VENONA traffic, there had never been any suspicion that he spied for the GRU. As well as influencing several generations of British scientists, Haldane possessed one of the most remarkable scientific minds of his generation and was exceptional in every sphere.

During World War I he served in the Black Watch and was described by Field Marshal Haig as “the bravest and the dirtiest officer in my army.” He was sent to France in January 1915, after four months of training, and was appointed his battalion’s bombing officer, which required him to experiment with rather primitive trench mortars. Among his inventory of unusual weapons were “stove-pipes almost as dangerous to their users as to the enemy.” Nevertheless, his men admired his gallantry under fire and his exploits in no-man’s -land.

As a nephew of Lord Haldane, then lord chancellor and later secretary of state for war, Haldane was able to advise about effective countermeasures for the clouds of chlorine deployed at Ypres in April 1915. In that month, he was wounded in the Festubert offensive and, after a period in hospital in Bethune, was evacuated and later posted to the Nigg Bombing School as an instructor in the use of grenades. In March 1916 Haldane was given an intelligence post in Edinburgh, and then in October he was transferred with the Second Black Watch to Mesopotamia. Here he was wounded again, this time by an accidental explosion on a temporary Royal Flying Corps airdrome, and he was taken by hospital ship to India, where he spent the remainder of the war lecturing Indian troops at the Bombing School at Mhow in Central Provinces.

Haldane made three visits to the Spanish Civil War and advised the defenders of Madrid on how to resist gas attacks and deal with Mills grenades. He also fought in the war, where the GRU defector Allan Foote recalled:

For a short period he served with the Brigade as a private soldier, standing in a trench brandishing a tiny, snub-nosed revolver and shouting defiance at the advancing Franco infantry. Luckily for science, we managed to repel the rebel attack and the Professor was spared for his further contributions to world knowledge.

The journalist Douglas Hyde, an eyewitness at the Daily Worker’s editorial boards, presided over by Haldane, described him as “taking little part in the discussion and absent-mindedly doodling. in Greek as the Dean of Canterbury held forth at length.” In fact Haldane was far from an eccentric boffin, and his ideological commitment to the party was total, to the extent of suppressing any adverse comment when Stalin began to interfere with scientific progress made in his field of genetics by persecuting Soviet colleagues who happened to be his friends. After the war Haldane took up a teaching post at University College, London, became active in the Association of Scientific Workers, and started to make regular contributions to the Daily Worker, establishing a reputation as a cantankerous, blunt-speaking, but brilliant exponent of modern science. In 1956, following the Suez adventure, Haldane renounced his British citizenship and went to live in India, where he died before being identified in VENONA as INTELLIGENSIA.

HALL, ADMIRAL SIR REGINALD. The director of naval intelligence (DNI) throughout World War I (and son of the first DNI), Reginald “Blinker” Hall was later elected a Conservative MP for Liverpool and then Eastbourne, and when he died in 1943 was active in the Home Guard. Widely credited with masterminding the wartime cryptographic successes of Room 40, he derived his nickname from a distinctive eye-twitch.

HALL, THEODORE. The youngest nuclear physicist to work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, Dr. Ted Hall was identified in the VENONA traffic as a Soviet spy codenamed MLAD (“Youngster”). Educated at Harvard, Hall was suspected of having continued to spy after World War II but the Federal Bureau of Investigation failed to obtain a confession from him when he was interrogated in Chicago in 1952. In 1960 Hall moved to Cambridge, England, to take up a research appointment, but made no admissions regarding his involvement in espionage. It was not until he died in December 2000 that his widow and daughter confirmed his covert role for the NKVD.

HAMBLETON, HUGH. A Canadian citizen and KGB agent, Hugh Hambleton joined NATO as an analyst in Paris in 1956 and subsequently continued to spy for the KGB during a long university career. An economist by training, Professor Hambleton met Soviet leader Yuri Andropov in Moscow in 1975 to be thanked for his lifetime dedicated to espionage. In 1980 Canadian authorities dropped charges of espionage against him on the grounds that he had not committed an offense in Canada, but warned him that he might face arrest if he traveled abroad. He was finally arrested in London in July 1982 and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment for having betrayed NATO secrets in Belgium.

HAMBRO, SIR CHARLES. Educated at Eton, Charles Hambro fought with the Coldstream Guards during World War I and was decorated with the Military Cross. With strong family connections in Norway, he was invited to join the Scandinavian Section of Special Operations Executive in 1940 and in May 1942 became “CD,” a post he relinquished to Colin Gubbins in September 1943 to run the Tube Alloys investigation of the German atomic project. Hugh Dalton recalled in his memoirs that ever-charming Hambro had also been chairman of the Great Western Railway and ran his own merchant bank at the time of his appointment. After the war, Hambro was appointed a director of the Bank of England and continued on the board of his family’s bank. When he died in August 1963, he had his daughter destroy all his secret papers.

HANLEY, SIR MICHAEL. Director-general of the Security Service from 1972 to 1978, Michael “Jumbo” Hanley had joined MI5 in 1948. He was educated at Sedbergh and Queen’s College, Oxford, where he read history. In 1940 he was commissioned into the Royal Artillery and in 1945 took a Russian language course before being posted to Budapest as an assistant military attaché. Upon joining MI5 he worked on a study of the ROTE KAPELLE and in 1951 was posted to Hong Kong as security liaison officer for five years.

HANSLOPE PARK. Established in 1940 as a wireless receiving station for Section VIII of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), designated Special Communications Unit 3, Hanslope Park in Bedfordshire absorbed the Radio Security Service in 1945 and became the postwar headquarters of the Diplomatic Wireless Service. It also accommodated a technical unit developing specialist equipment for MI5 and SIS. In 1952 MI5 identified a young Soviet spy working at Hanslope, William Marshall, who had been recruited following a tour of duty at the British embassy in Moscow.

HARE, ALAN. The fourth Earl of Listowel’s fourth son, Alan Hare served with the Life Guards in North Africa and saw action at El Alamein. In October 1943, he parachuted into northern Albania for Special Operations Executive, losing a toe to frostbite and winning a Military Cross. He endured appalling conditions while his mission was under German attack during the grim Balkan winter of 1943–44, his senior officer, Brigadier “Trotsky” Davies, having been wounded and captured. Hare remained fighting with the Albanian guerrillas until he was evacuated by boat to Bari in October 1944. Afterward, he undertook very similar missions for the Secret Intelligence Service, in which he remained until 1961 when he joined Industrial and Foreign Fairs, an organization setting up trade fairs overseas, with a special emphasis on the Soviet Bloc. Hare joined the Financial Times in 1963, becoming its managing director eight years later. He was appointed a director of the Economist in 1975 and a trustee of Reuter’s News Agency in 1985. He died 10 years later, aged 76.

HARLING. Code name for the first Special Operations Executive (SOE) mission to the mainland of Greece, in September 1942, led by Brigadier Edmund Myers of the Royal Engineers. HARLING resulted in contact with the Communist-dominated Greek army of national liberation, ELAS, and the demolition of the Gorgopotamus bridge in November. Myers was an unlikely candidate for the mission, his only tenuous connection with SOE being that he was courting, and was later to marry, Bickham Sweet-Escott’s sister Louisa. A professional soldier who had recently been through the Middle East Staff College in Haifa and the Combined Operations parachute course at Suez, in September 1942 he had been scheduled to return to England. Instead, Colonel William Hamilton, an acquaintance and senior member of SOE Cairo’s staff, persuaded him to volunteer for HARLING. Myers spoke no Greek and his local knowledge was “limited to a few hours in Athens and Dubrovnik.” Nevertheless, Hamilton assured him that this was plenty of experience by SOE’s standards and gave him four days to prepare himself for his mission.

Myers’s objective, the Gorgopotamus viaduct, was one of three bridges that carried the main railway through Greece to the port of Piraeus. The Afrika Korps was heavily dependent upon this supply route, and the Royal Air Force had been unable to prevent its supply ships from dashing across from Crete to Tobruk and Benghazi under cover of darkness. Having failed to sink General Erwin Rommel’s ships, GHQ Middle East asked SOE to destroy the vital railway link somewhere between Salonika and Athens. General Alexander’s request, in anticipation of the Eighth Army’s offensive at El Alamein scheduled for mid-October, was relayed to SOE’s main source in Athens, Captain Koutsoyiannopoulos of the Royal Hellenic Navy, known as PROMETHEUS II, who was operating a radio left by SOE during the evacuation of Athens. His reply, received in Turkey and couriered to Cairo in September confirmed that such an operation was possible and recommended that about 10 parachutists equipped with sabotage matériel be dropped between the end of September and early October.

Of the 12 SOE men due to land on the appointed evening from three Liberators, only eight actually parachuted on the last night of September, and of them only four could speak any Greek. The third aircraft had failed to find the drop zone and had returned to Egypt. Two further attempts were abandoned because of bad weather and eventually, some six weeks later, the last contingent landed in the Karpenisi Valley, miles away from the rest of the group and on the outskirts on a town under Italian occupation. The garrison opened fire and the SOE parachutists had fled, abandoning their containers to the Italians.

Despite the fact that plans of their target had been packed in one of the containers and must have fallen into enemy hands, the operation went ahead, but without the expected support of dozens of local guerrillas, who simply failed to materialize. Clearly PROMETHEUS II had exaggerated the number of pro-Allied guerrillas in the area, and SOE Cairo had been unable to double-check his information. Once Myers assembled his party and established contact with a band of local guerrillas known as andartes, he led an assault on the Italian garrison guarding the bridge and engaged the enemy for an hour while Tom Barnes, “a delightfully bluff and direct New Zealander,” and John Cook laid their demolition charges. When the raiders eventually withdrew, having suffered only four wounded, several of the bridge’s steel spans had been dropped into the gorge 40 feet below.

The operation had taken place about a month late, long after the big armored push at El Alamein but, says Monty Woodhouse, “It showed for the first time in occupied Europe that guerrillas, with the support of allied officers, could carry out a major tactical operation coordinated with allied strategic plans.”

Despite the apparent belated success of HARLING, which cut the vital rail link to Germany for a crucial six weeks, the rest of the operation was not to go well. No submarine turned up to collect Myers at the appointed time, and Cairo sent a signal explaining that, owing to the loss of another submarine in the vicinity, it was too risky to collect his team—which, because of the appearance of a pair of escaped Cypriot PoWs, had grown to more than a dozen. While this did not matter to Woodhouse and his two wireless operators, Sergeants Len Wilmott and Doug Phillips, who had always intended to remain in Greece as liaison officers with the local guerrillas, Myers had not bargained for this extended undertaking. Nor, for that matter, had he been briefed for it. Even from what Myers had witnessed during the three months he had spent involuntarily in the mountains, “it was apparent that the authorities in the Middle East knew little about the military strength and composition” of the local resistance movements.

Moreover, although we had one or two agents in Athens who were in touch by runner with some of the andarte bands in the field and by wireless with the Middle East, SOE Cairo had obviously been told little about the political aspects of the Greek resistance movements. The Greek government in London ... probably knew little more than SOE and the Middle East Command.

Following the success of HARLING, the Germans took 300 Greek army reserve officers hostage and shot 50 of them as a reprisal.

HARRIS, KITTY. An NKVD spy codenamed ADA, Kitty Harris was the common-law wife of Earl Browder, the general-secretary of the Communist Party of the United States of America who accompanied him on a mission to China in 1927. Born in London, she had emigrated with her family to Canada and then settled in Chicago. In 1935 she underwent training in Moscow as a wireless operator and was posted to London to assist the rezident, Grigori Grafpen and to supervise Donald Maclean and photograph documents he removed from the Foreign Office. When Maclean was transferred to the British embassy in Paris in October 1938, Harris followed him and remained there after the German occupation. When Maclean was withdrawn to London, she traveled back to Moscow via Berlin, posing as the wife of a Soviet diplomat. Later Harris undertook espionage missions in Mexico and the United States. She died in the Soviet Union in October 1968. Her biography, based on her KGB file, was written by Igor Damaskin 2001.

HARRIS, TOMÁS. The son of Lionel Harris, a well-known Spanish art dealer of Jewish origin, Tommy Harris ran MI5’s Spanish Section, designated B1(g) during World War II, and supervised M15’s star double agent, GARBO. Educated in Spain, Harris won a scholarship to the Slade School of Art at the age of 15. As well as being a gifted artist, as was his wife Hilda, he was a leading expert on Goya, El Greco, and Velázquez and ran a gallery from his sumptuous home in Chesterfield Gardens, Mayfair. Harris joined MI5, where two of his sisters worked, from Special Operations Executive in 1940. He was a close friend of Anthony Blunt and paid for the private education of one of Kim Philby’s children. His association with Philby, Blunt, and Melinda Maclean led to suspicion that he too had been a Soviet spy, but he was killed in a car accident in Majorca in January 1964 before he could be interviewed. MI5’s investigation of Harris proved inconclusive, although there was a belief that he had acted as a conduit for the Soviets so they could instruct Maclean on how to follow her husband to Moscow after his defection in May 1951. He was also thought to have acquired some of the art sold in his gallery from republican sources who had looted it from Spanish churches.

HART, EDITH TUDOR. See TUDOR HART, EDITH.

HART, HERBERT. After leaving Oxford, H. L. A. Hart practiced at the Chancery Bar before joining the Security Service in 1940. Initially he was employed in pursuing rumors of espionage and some of the many denunciations received from the public alleging enemy activity, often taking the form of lights seen to flash at night, perhaps signaling German aircraft. One of his first tasks was to survey telegraph poles in the south of England after a report was received that many of them bore coded messages for enemy parachutists. Of all the claims that Hart investigated, only one case proved to be that of an authentic Abwehr spy: that of Jan Ter Braak, a 27-year-old Dutchman found dead in an air raid shelter in Cambridge in April 1941. Ter Braak’s identity papers were forged and Hart concluded that he had shot himself when his food ran out because he had exhausted his ration book and did not want to risk buying food on the black market.

Most of Hart’s work for MI5 was in B1(b), the “special research” subsection of the counterespionage division that analyzed enemy intercepts and gleaned information relevant to German spies destined for infiltration into Britain, or data regarding any of the double agents run by his colleagues in B1(a). On his staff were several barristers and academics, including his close friend Anthony Blunt.

After the war Hart returned to Oxford to teach philosophy at New College and in 1952 was appointed professor of jurisprudence. He never discussed his wartime service in MI5, but he was embarrassed in 1981 by the disclosure that his wife, who had worked in a sensitive post in the Home Office, had been interviewed by Peter Wright during a mole hunt. Jenifer Hart admitted that she had been a member of a covert Communist cell and had been in contact with a mysterious Eastern European who was probably a key Soviet spy. The references to his wife in SpyCatcher must have caused Hart some anguish, but he made no public comment, even when she appeared on television to discuss her experience at the hands of the mole hunters. Hart retired as principal of Brasenose and died in December 1992.

HART, JENIFER. A secret member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and wife of Professor Herbert Hart, Jenifer Hart graduated from Oxford and was instructed to join a government department. In 1936 she was appointed secretary to the permanent secretary in the Home Office, where she had access to MI5’s warrants issued to intercept the telephone calls of suspects. When she was interviewed by MI5’s Peter Wright, and later in her autobiography, she admitted having held clandestine meetings with a mysterious Soviet spy, most probably NKVD. illegal Arnold Deutsch, but insisted she had never compromised any classified information. The suspicion that she had acted in tandem with her friend, novelist Iris Murdoch, was omitted from Wright’s memoirs, SpyCatcher. Jenifer Hart lived in Oxford until her death in March 2005.

HASTINGS, SIR STEPHEN. After Eton and Sandhurst, Stephen Hastings joined the Grenadier Guards in 1939, fighting with the 3rd Battalion in the Western Desert. He transferred to the Special Air Service (SAS) regiment in 1943. After nine months with the SAS, he joined Special Operations Executive in Cairo and was posted first to MASSINGHAM in Algiers and then sent on a mission to the south of France. He landed at newly liberated St. Tropez, and as the Germans withdrew, he drove to Paris, accompanied by Brooks Richards. From Paris he was dispatched to Brindisi for an assignment with No. 1 Special Force. His mission in February 1945, codenamed CLOVER II, was to parachute into the area behind Genoa and liaise with the local partisans.

At the end of the war, Hastings returned to his regiment briefly before being attached to the British Control Commission for Austria for two years. Then, in 1948 he joined the Secret Intelligence Service and was posted to Helsinki, Paris, and Cyprus. When he resigned in 1960, Hastings was elected to the Commons as the Conservative MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, a seat he retained until his retirement in 1983. He published his memoirs, The Drums of Memory, in 1994 and died in January 2005.

HAYES, JOHN. Elected the Labour MP for Edge Hill, Liverpool, in 1923, a seat he held until 1931, John Hayes was the son of a police inspector and started work as a clerk with the Wolverhampton Corrugated Iron Company at the age of 13. He joined the Metropolitan Police’s administrative staff in 1909 and was promoted to the rank of sergeant in 1913. He resigned in 1919 to become general secretary of the National Union of Police and Prison Officers. He also headed the Vigilant Detective Agency, an organization created to employ police officers dismissed during the police strike of 1919, which was a contractor of the Federated Press of America (FPA), a front for Soviet espionage. When the FPA closed down, Hayes was appointed secretary of the British Optician Association and remained on the editorial board of the Police Review.

HEMBLYS-SCALES, ROBERT. A career MI5 officer, Bob Hemblys-Scales participated in the investigation of Dr. Allan Nunn May in 1945. In 1947 he was commissioned to write a report on Soviet espionage, a task he completed with a colleague, Michael Serpell. Much of their information was drawn from papers seized by the Gestapo in Paris when Henri Robinson was arrested in December 1942. In 1948 Hemblys-Scales was posted to Australia for eight months to advise on the creation of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and supervise the exploitation of the VENONA material, discreetly referred to locally as “the case.”

HENDERSON, PAUL. The director of a Midlands machine tool manufacturer and an experienced source for MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service, Paul Henderson was the subject of an investigation by Customs and Excise into breaches of the export controls during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. The collapse of his trial at the Old Bailey in November 1992 resulted in a judicial inquiry conducted by Lord Justice Scott, which reported in March 1996.

HESS, RUDOLF. Rudolf Hess was Hitler’s deputy Führer when he flew to Scotland in May 1941, apparently in an attempt to broker peace between Germany and Britain for which Hitler accused him of treason. Instead Hess was imprisoned, first in the Tower of London and then at Mytchett Place, Aldershot, where he was interrogated by Secret Intelligence Service officers Frank Foley and Thomas Kendrick. Hess was sentenced at Nuremberg to life imprisonment for war crimes and spent the remainder of his life at Spandau Prison in Berlin, in solitary confinement, until his suicide in August 1987.

HILL, GEORGE. One of the more curious appointments of World War II was the decision in 1942 to send George A. Hill, a legendary anti-Bolshevik, to Moscow to liaise with the Soviet intelligence authorities. Known to his friends as Peter, Hill was sent on behalf of Special Operations Executive (SOE), but long before he arrived in Russia, he was well known to the NKVD. Indeed, following the publication of his two volumes of memoirs, Go Spy the Land, Being the Adventures of I. K. 8 of the British Secret Service in 1932 and Dreaded Hour four years later, there could be no mistaking the man who won the DSO for rescuing the Romanian crown jewels from Bucharest only hours before the Red Army began its occupation.

Born in Estonia to a timber merchant who constantly traveled the Near East, Hill was educated by French and German governesses, could speak half a dozen languages and was a natural recruit for intelligence duties when he reached the Western Front at Ypres in April 1915 with a battalion of Canadian infantry attached to the Manchester regiment. Initially an interpreter, Hill was soon undertaking dangerous missions into no-man’s-land, where he was badly wounded. A transfer to the War Office followed, and this in turn led to an assignment in Greece, where he learned to fly and, based in Salonika, took his plane behind enemy lines to land and drop off Allied agents. In 1916 Hill traveled to Egypt for a new assignment and en route met Compton Mackenzie who, he recalled, “was running a brilliant secret intelligence department against the Germans.”

In July 1917, when Hill was back in England on leave, he was ordered to Russia to join the Royal Flying Corps mission at Petrograd, but by the time he arrived, the Revolution had taken place and the intrepid airman found himself caught up in the strife. His main adventure began when he accepted a commission from the Romanian ambassador to rescue the Romanian crown jewels, which had been deposited in the Kremlin for safekeeping together with most of Bucharest’s treasury, and return them to Jassy, the temporary seat of government in war-torn Romania. Thus Hill found himself escorting a train of treasure across the newly declared Soviet republic and over five or six battle fronts to the Romanian frontier, an epic journey lasting nine days. After receiving the thanks of the Romanian prime minister, Hill returned to Moscow to help organize Leon Trotsky’s intelligence apparatus along the German front. During this period when chaos ruled, Hill teamed up with Sidney Reilly, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) spy that had previously been known to him only by the cipher “ST 1.” Hill did not fully approve of Reilly’s commitment to the anti-Bolshevik Boris Savinkov and preferred to concentrate his resources on fighting the Germans in a guerrilla campaign waged in the Ukraine.

The Allied occupation of Archangel in August 1918 abruptly ended Hill’s relationship with the revolutionaries, and he went into hiding just before the Cheka arrived with warrants to arrest him and Reilly. By discarding his uniform and growing a beard, Hill successfully evaded the Cheka and was evacuated with the rest of the Lockhart mission to Finland in October 1918. Hill undertook one further, brief undercover assignment back into Soviet Russia, lasting three weeks, and was back in London by Armistice Day, 11 November 1918. Upon his return, Hill was welcomed by the Chief and Colonel Freddie Browning of SIS and in the coming months was decorated with the Military Cross and MBE and mentioned in dispatches three times. In 1919 he was awarded the coveted DSO, appropriate recognition for an intelligence officer who survived the most astonishing adventures at a turbulent moment in history.

Hill spent a further three years in the Near East either operating for SIS or, briefly, on Sir Halford Mackinder’s staff. Upon his return to London, Hill found that SIS was no longer in a position to finance his escapades, so he took his wife Dorothy to live in a caravan parked in a farmer’s field in Colemans Hatch, Sussex. There he managed to survive, as a technical adviser to film companies making movies about Russia and by living off the generosity of his friends. It was while he was acting in this capacity on Dennis Wheatley’s first novel, The Forbidden Territory, that he met Wheatley and became the basis of his Eunuch of Stamboul. In 1930 he found a job as manager of the Globe Theatre, and for a short time was deputy general manager to the impresario Charles B. Cochran. During this period he wrote two plays, It Is the Law and Release. Kim Philby recalled that while the jolly Hill was in the Soviet Union for SOE, “a very belated security check of his conference room revealed a fearsome number of sources of leakage.” After World War II, Hill was appointed the manager of the Apollinaris mineral water company in Germany, and for the last 10 years of his life experienced a degree of comfort that had hitherto eluded him.

HILLGARTH, ALAN. The British naval attaché in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War and World War II, Commander Hillgarth was reputed to communicate directly to Winston Churchill and to have run his own intelligence organization in Spain.

HINCHLEY-COOKE, EDWARD. Half German, Edward Hinchley-Cooke spoke the language fluently and in 1915 acted as a stool pigeon, mixing with enemy prisoners of war. Later he was lent to Prime Minister Lloyd George as an interpreter for the Spa Conference. Between the two world wars, Colonel Hinchley-Cooke became the public face of the Security Service, offering evidence on behalf of MI5 at several criminal trials, among them those of Jessie Jordan, Dr. Hermann Goertz, and Walter Simon.

HINDAWI, NEZAR. The arrest of Nezar Hindawi in London in April 1986 following the discovery of a bomb in the luggage of his pregnant Irish girlfriend, Ann-Marie Murphy, at Heathrow Airport was the culmination of a long surveillance operation conducted on the Syrian embassy in London. A journalist of Palestinian origin with other members of his family resident in London, Hindawi had a wife and daughter in Poland. He had given Murphy the bomb shortly before she was due to board an El Al jumbo jet bound for Tel Aviv but the three pounds of Semtex were discovered during a security search of her suitcase. Hindawi was arrested by police the following day at a hotel in North Kensington, carrying a Syrian passport in the name of Izzam Shara. The previous day he had been to the Syrian embassy in Belgrave Square and had been escorted to a safe house in Stonor Road, the home of diplomat Mounir Mouna.

The subsequent investigation identified Nezar’s eldest. brother Hasi as a terrorist convicted in November 1986 in West Berlin of having bombed the German-Arab Friendship Society in March 1986; he had been sentenced to 14 years’ imprisonment. Both were linked to a senior Syrian Air Force intelligence officer, Colonel Haitham Said, a well-known sponsor of international terrorism who had used Syrian diplomatic privileges to smuggle weapons and explosives into Europe.

Nezar Hindawi was sentenced to 45 years’ imprisonment. Britain also expelled the ambassador, who had been directly implicated in the plot, and severed diplomatic relations with Damascus.

HINSLEY, SIR HARRY. Born in November 1918, Harry Hinsley won a scholarship to read history at St. John’s College, Cambridge, but in his second year he was sent to Bletchley Park to act as liaison between Government Code and Cipher School’s Naval Section and the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre. The Naval Section achieved considerable success in 1941 in reading the enemy’s wireless traffic encrypted on the Enigma machine and played a crucial role in protecting the transatlantic convoys from U-boats.

After the war Hinsley returned to Cambridge as a research fellow and was appointed a history lecturer in 1949. In 1969 he was made a professor. Three years later, Hinsley was commissioned to supervise the preparation of an official history of British Intelligence in World War II. The first of the five volume series was published in 1979; the last, on strategic deception by Sir Michael Howard, was delayed until 1990. In 1981 Hinsley was made vice chancellor of the university, a post he held for two years. He was knighted in 1985 and died in 2002, aged 79.

HINXTON. In 1940 MI5 acquired a secluded property, the Old Parsonage in the quiet Cambridgeshire village of Hinxton, as secure long-term accommodation for captured enemy agents who were unsuitable for incarceration at Camp 020. The only person known to have escaped from what MI5 called the “Home for Incurables” is SUMMER, who was quickly recaptured in 1941 after he had assaulted one of his guards and stolen his motorcycle.

HOARE, SIR SAM. Sam Hoare was the MP for Chelsea when he was first recruited for intelligence duties, and he never lost the skepticism his experience during World War I gave him. In 1930, shortly before his appointment as secretary of state for India, Hoare published the first volume of his memoirs, The Fourth Seal: The End of a Russian Chapter. His disclosures did nothing to jeopardize his political career and he was later to be foreign secretary, first lord of the Admiralty, lord privy seal, air minister, and—after clashing with Winston Churchill—British ambassador in Madrid.

Hoare had learned Russian apparently in the hope that this would enable him to lead an interesting life and travel abroad. In March 1916 his linguistic skill brought him before Admiral Mansfield Smith-Cumming, the first chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), and he was dispatched to Petrograd on a mission that he described vaguely as having to do with counterespionage. Hoare returned to England the following year, having completed a survey of “intelligence possibilities” in Russia, and in June was appointed head of the British Intelligence mission to Petrograd. Once again he made his way to Russia, accompanied by his wife. He recalls:

My first duty according to my instructions was to put myself into the closest personal touch with the chief of the Russian Secret Service. I found there was no such person. In Russia every department seemed to have a Secret Service and nobody exercised any central control.

Hoare’s further encounter with SIS took place in Madrid upon his appointment there as British ambassador in 1940. He saw his task as preventing General Francisco Franco from joining the Axis powers, and he regarded the local SIS station as a source of potential embarrassment. Not long after his arrival, the SIS representative, Colonel Edward de Renzy Martin, who was operating under military attaché cover, was declared persona non grata for “attempting to obtain strategic information,” and this confirmed Hoare’s worst suspicions. Thus when Donald Darling arrived on a reconnaissance mission prior to extending the SIS station to accommodate a permanent escape-and-evasion expert from P15, Hoare was not just uncooperative but obstructive and ordered Darling’s immediate return to Lisbon.

Hoare died in May 1959. In his second volume of memoirs, Ambassador on Special Assignment, published in 1946 after the author had been ennobled as Lord Templewood, omitted all references to SIS even though the first volume had given a fascinating description of his first encounter with Admiral Smith-Cumming.

HOLDSWORTH, GERALD. Originally a planter in Malaya, Gerry Holdsworth returned to London to make advertising films, mainly for the Philips electric company, and as he was a frequent visitor to Holland and Germany, he was recruited into Section D. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, Holdsworth was established in a fish-brokering business in Norway, buying brisling and slid—a good cover for making local contacts and, as a skilled small boat sailor, for conducting marine surveys of the fjords. When Norway was occupied by the Nazis, he was instructed to make his way to Sweden to assist in the section’s scheme to sabotage the docks at Oxelösund. Shortly before he arrived, however, the operation, codenamed LUMPS, was aborted when the police arrested the British saboteurs. Holdsworth continued his journey to Finland and was able to catch a ship in Pet-samo bound for Kirkenes and eventually to reach Barrow-in-Furness.

Upon his arrival in London, Holdsworth was posted by Laurence Grand to Ridifarne on the Helford estuary to prepare, with the help of his deputy Brooks Richards, the flotilla of inshore fishing boats used to maintain clandestine sea lines to Special Operations Executive (SOE) and Secret Intelligence Service networks in Brittany. He was also assisted by his wife, an explosives expert, and they began cross-Channel night operations in August 1940. In 1942 Holdsworth sailed one of his boats, the Mutin, to Gibraltar in preparation for the landings in North Africa. Later he was to conduct small boat operations in the Mediterranean for SOE, employing Adrian Gallegos, and was based in Corsica until he was placed in command of No.1 Special Force in Malta, and then Monopoli, near SOE’s regional headquarters at Bari.

After the war Holdsworth helped found the Special Forces Club in Knightsbridge, a convivial meeting place for SOE veterans.

HOLLIS, SIR ROGER. Director-general of the Security Service from 1956 to 1965, Roger Hollis had a long career with MI5, beginning in 1938. During World War II, the enigmatic Hollis became MI5’s expert on international Communism and in 1953 was appointed deputy director-general to Sir Dick White. In 1963 as director-general, Hollis came under suspicion as a potential Soviet mole and was the subject of a secret investigation codenamed DRAT. He was recalled from retirement to undergo a hostile interrogation and died in 1973 surrounded by much controversy.

When challenged in the Commons, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher read a prepared statement that, far from ending the speculation, prompted Peter Wright to publicly denounce his former director-general as a traitor. The question of whether MI5 ever suffered Soviet penetration after the departure of Anthony Blunt in 1945 is an issue that may only be resolved when the KGB archives are opened to public scrutiny. In the meantime, the only certainty is that both Hollis and his deputy, Graham Mitchell, suffered the ignominy of being accused by colleagues of having betrayed secrets to Moscow over an extended period.

Hollis was the son of the bishop of Wells. He dropped out of Oxford and sought a job in journalism in Hong Kong. Later he moved to China, where he was employed by the British American Tobacco Corporation as a manager and where he contracted tuberculosis, a disease from which he never fully recovered. Invalided back to London, Hollis applied unsuccessfully to Roger Fulford for a job on the Times, was turned down by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) where his brother Marcus went to work, and was eventually accepted by MI5 in 1938.

Once in MI5 Hollis worked in the countersubversion division and made himself an expert on British Communists. He earned a reputation as a diligent but dull worker who ably represented his organization in Whitehall’s committees. His route to advancement was not through the relatively glamorous counterespionage sections, but via the more mundane countersubversion and protective security branches. His promotion to the post of deputy director-general was entirely unexpected and followed the sudden departure in 1952 of Guy Liddell, who switched to GCHQ following the embarrassing defection of his friend Guy Burgess. Hollis had little hope of moving up to the top job until White’s transfer to SIS in 1956 in the wake of the Buster Crabb incident. Prime Minister Anthony Eden, furious that his instructions to suspend all clandestine activity for the duration of the visit by Nikita Khrushchev and Marshal Bulganin, had been disobeyed, had fired SIS’s ineffectual chief, Sir John Sinclair. His replacement by White left a vacancy in the Security Service, which was filled, on White’s recommendation, by Hollis.

Hollis was able to impress Whitehall with sanctioning ENGULF, a surveillance technique which paid instant dividends. For the next nine years, he was to give the Security Service uninspired leadership during a period of unprecedented crisis. No less than three major government inquiries were conducted into serious lapses of security, which left MI5 lacking in confidence and credibility. The spy scandals at Portland and the Admiralty were compounded by the Profumo affair, which left Hollis desperate to avoid any further exposure, even at the risk of harboring a Soviet spy within his own organization.

In 1963 several senior MI5 officers became convinced that MI5 had experienced hostile penetration. The clues ranged from specific allegations made by defectors to more intangible evidence of operational failures that might have had other, perhaps innocent. explanations. There followed a series of inconclusive mole-hunting exercises that cast suspicion on a range of possible culprits, among whom was Hollis himself. Now retired, married to his secretary with whom he had conducted a lengthy affair, and living in New Street, Wells—where he occasionally called on David Cornwell, who had rented a house nearby—Hollis was interrogated in 1970.

Naturally the fact that a director-general of MI5 had himself fallen under suspicion was a closely guarded secret even within the Security Service, but news of the investigation leaked when Wright, on the instigation of Lord Rothschild, decided to divulge details of his career to a Fleet Street journalist. By the time the Hollis affair became public knowledge, Hollis himself was dead, having died of a stroke at his home in Catcott, near Bridgewater in Somerset, in September 1973.

HOLT-WILSON, SIR ERIC. Deputy director-general of the Security Service from 1912 to 1940, Sir Eric Holt-Wilson was dismissed by Winston Churchill in May 1940, together with MI5’s long-serving director-general, Sir Vernon Kell. Born in August 1875 and educated at Harrow and Woolwich, Holt-Wilson was decorated with a DSO in 1900 and was an instructor in military engineering until he was recruited to join MI5. In 1915 he was appointed the security liaison officer at the Inter-Allied Intelligence Bureau in Paris and supervised the deployment of the Field Security Police. The following year he was transferred to Egypt to reorganize the British security apparatus in Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean. After the war he went to the Rhineland as chief of the British Police Commission, responsible for rebuilding the civilian police in Germany.

In 1930 Holt-Wilson visited India, Ceylon, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Ottawa on a trip aimed at establishing and developing liaison with the Dominions and Colonies. Although no plans were worked out for systematic maintenance of this liaison, the foundation was laid for the establishment of a global network security liaison officers and defence security officers across the empire. Hitherto, liaison with the Allies had been the preserve of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), although during World War I, MI5 had placed “military control officers” and “military pass officers” in Paris, Rome, New York, and certain ports. In neutral countries, this task had been undertaken by SIS.

HOME DEFENCE (SECURITY) EXECUTIVE. Created in 1940, the Home Defence (Security) Executive was chaired by Lord Swinton for the purpose of supervising the work of the Security Service and was run by Sir Findlater Stewart. Also on the committee were Isaac Foot, MP; Sir Joe Ball; Jasper Harker, as MI5’s acting director-general; Valentine Vivian of ACSS; Colonel Roger Reynolds of the War Office; Sir Alan Hunter, head of the War Office’s PoW department; Sir Arthur Rucker from the Department of Health; (Sir) Arthur Hutchinson from the Home Office; Edwin Herbert, the director of postal censorship; Malcolm Frost of the BBC; and a trade unionist, Alf Wall. The Security Executive was served by two secretaries, (Sir) William Armstrong and Kenneth (later Lord) Diplock. In 1942 Swinton was replaced as chairman by Duff Cooper.

HONEYTRAP. A technique adopted by intelligence agencies to entrap an adversary in a compromising situation that can be exploited to advantage. British victims of honeytraps include John Vassall, who was blackmailed in Moscow and spied for the Soviets from his return to London in 1956 until his arrest in September 1962, and Commander Anthony Courtney, MP, who resisted coercion but was forced to resign his parliamentary seat, as described in his 1968 memoirs, Sailor in a Russian Frame. All sides have indulged in honeytraps, although the MI5 operation mounted against Eugene Ivanov backfired and proved the catalyst for the Profumo affair in 1961. A more successful result was achieved with Oleg Lyalin in 1971.

HONG KONG. The British Crown Colony of Hong Kong was always an important outpost of British Intelligence, with representatives of MI5, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), and GCHQ present until the withdrawal in July 1997. The security liaison officer, representing MI5, liaised closely with the local Special Branch, as did the SIS station commander, who operated under a military attachment or trade commissioner cover. GCHQ’s large intercept site, located on the island of Little Sai Wan, was closed in 1984 and replaced by Chung Horn Kok. Hong Kong was an important signals intercept site from 1935 when the Far East Combined Bureau was created and managed by the Royal Navy on Stonecutter’s Island.

HOOPER, JOHN. Having joined the Passport Control Office in The Hague at the age of 15, John Hooper was appointed a clerk in 1927 and directed to undertake a study of Communism in Holland. In 1935, during the course of his duties, he met Henri Pieck, a known Communist, although Hooper only became aware of his espionage after he had been sacked from the Passport Control Office, implicated in the visa racket run by Major Hugh Dalton. After his dismissal, Hooper was invited to join Pieck’s spy ring and was introduced to Walter Krivitsky, who took a disliking to him. Hooper gave a comprehensive statement to MI5 in October 1939 in London and agreed to return to Holland to persuade Pieck to come to England so he could be entrapped, but Pieck declined the invitation. Later in the war, Hooper was employed by MI5 as an interrogator.

HOOPER, SIR LEONARD. Director of GCHQ from 1965 to 1973, Leonard Hooper was born in Dulwich in July 1914 and after graduation from Worcester College, Oxford, went straight into the Government Code and Cipher School’s Italian Section. In September 1943 he was made head of the Japanese Air Section and a month later was in Washington, D.C., to visit Arlington Hall, the headquarters of the U.S. Army’s Signal Security Agency to negotiate what was to become the UKUSA Agreement. In 1960 he was appointed deputy director, and five years later succeeded Sir Clive Loehnis as director, a post he held until he went to the Cabinet Office in 1973 for five years as intelligence coordinator to the Cabinet.

HOPE, SIR PETER. Born in 1912 and educated at the University of London and Cambridge, Peter Hope joined the Territorial Army in 1938 and was recruited to work for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in Germany. On the outbreak of war, he transferred to MI5 to serve as a regional security liaison officer and then worked as an interrogator at the Royal Victoria Patriotic School. In 1944 he was dispatched to Paris, where he tracked down the notorious traitor Harold Cole. Hope moved back to SIS in 1946, and then became a regular diplomat in 1950, concluding a distinguished career as ambassador to Mexico in 1972. He devoted much of his retirement to the affairs of the Order of Malta.

HOPKINSON, HENRY. After Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, Henry Hopkinson joined the Foreign Office in 1924 and had a conventional career as a diplomat until 1939, when he was appointed private secretary to Sir Alexander Cadogan, the permanent undersecretary, and was introduced to Stewart Menzies and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Hopkinson acted as Cadogan’s liaison with SIS and in 1941 was posted to Cairo, where he chaired the Middle East Intelligence Centre. There he was joined by his wife Alice, who worked as Dudley Clarke’s secretary. In 1943 Hopkinson transferred to Lisbon, where he ran deception campaigns against the enemy, before going to Italy in 1944 for two years as deputy high commissioner.

In 1946 Hopkinson resigned from the Foreign Office to join the Conservative Research Department, being elected the MP for Taunton in 1950. He was elevated to the House of Lords in 1956 as Baron Colyton of Tarway and Taunton and published his memoirs, Occasion, Chance, and Change, in 1993.

HOR LUNG. A senior member of the Communist Party of Malaya, Hor Lung defected to the British in April 1957 and supplied enough information to isolate the party’s leader, Chen Ping. The defection was the culmination of a long antiterrorist campaign conducted during the Malaya Emergency by the Malay Special Branch, which was largely staffed by MI5 personnel seconded from London.

HORNE, SIR ALASTAIR. In 1944, having already transferred from the Royal Air Force to the Coldstream Guards on the grounds of poor eyesight, Alastair Home joined MI5’s regional branch in Cairo, Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME). He had intended to drive tanks in the Guards Armoured Division, but instead he was switched to intelligence duties. His first assignment involved reconnaissance of Transjordan to determine what areas were accessible to Soviet T-34 tanks. Home, who was educated in Switzerland and the United States, as well as at Jesus College, Cambridge, remained in SIME until he was demobilized in 1947. Horne’s work in SIME’s Palestine branch was supervised by Maurice Oldfield, who was later to be appointed chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Home recalls that soon after the end of the war SIS’s cover name in the region changed from the Inter-Services Liaison Department to the Combined Research and Planning Office, known as “CREEPO.” This particular acronym was unfortunate, as much of SIS’s most secret correspondence was accidentally diverted to the Combined Regimental Pay Office, located in Jerusalem.

Four years later, in 1952, Home joined the Daily Telegraph as a foreign correspondent but left the paper in 1955 upon the publication of his first book, Back into Power. Over the next 20 years, he wrote more than a dozen important works of nonfiction, concentrating on military history and France. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan chose Home to be his official biographer.

HOUGHTON, HARRY. Harry Houghton left the Royal Navy in 1945 with an honorable discharge and a small pension after 24 years’ service, having achieved the noncommissioned rank of master-at-arms. He then took a civilian post in the naval dockyards at Gosport. Between July 1951 and October 1952, he was attached to the British embassy in Warsaw as a clerk. Here, Houghton was recruited by the Polish SB, which became aware of his black market activities. After his return from Warsaw, Houghton worked as a clerk in the Underwater Detection Establishment at Portland in Dorset and lived in a small cottage at Broadwey near Weymouth. In January 1957, he was transferred to the Port Auxiliary Repair Unit at the same base, which by then had been renamed the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Research Establishment.

Houghton’s childless marriage of 23 years to a widow from his home town of Lincoln ended in divorce in 1958. His embittered wife denounced him as a spy about the time of their divorce, but this tip was not acted upon and he continued to spy until the Central Intelligence Agency supplied information from a source MI5 codenamed LAVINIA, who was in fact Michal Goleniewski, a senior Polish SB officer (and part-time KGB informant) who requested political asylum for himself and his German girlfriend. Goleniewski described a spy with a name like “Horton.”

Once the 56-year-old Houghton had been confirmed as the most likely candidate for “Horton,” he was placed under surveillance. When he traveled to London by train one Saturday morning, he was observed exchanging envelopes with a stocky, middle-aged man carrying a shopping bag. Houghton was trailed back to Dorset while his contact was kept under observation at his hotel in Bayswater. Discreet inquiries at the hotel revealed Houghton’s link to be a Canadian guest, a recent arrival named Gordon A. Lonsdale. Further surveillance and an overheard conversation produced a pattern of meetings between Houghton and Lonsdale, usually on the first Saturday of the month.

At their next meeting in August, Houghton was accompanied by Ethel Gee, a colleague from Portland with whom he spent the weekend at the Cumberland Hotel, Marble Arch. Both had driven up to London in Houghton’s new car and later had attended a performance of the Bolshoi Ballet at the Royal Albert Hall with tickets supplied by Lonsdale. Although she spent much of her spare time with Houghton, Gee, who was known as Bunty, lived with her elderly mother, uncle, and disabled aunt in a small terraced house in Portland. Whereas Houghton’s job did not give him access to secrets, Gee’s position in an adjoining building that housed the Drawing Office records section, most certainly did. She had worked at the base since October 1950 and had moved from the stores department in 1955, two years before she had been accepted as an established civil servant.

Houghton, Gee, and Lonsdale were arrested in January 1961 and three months later appeared at the Old Bailey, where the two Britons were sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment. Houghton claimed that he had been coerced into helping the Soviets after his black-market activities in Warsaw had been discovered. He also insisted that he had believed Lonsdale to be an American intelligence officer (in fact, he was the Soviet illegal rezident, Konon Molody). The prosecution challenged his version by pointing out the large amount cash he had accumulated that had been found in a search of his home. Upon his release from Maidstone Prison, Houghton married Gee and wrote his autobiography, Operation Portland. They moved to the Isle of Wight, where they still live.

HOUSEHOLD, GEOFFREY. Born in 1900, Geoffrey Household was educated at Clifton College, which he detested, and Magdalen College, Oxford, which he regarded as paradise. After graduation he was offered a job in Bucharest by a fellow student’s father who happened to be managing director of the Ottoman Bank. Household’s branch was a subsidiary, the Bank of Romania, and he arrived to take up his duties there as a junior clerk at the end of 1922. After four years in banking, during which he had acquired a loathing of the business and a love for the daughter of one of his customers, Household moved to Paris to take up a job with Elders & Fyffes, fruit importers famous for their bananas.

In 1927 Household was sent to Bilbao to open a Fyffes office. Although it proved to be highly successful commercially, his ambition was to travel to America to join his fiancée, who lived for much of the year with her parents in New York. He was also keen to publish his short stories but could not interest anyone in them. After two years in Spain, Household joined a ship bound for Panama and traveled to New York by train. There he married Marina but was unable to make a living as a writer and instead worked as an editor on a dictionary. Finally, in the autumn of 1932 he was commissioned by CBS to write a series of radio plays and thus began his literary career.

By mid-1933 Household was back in London, ready to embark on a third career, as the representative of an ink manufacturer. He was hired, on the basis of an advertisement in the Times, to travel across Europe to exploit the boycott Jewish printers had imposed on their traditional German suppliers. Later he was to open up new markets in Greece, the Near East, and South America, as well as achieving success with two novels, The Third Hour (1937) and Rogue Male (1939). Household’s return to London coincided with the Munich Crisis, which prompted him to volunteer for the reserves. On the basis of his claim to speak German, French, and Romanian, he was instructed to attend two short intelligence courses. However, it was not until August 1939 that he was to be summoned to the War Office and dispatched to Cairo on a secret assignment for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).

SIS’s objective was the destruction of the Romanian oilfields in anticipation of a German invasion, and a group of saboteurs was sent to Bucharest from Egypt via Palestine and Turkey. “I was forbidden to travel on my current passport which gave my profession as author,” recalled Household. “Authors, said the authorities, were immediately suspected by every security officer, Compton Mackenzie and Somerset Maugham had destroyed our reputation as unworldly innocents forever. So I was given a new passport which stated that I was an Insurance Agent.” At Ploesti, Household helped coordinate a clandestine survey of the oil installations and, once this had been concluded, was given a cover diplomatic post at the British Legation and participated in the notorious Iron Gates fiasco.

In October 1940 Household returned to Cairo and was appointed a security officer in the Field Security Police. His first posting was to Greece, but after the British withdrawal he joined Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME) and was transferred to Jerusalem to work under MI5’s local representative, Henry Hunloke, MP, the defence security officer. Until the end of the war, as he recalled in his autobiography Against the Wind (1958), he moved between Beirut and Baghdad, but never actually caught any spies. He ended up in charge of SIME’s office in Haifa in 1945 and was then brought home to London with his second wife, Ilona, who was Hungarian. However, before returning to civilian life he was posted to Germany to write an account of the Guards Armoured Division’s recent battles for the Ministry of Information.

After he was demobilized, Household returned to writing and published several novels and books of short stories, including Arabesque and Fellow Passenger, though none achieved the success of Rogue Male. He was elected a Conservative borough councilor and he died in October 1988.

HUME, COLONEL. In July 1900 the director of military intelligence (South Africa), Colonel Hume, wrote a paper recommending the appointment of intelligence officers to all levels of military commands, noting, “This is recognized in India where an Intelligence Officer is allowed for each mixed brigade.” He pointed out the need to develop military counterintelligence to combat the Boers who, though defeated in the field, had resorted to commando raids. Hume’s demand to coordinate “detective work” with “press censorship and the reading of private mail” and the recruitment of scouts and interpreters set a standard for the centralized collection and analysis of intelligence.

HUNGARY. Section D’s man in Budapest, Basil Davidson, had been forced to decamp to Belgrade following the German invasion in April 1941. There had been no time to recruit a stay-behind network— and anyway the British minister, Sir Ronald Campbell, so thoroughly disapproved of covert operations that he had ordered his military attaché to throw Section D’s cache of sabotage matériel, stored in the legation’s basement, into the Danube, threatening to denounce Davidson to the Hungarian authorities if he created a diplomatic incident. From this unpromising start, it is not surprising that Special Operations Executive (SOE) had considerable difficulty in reestablishing a presence in the country.

It was not until Lazlo Veress, a young Hungarian diplomat, appeared in Turkey, apparently on a semiofficial mission to negotiate a surrender to the Allies, that a radio was successfully infiltrated into Budapest. Harold Gibson, the long-serving Russian-speaking Secret Intelligence Service head of station in Istanbul, rejected Veress’s overtures, but Bill Bailey proved more accommodating. Two transmitters were handed over to Veress, who made his way home in September 1943 and managed to maintain contact until the German invasion in March 1944. Veress then made his way to Zagreb, where he found some Partisans and talked his way onto a flight to Bari. With Veress out of the country, SOE was again at a disadvantage, so Peter Boughey, head of the Hungarian subsection in Baker Street, whose own staff had been depleted by the prosecution and imprisonment of the Soviet agent Ormond Uren, volunteered to lead a “blind” mission. His team was caught within a few hours of landing near Lake Balaton, and Boughey was delivered to the Gestapo. Only Boughey survived the war, having escaped from a PoW camp in Silesia, where he had been sent as a noncommissioned officer. He eventually reached England via Odessa. Another mission, dropped blind into southern Hungary, was also eliminated, and an Office of Strategic Services attempt, led by Florimond Duke, resulted in him going to Colditz. Basil Davidson, who had parachuted into Yugoslavia in September 1943 with the intention of reaching Hungary, was never able to do so.

SOE’s Hungarian subsection, designated MP, was headed by Harold Perkins in London and had an operations section in Cairo to infiltrate missions through Czechoslovakia. The main military mission, WINDPROOF in 1944, was unable to venture further than Slovakia, where it remained as liaison with the leader of the Slovak revolt, General Golian, until its leader, John Sehmer, was shot by the Germans.

HUTTON INQUIRY. Lord Hutton conducted an inquiry into the circumstances and background to the July 2003 suicide of David Kelly, a senior Defence Intelligence analyst and expert on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Despite considerable criticism of the Ministry of Defence’s handling of him, when he was exposed as having leaked sensitive information to the BBC relating to disquiet within the intelligence community over the composition of the two dossiers prepared in September 2002 and February 2003 by the government in anticipation of an invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair’s administration was exonerated.

HYDE, HARFORD MONTGOMERY. When Harford Montgomery Hyde joined Section D in 1939, at the suggestion of a friend of his wife, he found that he was obliged to share a room in the organization’s temporary offices, in the St. Ermin’s Hotel, with Guy Burgess. Unlike Burgess, who experienced no trouble in joining Section D, Hyde’s application was held up after MI5 reported the sinister news that six years earlier he had applied for a single, one-way ticket for a voyage to Russia. Did this mean he had intended to remain in Moscow? he was challenged. Hyde reassured his interrogator that he had always planned to return to London overland. Hyde’s shared accommodation with Burgess lasted only a short time before he was posted to Liverpool as a liaison officer with the censorship authorities. There he found the theatrical producer Eric Maschwitz, whose job was to riffle through parcels mailed overseas for clues to enemy agents.

Born in Ulster and educated at Queen’s University, Belfast, and Magdalen College, Oxford, Hyde had been called to the bar and had built up a reasonable criminal practice on the Northeast circuit when the war broke out. He had also written several books, the first being the Rise of Castlereagh in 1933. Hyde volunteered as a reserve officer during the Munich Crisis, when he was also serving as private secretary to the minister of air, Lord Londonderry, and this had led him to Section D, through the intervention of his wife’s contacts.

In January 1940 Hyde was assigned to a new Section D office in Gibraltar, and then in August he was transferred to Bermuda, where a major examination center for Imperial Censorship was under development. In May 1941, having reported to British Security Coordination (BSC), the regional headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in New York, Hyde was sent on a secret mission to Bolivia. This was a reconnaissance to research a scheme for thwarting a pro-Nazi coup in the capital, La Paz, and resulted in the circulation of a forged letter purporting to come from the coup leader, then the Bolivian military attaché in Berlin. The document was never detected as a fake and its publication sparked off an anti-Nazi purge in the Bolivian government, exactly as had been intended.

Apart from one short visit to London and a few visits to the Caribbean and Central America, Hyde remained at BSC headquarters in New York until the latter part of 1944. He was later appointed legal adviser to the British Control Commission for Austria, and in 1950 was elected the Unionist MP for North Belfast.

Hyde was an amateur criminologist and his many books brought him great success, particularly his acclaimed biography of Oscar Wilde and his studies of Victorian scandals. His biography of his former chief at BSC, Sir William Stephenson, The Quiet Canadian (1962), identified the wartime chief of SIS as Sir Stewart Menzies for the first time in print and led to awkward questions being tabled in the Commons. In April 1981 Hyde published a letter in the Times in support of his former colleague Dick Ellis, complaining that doubt had been cast unfairly over the latter’s loyalty. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had declined to make a formal statement to the House of Commons regarding Ellis, and her reluctance to vilify him had given his few remaining supporters, Hyde and Stephenson among them, the false hope that the accusations had been false. Hyde, who continued to make an annual visit to Stephenson at his home in Bermuda every year, died in Tenderden, Kent, in August 1989.

–I–

IMPERIAL CENSORSHIP. One important branch of British Intelligence was Imperial Censorship, the screening of all mail posted to or from the empire or passing through British territory. In England this was conducted in London and Liverpool, with the main overseas centers being in Bermuda and Trinidad. The overt objective of Imperial Censorship was to remove any information that might be useful to an enemy, but examination of all the transatlantic mails, including items sent from the United States and addressed to neutral countries in Europe, provided an opportunity to test letters for secret writing and the concealment of microdots.

Whereas in World War I the censorship of the international mails was limited to scrutiny at MI5 headquarters of selected suspect correspondence, with a small laboratory to develop methods for covert opening of envelopes and the detection of secret ink, the procedures had become considerably more sophisticated by 1939 when the Defence of the Realm Act gave wide authority for the interception and inspection of all mail.

During World War II Imperial Censorship took over the entire Hamilton Princess Hotel in Bermuda, overlooking the Great Sound, to process the airmail delivered daily on the transatlantic seaplane route between New York and the Azores. As well as scrutinizing the content and searching for blacklisted addresses, weekly intelligence reports were prepared on topics ranging from morale to issues of political controversy. Imperial Censorship eventually employed more than a thousand examiners in Bermuda and scored some notable successes in tracing letters posted by enemy spies in the United States. By establishing Censorship and Contraband Control offices in Bermuda and Trinidad, British intelligence exercised the right of inspection, censorship, delay, and confiscation on all the transatlantic traffic, with the sole exception of the Italian airline route from Recife to Dakar, which was in any case closed in 1941 following an intensive campaign of sabotage and political pressure orchestrated by British Security Coordination.

INDIAN POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE BUREAU (IPI). IPI developed out of India’s Home Intelligence Bureau, headed by Sir Cecil Kaye from 1919 to 1924. Arguably one of the most successful British Intelligence organizations, IPI provided the India Office, MI5, and the Secret Intelligence Service with information about Indian. nationalism and Communist agitation from a comprehensive network of agents. Its directors included Sir Philip Vickery, Sir Horace Wilson, and Sir David Petrie, who was appointed director-general of the Security Service in 1940. During World War II the organization was commonly referred to as the Delhi Intelligence Bureau.

The first Indian Intelligence Department was established in 1878 at Simla, covering the Middle East, following fears of Russian plans to close the Suez Canal. In 1886 Colonel C. S. Maclean was appointed to head a Central Asian intelligence branch for the Indian army at Meshed, where he was appointed consul-general, and he retained a record of his operations, conducted between October 1886 and March 1992 in a private diary, published as The Great Game.

INDOCHINA. Special Operations Executive (SOE) operations in French Indochina during World War II were directed toward contacting and supporting pro-Allied members of the local administration. The operations included BELIEF, RADICAL, and VOGUE. MASTIF and BIRDCAGE were designed to liberate PoW camps in Siam. After the Japanese surrender in August 1945, SOE provided personnel for the establishment of an intelligence branch at South-East Asia Command.

INDUSTRIAL INTELLIGENCE CENTRE (IIC). Created in 1936 by the Secret Intelligence Service to monitor German rearmament and headed by Major Desmond Morton, the IIC gathered information from financial and commercial sources—and leaked heavily to Winston Churchill. Among those recruited to keep the IIC well informed was William Stephenson, a Canadian industrialist with prewar interests across Europe. In 1940 Churchill appointed Morton his special assistant to liaise with the intelligence services.

INDUSTRIAL SECURITY LIAISON OFFICERS. The Protective Security Branch of the Security Service is responsible for offering advice on physical security to government departments and to contactors undertaking classified work. Industrial security liaison officers also provide useful points of contact for individuals in sensitive positions likely to be the target of entrapment and recruitment operations mounted by hostile intelligence agencies, and they give an opportunity to gather information from businessmen traveling overseas. During the Cold War, the C Branch headquarters was located in Cork Street, Mayfair.

INFORMATION RESEARCH DEPARTMENT (IRD). Created in February 1948 by Christopher Mayhew, the Information Research Department acted as a covert channel of anti-Soviet propaganda. Headed by (Sir) Ralph Murray, IRD began with a staff of 16 and in September 1948 had a budget of £100,000, funded through the secret vote, to analyze Soviet policy and develop conduits to counter the Kremlin’s propaganda. It operated independently of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), although it was headed by an SIS officer, Nigel Clive, between 1966 and 1969. IRD was closed down in 1978 by David Owen when Ray Whitney (a future Conservative MP) was its head.

INFORMATIONSHEFT GROSSBRITANNIEN. In 1940 the Sicherheitsdienst issued a document for the use of the Gestapo in anticipation of a Nazi occupation of Britain that included a largely accurate chapter outlining the structure and organization of British Intelligence. The handbook was captured at the end of the war and an analysis of the sections dealing with MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) suggested that the information had been obtained from the interrogation of Captain Sigismund Best and Major Richard Stevens, the two SIS officers abducted during the Venlo incident in November 1939. Although copies of the handbook were retained at the Imperial War Museum in London and the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford, a full translation was not published until the release of Invasion 1940 in 2000.

INGRAM, MARTIN. “Martin Ingram” is the pseudonym of a former Parachute Regiment soldier who joined the Intelligence Corps and in 1982 was assigned to the Force Research Unit (FRU) in Enniskillen. In 1990, he left the army and went to live in Eire, where he married a republican and subsequently collaborated on the publication of Stakeknife: Britain’s Secret Agents in Ireland (2004). Prior to coauthoring the book, Ingram had supplied information to the Sunday Times regarding his work in the FRU and had been the subject of a legal injunction obtained by the Ministry of Defence in 1999 to prevent him from making disclosures about a FRU agent, Brian Nelson, and his involvement in the murder of a Belfast lawyer, Pat Finucane.

Ingram’s revelations concerned the role played by Freddie Scappaticci as an FRU source, codenamed STAKEKNIFE. The book describes a television interview Scappaticci gave in August 1993, in which his identity had been protected, but as an ostensibly hardened republican who had been interned, he had been astonishingly candid and critical of his friend Gerry Adams. A builder by trade, Scappaticci had earned an unenviable reputation as a ruthless enforcer and a member of the Provisional IRA’s “Nutting Squad,” which interrogated, tortured, and murdered suspected informers. According to Ingram, Scappaticci had been implicated in no less than 35 incidents in which “touts” had been questioned and then killed.

INTELLIGENCE AND SECURITY COORDINATOR, NORTHERN IRELAND. The post, usually held by an MI5 officer on secondment to the Northern Ireland Office in Belfast, responsible for liaising between the various overlapping intelligence agencies operating in the province. Those holding the post have been lain Cameron, Harold Doyne-Ditmas, David Eastwood, Maurice Oldfield (1979–80), Denis Payne, David Ranson, Brooks Richards, Craig Smellie, and Frank Steele (1983–).

INTELLIGENCE COLLECTION STAFF. A component of the Defence Intelligence Staff, the Intelligence Collection Staff is headed by the director-general of intelligence collection, a two-star military appointment, responsible for managing the Defence Geographic and Imagery Intelligence Agency and the Defence Intelligence and Security Centre at Chicksands Priory.

INTELLIGENCE COORDINATOR TO THE CABINET. A post originally created for Sir Dick White, the retiring chief of the Secret Intelligence Service in 1968. Its holder liaises between the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), the Permanent Under-Secretaries’ Committee, and the prime minister. Among the subsequent coordinators have been Leonard Hooper (1973–78), Brooks Richards (1978–80), Peter Wilkinson (1980–83), Antony Duff (1983–85), Colin Figures (1985–89), Christopher Curwen (1989–91), Gerald Warner (1993–95), John Alpass (1995–98), and Peter Ricketts (2001–02). The post was briefly combined with that of chairman of the JIC between 1983 and 1985 and again from 2000 to 2003 before Bill Jeffrey was appointed in 2005.

INTELLIGENCE CORPS. The British army regiment responsible for the recruitment and training of personnel drawn from other branches of the military, the Intelligence Corps had its origins in the Peninsula Corps of Guides raised in September 1808 and marched with Sir John Moore to Salamanca. The modern regiment was founded in August 1914 under Major T. G. Torrie and initially consisted of a Headquarters Wing, a Dismounted Section, a Mounted Section equipped with horses borrowed from the Grafton Hunt, a Motor-Cycle Section, and a Security Duties Section manned by detectives seconded from Special Branch. In 1916 the familiar green staff tabs and hatbands were introduced, and by the end of the war the unit amounted to 3,000 men, mostly based in Wiesbaden. In December 1929 the corps was disbanded, only to be mobilized again in September 1939 for service with the British Expeditionary Force in France.

The corps established a School of Military Intelligence at Smedley’s Hydro, Matlock, Derbyshire, which remained operational until 1946. It also shared the Corps of Military Police Depot at Mytchett in Surrey, where field security courses were given to noncommissioned officers. In January 1946 the decision was taken to keep the Intelligence Corps as a reserve unit, and it became part of the Territorial Army, so the Depot was moved from Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire to Oudenarde Barracks in Aldershot. Almost simultaneously, the School of Military Intelligence was transferred from Matlock to Wilton Park, and then in 1948 to a hutted camp at Maresfield in Sussex.

Since the end of World War II, the Intelligence Corps has sent Field Security Sections (with the military intelligence designation MI11) and Field Security Wings to almost all the trouble spots where British troops have been deployed. Based until 1992 at the Templer Barracks at Ashford, it has now moved to RAF Chicksands Priory.

INTELLIGENCE SERVICES ACT. The Intelligence Services Act of 1992 created the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee and, for the first time, laid out the duties of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) chief. As set out in clause 2 of the act, the Chief’s role is to ensure the efficiency of SIS and “to ensure that there are arrangements for securing that no information is obtained by the Intelligence Service except so far as is necessary for the proper discharge of its functions” and to prevent the disclosure of information “except so far as is necessary in the interests of national security, for the purpose of prevention or detection of crime, or for the purpose of any criminal proceedings.” In addition, the Chief has an obligation to write an annual report for the prime minister and not to “take any action to further the interests of any United Kingdom political party.” SIS’s legitimate functions, as spelled out in the act, are

to obtain and provide information relating to the actions or intentions of persons outside the British Islands, and to perform other tasks relating to the actions or intentions of such persons. The functions of the Intelligence Service shall be exercisable only in the interests of national security, with particular reference to the defense and foreign policies of Her Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom, or in the economic well-being of the United Kingdom, or in support of the prevention or detection of serious crime.

This felicitous use of language amounted to the first encapsulation of SIS’s role and, thanks to Sir Colin McColl’s drafting and lobbying skills, was so widely drawn as to encompass virtually every eventuality. It did not attempt to define any of the terms used, such as “political party” or “serious crime.” McColl later described this exercise as writing his own job description, and the inclusion of a responsibility to protect the “economic well-being of the United Kingdom” went unchallenged, just as it had done when it was originally inserted in the Security Service Bill in 1989. SIS would be free to apply for telephone and mail intercept warrants in the United Kingdom, through MI5’s well-established procedures, and was given an immunity from any civil or criminal liability within the United Kingdom for acts committed outside the jurisdiction.

INTERCEPTION OF COMMUNICATIONS. Prior to the passage of the Interception of Communications Act (1985), authority for the interception of mail and telephone calls was supplied by six cabinet ministers: the secretaries of state for home affairs, foreign affairs, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and trade and industry. Each request was prepared by the relevant organization (MI5, the Secret Intelligence Service, Customs and Excise, or the police) and submitted to the appropriate minister, who signed a warrant authorizing the interception for a period of six months, under the general authority of the royal prerogative. The warrant would then be delivered to the General Post Office, which would make the necessary technical arrangements for interception. The number of individual warrants issued was published (although it was not a particularly accurate guide, as a single warrant, in the case of an organization, might cover numerous telephone lines), and after 1985 an independent commissioner was appointed to supervise the procedure and investigate complaints.

The current criteria for granting a warrant, as set out in the 1985 act, are that the required information cannot be obtained from any other source and that the offenses under investigation have a penalty of more than six months’ imprisonment on the first offense. Information gleaned from the source is not admissible as evidence in a criminal trial. In the case of telephone warrants, the interception is arranged at the exchange, and the transcripts are prepared by the relevant agency.

INTERNATIONAL BRIGADE. The military unit created to fight for the republican cause during the Spanish Civil War, and a source of recruits for the NKVD. Of principal interest to the Security Service was the British membership, from whom various spies were cultivated, among them, Douglas Springhall, who had served as a political commissar with the British battalion, Morris Cohen, and Oliver Green.

INTER-SERVICES LIAISON DEPARTMENT (ISLD). Cover name for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in the Middle East during World War II, with a B Section responsible for the recruitment and management of agents and double agents. Headed by Captain Cuthbert Bowlby in Cairo, ISLD ran SIS stations across the region. Bowlby was succeeded as director by John Teague and Teddy Smith-Ross.

INTER-SERVICES RESEARCH BUREAU. Cover name for Special Operations Executive, found on a brass plaque outside the headquarters at 64 Baker Street.

INTER-SERVICES SECURITY BOARD (ISSB). Headed by a former MI(R) officer, Colonel Edward Combes, the ISSB was created by the War Office, accountable to the chiefs of staff, to coordinate measures intended to prevent the leakage of information to the enemy. Inevitably this led the ISSB into developing policy on strategic deception, and as a consequence the body liaised closely with the London Controlling Section, the Joint Intelligence Committee, and “A” Force in the Middle East.

INVERGORDON MUTINY. Discontent in the Royal Navy following the imposition of pay cuts culminated in a mutiny at Invergordon in September 1931. The circumstances of the mutiny were investigated by Charles Butler and Colonel W. A. Alexander of the Security Service. MI5 reported that the trouble had been caused by a group of 400 sailors, who were promptly dismissed. Also sacked was the director of naval intelligence, Rear Admiral C. V. Usborne, who had failed to give any warning that a breakdown of discipline was imminent below decks.

IRELAND. In April 1938 Eire, the Republic of Ireland, signed an agreement with Great Britain for the withdrawal of British garrisons from Irish ports. A few months later, the Irish Department of External Affairs requested a meeting with MI5. In August 1938, Captain Guy Liddell then met Joe Walshe and the Irish high commissioner in London, John Dulanty, who expressed concerned about Nazis in Dublin. A further meeting was held in September at which Liddell supplied an MI5 report on Nazi activity in Eire, recommending the creation of a counterintelligence service under the Ministry of Defence, headed by a senior officer with direct access to the minister. The organization would need to monitor the arrivals and departure of foreigners; maintain surveillance on them while they were in the country; and intercept mail, cables, and telephone communications.

MI5’s memorandum expressed a readiness to liaise closely with the new agency, G-2, which would be headed by Colonel Liam Archer. During September 1938 Archer held more meetings with Security Service officers. His organization had to start from scratch under conditions of the greatest secrecy, without experience, staff, or resources and of course was also subject to the vagaries of Irish politics.

Throughout World War II, Colonel Archer and his successor, Dan Bryan, maintained the closest relationship with MI5’s small Irish Section, designated B1(h) and then B9, headed by Cecil Liddell, and its Secret Intelligence Service counterpart, headed by a former MI5 officer, Jane Sissmore. MI5 assisted with evidence for the arrest and imprisonment of Nazi spies, either parachuted into Ireland or landed by U-boats, and campaigned to isolate the German Legation, which was equipped with a wireless transmitter.

Since World War II, G-2 and the Garda Special Branch have maintained liaison links with MI5 and the Special Branch, chiefly for the exchange of information about terrorist suspects.

IRGUN. A Jewish terrorist organization in Palestine headed by Menachim Begin and his deputy, Yaacov Meridor. An abbreviation of Irgun Zvai Leumi, the Irgun took a more militant line in the campaign for a Jewish homeland in Palestine and consisted mainly of immigrants of Polish extraction. Although the Irgun temporarily suspended anti-British operations during World War II, leaving the terrorism to the Stern Gang, they targeted the Palestine Police once the Nazis surrendered and made a daring attack on the police headquarters in Jaffa in May 1945. The Irgun was behind the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946.

Begin was never caught because he rarely moved from Tel Aviv, where he was disguised as a rabbi, and his organization was much feared by British Intelligence. On one occasion, when two of his terrorists were sentenced to death, Begin arranged for the abduction of five British officers, including Major H. B. Chadwick of Security Intelligence Middle East, and threatened to kill them if the Irgun men were executed. Their sentences were commuted to imprisonment and the hostages were freed.

The Palestine Police reacted to the Irgun with counter-gangs until the abduction of an Irgun suspect, Alexander Rubinowitz. In Austria, the Irgun attempted to blow up Vienna’s Sacher Hotel, but an investigation conducted at the local Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre assisted in the identification of the terrorists responsible.

IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY (IRA). The principal Irish nationalist organization committed to the unification of a Socialist republic of Eire, the IRA has conducted terrorist operations in Ireland and the mainland of Britain. In 1972 the Marxist wing split away to form the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), which in turn spawned a Trotskyite faction, the Irish National Liberation Army. When the peace process began in 1994 the rejectionist members of PIRA formed the Real IRA and later Continuity IRA.

IRON GATES. The first sabotage plan of World War II undertaken by Section D was the blocking of the Danube at the narrows known as the Iron Gates. The Goeland Shipping Company, run by William Burland-Harris, began to buy up or charter the Danube’s barges so as to deny them to the Germans. These were then manned by Australian and British naval volunteers and moved to Sulina, at the river’s mouth, to rendezvous with the S.S. Ardinian, which carried a cargo of weapons, explosives, and more ratings led by Merlin Minshall. The intention, according to David Walker, was to transfer the illicit cargo, documented as oil equipment, onto lighters and then tow them up river toward Budapest in 94 barges towed by five tugs. However, one shipment, on the Tormonde, was discovered by the Romanians to consist of several three-pounder guns, six tons of gelignite, and a quantity of grenades. Twelve naval ratings were detained and then deported, escorted onto a British tanker bound for Istanbul. The remainder of the team was subsequently rounded up and allowed to leave Romania without charge. After that, bowing to the outrage expressed by the Foreign Office, Section D abandoned the entire operation. Minshall, the Royal Navy’s liaison officer who had conducted a clandestine survey of the Iron Gates from his yacht before the war, succeeded in extricating himself from the Romanian security police, largely due to his status as a British vice consul, and made a swift exit into the Black Sea aboard a fast launch, having abandoned his own explosives-packed ship, the Oxford. Harris-Burland was also evacuated, albeit under less dramatic circumstances, to Istanbul, where he was later to succeed Gardyne de Chastelain as head of Special Operations Executive’s local Romanian subsection.

IRONSIDE, EDMUND. Born in 1880 in Aberdeenshire, the son of an army surgeon, Edmund Ironside entered the Royal Artillery in 1899 to fight in the Boer War. He was commanding the 9th Infantry Brigade in October 1918 when he was appointed commander-in-chief of the Allied intervention in North Russia. After the withdrawal from Archangel a year later, he commanded British troops in Persia and in 1922 went to the Camberley Staff College as commandant. Ironside went to Gibraltar as governor in 1938, became chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1939, promoted to field marshal, and then became commander-in-chief, Home Force, in 1940. Because of Ironside’s adventures in northern Russia, his friend John Buchan used him as the model for his fictional character Richard Hannay, hero of The Thirty-One Steps.

ISCOT. Code name for a cryptographic source created by Bernard Scott, who studied and solved Soviet ciphers used for wireless communications between Moscow and certain overseas Communist parties. Work on the traffic was begun in conditions of the tightest security by a Russian subsection of GCHQ’s Diplomatic Section at Allford House, overlooking Park Lane, in 1943 with a small team of cryptographers that included Felix Fetterlein, John Croft, and an officer named Sainsbury.

ISK. Code name for a cryptographic source created by Dillwyn Knox, who was able to solve some of the Enigma keys used by the Abwehr in December 1941. This breakthrough, partly based on success with isos, encouraged the Government Code and Cipher School to concentrate on other Enigma keys.

ISOS. Code name for a cryptographic source created by Oliver Strachey based on his study of Abwehr hand ciphers in 1939. This material, intercepted by the Radio Security Service, was originally based on messages exchanged by Arthur Owens, codenamed SNOW, MI5’s first double agent of World War II equipped with a wireless transmitter. The isos intercepts originated in transmissions to and from four German radio stations, two located in Berlin, the others at Wiesbaden and Hamburg.

ITALY. Until Italy went to war with Abyssinia in 1935, the Security Service had no grounds for investigating the Italian Fascist Intelligence Service or the party organization in British territory, and when permission was finally granted, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) could offer very little information. Section V’s dossier consisted of a general review of the Italian system very broadly defined, compiled several years earlier, with little on the Italian intelligence service and its place in the Italian military machine.

MI5 investigated the local branches of the FAE and shared the information obtained with the representatives of the Dominions and Colonies as well as with the liaison authorities in the Middle East. It furthermore learned from Egypt at an earlier time of tension that the Royal Air Force in the Middle East had been obliged to dismiss a large number of Italian civilian employees on British aerodromes. Apparently, in the event of war, the National Fascist Party leadership intended to use the party organization for sabotage in the Mediterranean region.

SIS also received information from an independent source that specific plans were in place to use the Italian Fascist militia in Greece to impede mobilization of the Greek army should Greece and Italy find themselves at war, perhaps as a result of the proposed closure of the Suez Canal to Italian shipping. The report said that the plans envisaged the sabotage of railways and bridges in Greece, the Fascists having been advised that war would begin without any prior break of diplomatic relations.

MI5’s investigation in England suggested that Italian consuls and Fascist organizations had collected some rough intelligence on the movement of troops and matériel to the Near East, but that most of this information had come from open sources with the help of the party. Later the Joint Intelligence Committee directed MI5 should keep a watch on the FAE and the Italian Overseas Youth Organization (Giovani Italiani all’Estero). Many Italian children on British territory were British subjects by birth, but the FAE made every effort to preserve their “Italian essence” (italianità). One of their methods was summer camps in Italy, where large numbers of children from Italian communities around the world came together to be fed Italian patriotic propaganda, to be put through military training, and to be generally imbued with militarism.

MI5’s investigations continued up to the outbreak of war in September 1939 but produced no material evidence of Italian espionage. There were a few minor cases in the Middle East and there were various indications of Italian intrigues and propaganda in the Middle East aimed at boosting Italian, and diminishing British, prestige.

IVANOV, EUGENE. A GRU officer working under assistant naval attaché cover at the Soviet embassy in London since March 1960, Eugene Ivanov was identified as a potential honeytrap victim by Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who had been asked to name vulnerable colleagues. MI5 attempted to mount an operation against Ivanov, and Keith Wagstaffe used the alias of Keith Woods to approach a man Ivanov was known to be in contact with, the society artist and osteopath Stephen Ward. The plan was abandoned in July 1961 when the Cabinet secretary asked the secretary of state for war, John Profumo, for his cooperation, and he declined. MI5 took no further action against Ivanov, unaware that he had been conducting an affair with Christine Keeler, who was also sharing her favors with Profumo.

Ivanov fled to Moscow when Keeler’s affair with Profumo became public and later cooperated in the publication in 1992 of his memoirs, The Naked Spy, which was withdrawn following legal action by Sir Anthony Eden’s widow, Lady Avon. Ivanov died of alcoholism in January 1994, aged 68.

–J–

JAPAN. MI5’s first case of Japanese espionage was that of Colin Mayers, who was convicted under the Official Secrets Act in April 1927. However, prior to that prosecution MI5 had maintained a watch on Lord Sempill, a well-known aviator overtly employed by the Imperial Japanese Navy as a consultant. No action was taken against him, but in a similar case Frederick Rutland, who had been kept under surveillance for years and had had his mail intercepted, was arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act emergency regulations in December 1941 because of his “hostile associations”; he was detained until September 1943 and committed suicide in January 1949.

MIS’s B1(f) became aware of Japanese espionage in Britain in June 1941 when TATE was instructed by his Abwehr controller to rendezvous on a London bus with a Japanese man. His contact was followed by Special Branch and identified as Lieutenant Commander Minitory Yosii, an assistant naval attaché at the Japanese embassy. Yosii returned to the embassy immediately after the meeting and thereafter was kept under surveillance, but no further evidence emerged of his activities as an Abwehr surrogate.

MI5’s review of Japanese espionage concluded that the Japanese maintained an extensive intelligence network throughout the British Empire through embassies and consulates, which concentrated with ship movements and, in the United Kingdom, with bomb-damage reports. The Japanese network was an important component of the Axis intelligence system. MI5 identified Lord Sempill as a useful source for the Japanese and noted that he had been connected for 10 years with Mitsubishi, which paid him £300 a year. Following the outbreak of war, Mitsubishi proposed stopping these payments, but at the special request of the Japanese naval attaché they continued for some time, albeit at a lower level. In a letter on this subject, a director of Mitsubishi described Lord Sempill as someone who was of “direct and indirect benefit” to the military and naval attaches in London. Lord Sempill had collected information on bombs and aviation for the Japanese since 1925 and in 1930 was one of the two directors of the Anglo-German Club.

Another Japanese source was Professor Grotwohl, a German by birth with a British passport, his father having been naturalized in 1869. From 1903 to 1912 Grotwohl worked as professor of French at the Universities of Bristol and Dublin and then acted as a freelance journalist, working as an unofficial adviser for various embassies and private individuals for the Daily Telegraph as well as for various provincial papers; at various times has been on the payroll of the Greek, Romanian, and Saudi Arabian embassies. Grotwohl was also connected with the Poles and with the Turkish and Argentine embassies. MI5 noted he had a very close relationship with Dr. Siebert, doyen of the Nazi press corps in Great Britain, and Sir Edward Grigg, who, when warned, became a conduit for passing disinformation to the Japanese.

The Japanese also cultivated Arthur Edwards, who had worked in the Chinese Customs from 1903 to 1928 and later was openly employed by the Japanese embassy as a salaried adviser, and his close friend, General F. S. G. Piggott, the British military attaché in Tokyo until 1930. Another friend of Edwards was Commander McGrath, a director of Cannon Boveri and a near neighbor of the former Japanese ambassador in Bucharest. The last member of the group was George Sale of Sale Tilney, an export-import business with interests in Japan.

The Government Code and Cipher School succeeded in reading some of the Japanese diplomatic cipher traffic during the late 1920s, and this information was used by MI5 to monitor the relationship between Rutland and the naval attaché in London, Captain Oka. The principal objective of the work on the traffic was to monitor the growth and movement of the Japanese fleet, and the Far East Combined Bureau, in Hong Kong and then from 1939 in Singapore, concentrated on this target alone and achieved considerable success.

One unexpected consequence of this lengthy study of Japanese ciphers and procedures was the continuous commentary on strategic issues provided by the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, General Oshima Hiroshi, who sent regular, exceptionally well-informed reports to Tokyo. An experienced soldier, Oshima had been posted to Germany first in May 1921 as an assistant military attaché and had been appointed ambassador in October 1938. He enjoyed a very close relationship with Hitler and the top Nazis and sent frequent, detailed telegrams home, first in the RED machine cipher and, after 1938, in a cipher generated by the PURPLE machine, a replica of which was constructed by the Americans and delivered to Bletchley Park in January 1941. Thereafter, until he was detained at his hotel in Bad Gastein in 1945, virtually all his radio traffic was read by GCHQ.

JEBB, GLADWYN. A career diplomat who had been educated at Eton and won a first in history at Magdalen College, Oxford, Gladwyn Jebb was Special Operations Executive’s first chief executive officer, appointed in August 1940 to assist Hugh Dalton. Jebb had spent the previous three years as private secretary to the permanent undersecretary, Sir Alexander Cadogan. In 1942 Jebb returned to the Foreign Office, where he remained until his retirement in 1960, following six years as ambassador in Paris, and his ennoblement as Lord Gladwyn.

JEDBURGH. Code name for Allied paramilitary teams of three dropped into France and Norway during World War II to support local resistance organizations. Created in July 1942 by Colin Gubbins, JEDBURGHS were under Special Operations Executive (SOE) command but controlled by Special Forces Headquarters. The JEDBURGH concept was a very considerable shift in tactics for SOE and meant the adoption of a much more overt, paramilitary role than it had previously been accustomed to in France.

A trial, codenamed SPARTAN, was conducted on Salisbury Plain in March 1943 with 11 teams and proved a success. The experience gained from SPARTAN formed the basis of a secret document circulated by the head of SOE’s Planning Section, Colonel M. W. Rowlandson, in April 1943. This in turn resulted in the basic JEDBURGH directive, which was issued in December 1943 and formalized the arrangements that were to be implemented soon afterward with the intention of producing 300 JEDBURGH teams by 1 April 1944, an optimistic ambition never to be achieved.

An Office of Strategic Services (OSS) officer, Henry B. Coxe, and a recently escaped PoW, Major Combe-Tennant, were placed in charge of the JEDBURGHS, and a training program was devised by the head of SOE’s Training Section, Colonel James Young, and his OSS counterpart, Major John Tyson. Together they prepared a three-part course for all the volunteers that survived an extended interview with three psychiatrists: Preliminary training in Scotland, followed by technical courses at Hatherop Castle in Gloucestershire (Special Training School [STS] 45); Gumley Hall, Leicestershire (STS 41); and West Court, Wokingham (STS 6). This stopgap continued until February 1944, when Milton Hall (designated ME 65), became the main JEDBURGH training center. Situated just seven miles from Peterborough, this beautiful 17th-century property and the surrounding estate provided ideal facilities for preparing the agents for their tasks. The radio operators went on to STS 54 for an intensive wireless instruction, and a parachute course was run at Altrincham, Manchester (STS 51a). Thereafter the graduates were given a five-day field test under simulated conditions at Horsham in Sussex.

Milton Hall was to become the JEDBURGHS’ principal home and was staffed almost entirely by SOE. The first commandant was Frank Spooner, with Major O. H. Brown as chief instructor and Major H. L. Trebilcock as adjutant and transport officer. Bill Sykes led a team of 15 instructors, supplemented by eight Americans. The organization was divided into three companies, commanded by Majors H. A. Dorsey, M. C. M. Crosby, and B. W. Gilmour. Before the first JEDBURGH team could be formed, in mid-March 1944, SOE experienced further difficulty in gathering sufficient personnel, but found a remedy in the recruitment of 70 Free French officers from the Middle East.

Once the training phase had been completed and the “Jeds” were ready to be deployed operationally, the overall management was changed, with Colonel Smith and Major Coxe replacing Spooner in command at Milton Hall. The composition of each team was chosen by Milton Hall’s new commandant, Colonel Musgrove, in consultation with his chief instructor, Major McLallen. Each team was allocated a cryptonym, usually an English first name, although the names of drugs and car manufacturers were introduced after the Security Section ran out of Christian names.

In April 1944 the first teams were sent abroad, all to North Africa accompanied by a U.S. Marine, Major Horace Fuller, in expectation of being dropped into southern France. However, the Algiers group was beaten into the field by HUGH, the first JEDBURGH into France. HUGH was dispatched from RAF Harrington on 5-6 June to the Châteauroux area, where it linked up with the local maquis leader, codenamed PHILIPPE of SHIPWRIGHT. The team acted as liaison between his men, which numbered some 2,000 spread across the Indre département , and a 1st Special Air Service regiment mission codenamed BULBASKET; the latter was under the command of Major J. E. Tonkin and wreaked havoc among the enemy defenders until it was itself decimated by a battalion of SS infantry on 4 July. HUGH was not a typical JEDBURGH because it consisted of two Frenchmen and one British officer, but this did reflect the relative shortage of OSS personnel available in mid-June. In fact, although more teams were to be dropped into enemy territory in the days following D-Day, the first American did not go into the field until Sergeant Robert Keyhoe of FREDERICK and Captain Paul Cyr of GEORGE landed in Brittany on 9-10 June. By the beginning of July 1944, a total of 13 Jeds had been dispatched, of which seven originated from Algiers. Altogether 93 JEDBURGHS were deployed, with losses amounting to 21, the equivalent of seven full teams.

The Jeds dropped into France were ALAN, ALASTAIR, ALEC, ALEXANDER, ALFRED, AMMONIA, ANDREW, ANDY, ANTHONY, ARCHIBALD, ARNOLD, ARTHUR, AUBREY, AUGUSTUS, BASIL, BENJAMIN, BERNARD, BRIAN, BRUCE, BUGATTI, BUNNY, CECIL, CEDRIC, CHLOROFORM, CHRYSLER, CINNAMON, CITROEN, COLLODION, DANIEL I, DANIEL II, DESMOND, DODGE, DOUGLAS I, DOUGLAS II, ECLAIREUR, EPHEDRINE, FELIX, FRANCIS I, FRANK, FREDERICK, GAVIN, GEORGE, GEORGE II, GERALD, GILBERT, GILES, GODFREY, GRAHAM, GREGORY, GUY, HAMISH, HAROLD, HARRY, HENRY, HILARY, HORACE, HUGH/POLITICIAN II, IAN, IVOR, JACOB, JAMES, JEREMY, JIM, JOCK, JOHN, JUDE I, JUDE II, JULIAN, JULIAN II, LEE, MARK, MARTIN, MASQUE, MAURICE, MILES, MINARET, MONOCLE, NICHOLAS, NORMAN, NOVOCAINE, PAUL, PHILIP, QUENTIN, QUININE, RAYMOND, RODERICK, RONALD, SCEPTRE, SCION, SIMON, STANLEY, TIMOTHY, TONY, VEGANINE, and WILLYS.

JEFFES, MAURICE. The son of a former British consul in Belgium, Maurice Jeffes was a veteran Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer who headed the stations in New York and Paris. He had been educated entirely on the Continent, in Brussels and at Heidelberg University, and in 1916 joined up with the Royal West Surreys. Later he transferred to the Intelligence Corps and in 1919 was appointed as station commander in Paris before going to New York in September 1921. Upon his return to London he played a senior role in SIS’s management while ostensibly director of the Passport Control Office of the Foreign Office, a post he held until his death in November 1954.

JERVIS, THOMAS. Having retired from the Indian army after 30 years’ service in 1836 and failed to be appointed surveyor-general of India, Major Thomas Jervis maintained his interest in cartography and in early 1854, while on holiday in Belgium, came across a Russian map of the Crimea. Having reproduced it and sold it to the secretary of state for war, the Duke of Newcastle, Jervis was appointed head of a new Topographical and Statistical Department at the War Office, accommodated in stables off Spring Gardens. By the time he died in his sleep in April 1887, Jervis had received widespread international recognition as a geographer and head of British Intelligence.

JOHN, OTTO. A senior Abwehr officer, Otto John also worked as the chief lawyer for the German airline Lufthansa, and it was in this capacity that he arrived in Lisbon in November 1942. During his stay he made contact with the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and alerted his case officer to the existence of an anti-Nazi group based within his organization in Berlin. In February 1943 John returned to Lisbon to report on the progress made by his fellow conspirators but was given a deliberately discouraging response by SIS, which was anxious not to raise Soviet suspicions by developing formal links with any German opposition movement. Undeterred, John participated in an attempt on Hitler’s life in March 1943, which failed when a British-made bomb placed on the Führer’s aircraft failed to detonate. A further assassination bid failed on 20 July 1944, forcing John to flee to Spain, where he again contacted SIS. As he later explained, “I felt no urge to provide a lone heroic example and become a political martyr. In any case the political effect would have been nil. There was no resistance movement.”

Arrangements were made by SIS to exfiltrate John from Madrid to a safe house in Lisbon, but it was raided by the Portuguese secret police (PIDE) and John was imprisoned as a suspected Royal Air Force pilot. Under interrogation John acknowledged his true identity, an admission that was reported to the German embassy and caused a member of the local Abwehr, Fritz Cramer, to be assigned the task of assassinating John. However, Cramer himself nurtured anti-Nazi sympathies and instead of carrying out the murder, he tipped off SIS and allowed them to negotiate John’s release into British safekeeping. Once freed by PIDE, John was flown to London, where he was employed by the Political Warfare Executive preparing radio propaganda broadcasts for the Soldatensender Calais station at Woburn Abbey, where he worked alongside Wolfgang zu Putlitz, a man he later described as “an odd political crank.”

After the war John returned to Germany and acted as an interpreter during the Nuremberg trials. In 1950 he was nominated by the British as the first director of the Bundesamt fur Verfassungsschutz, the Commission for the Protection of the Constitution. Among his tasks was the cultivation of sources in East Germany, and one of his contacts was zu Putlitz, whom he regarded as unreliable. While still head of the security agency, John disappeared in July 1954, either the victim of an abduction or a willing defector to the East. Soon after his arrival in East Germany, he gave a press conference in which he announced his adherence to Communism and left the distinct impression that his performance was voluntary. Later, though, he reappeared in the West, insisting that he had been kidnapped and that his previous public statements had been made under duress. According to the Soviet defector Piotr Deriabin, John had been blackmailed by the Soviets, who had discovered evidence of John’s secret contact and collaboration with the Nazis during the war.

After his unexpected reappearance in December 1955, John was arrested and in December 1956 sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in solitary confinement for treason. Released from Munster prison at the end of July 1958, he spent his retirement at Hohenburg, near Igls in the Austrian Tyrol. In his 1965 autobiography, Twice through the Lines, he explained the background to his involvement in the anti-Hitler plot.

JOHNS, PHILIP. In the autumn of 1939, as a newly arrived member of the Naval Control Service in Antwerp, Commander Philip Johns, RNVR, was invited to join the local station of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). “There was no application form to join the Secret Service,” he recalled. “There was no written examination or personal interview with any board.” Instead he was invited to volunteer for “special service” and promptly driven by a civilian member of the Passport Control Office to Brussels, where he was introduced to Edward Calthrop, the wheelchair-bound head of station.

Johns remained in Brussels until the evacuation in May the following year and then joined SIS’s Naval Section in London. As the third most senior member of the section, Johns recalls that one of his duties was to confer with Ian Fleming, his liaison contact in the Naval Intelligence Division. “After our exchanges on duty matters, we would often lunch together, sometimes at one of his clubs, Boodle’s, where he maintained (and I could not but agree) that the wartime cuisine was probably the best available in London.” Early in 1941 Johns was posted as head of station to Lisbon, the neutral capital that had become a center of European espionage. During his two years in Portugal, Johns encountered Dusko Popov, one of MI5’s many double agents, and Donald Darling, the local MI9 representative who had been identified mistakenly by the notorious Portuguese secret police, PIDE, as the head of SIS’s local networks. Johns recalls the arrival of a double agent codenamed TRICYCLE:

It was reported to me ... that he had been given by his German controllers a questionnaire relating to the US defenses of Pearl Harbor. At the time, if I remember correctly, little importance was attached to this piece of information and if of value it would have been for the Americans to assess, although of course at that time the USA had not entered the war. As it turned out, when TRICYCLE was handed over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation on his arrival in the USA, the implication in regard to Pearl Harbor was given little credence.

In December 1942 Johns was recalled to London for a new assignment, the supervision of a complicated shipping deal in Buenos Aires intended to transfer the ownership of some Axis merchant vessels mothballed in neutral ports to front companies in Argentina. The scheme was to be financed by the Treasury, but after Johns had arrived and opened negotiations, the project was abandoned and Johns was sent to Rio de Janeiro as head of station. He remained in Brazil until October 1943, when he returned to London via New York to take command of Special Operations Executive’s Belgian Section.

For the last 18 months of World War II, Johns was in command of the Low Countries Section, which combined the Belgian and ill-fated Dutch country sections. It was a task requiring considerable skill and tact, considering the tension that had developed between the various competing intelligence agencies with overlapping responsibilities that had all experienced degrees of enemy penetration. When Brussels was liberated, in September 1944, Johns opened a Special Forces headquarters in what had until recently been the offices of the Luftwaffe.

At the end of the war, Johns returned to commercial life and emigrated to the United States, where he now lives. His memoirs, Within Two Cloaks: Missions with SIS and SOE (1979), were among the very first to be written by a wartime SIS officer and were unusual because the author identified many of his SIS colleagues, although he neglected to reveal the name of his successor in Lisbon, Cecil Gledhill, with whom he had been on poor terms. Living in Florida, Johns felt under no obligation to submit his manuscript to the authorities, and it thereby achieved some notoriety within the intelligence community.

JOINT AIR RECONNAISSANCE INTELLIGENCE CENTRE (JARIC). Located at RAF Brampton, the JARIC undertook the Royal Air Force’s photoreconnaissance missions with converted Canberra and Vulcan aircraft during the Cold War. In 1983, 13 Squadron and 3 Squadron, operating from RAF Wyton and RAF Coltishall, were disbanded, leaving No. 1 Photographic Reconnaissance Unit, which was later amalgamated into the Defence Geographic and Imagery Intelligence Agency.

JOINT INTELLIGENCE BUREAU (JIB). The Joint Intelligence Bureau was the War Office’s central military intelligence organization. It existed between 1948 and the establishment of the Ministry of Defence in 1964 and was headed by Major General Sir Kenneth Strong continuously.

JOINT INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE (JIC). Created in 1936 under the chairmanship of Ralph Stevenson, the JIC consists of the various directors of intelligence, the chief of the Defence Staff, and the permanent undersecretaries from the Home Office, Foreign Office, Ministry of Defence, and the Treasury. It sets the requirements for the Secret Intelligence Service and GCHQ, since 1968 has provided an Assessment Staff to undertake independent analysis, and is attended by the Central Intelligence Agency’s chief of station in London and his equivalent from Australia and New Zealand.

The chairs of the JIC have been Ralph Stevenson (1936–39), Victor Cavendish-Bentinck (1939–45), Harold Caccia (1945–48), William Hayter (1948–49), Patrick Reilly (1950–53), Patrick Dean (1953–60), Hugh Stevenson (1960–63), Bernard Burrows (1963–66), Denis Greenhill (1966–68), Edward Peck (1968–70), Stewart Crawford (1970–73), Geoffrey Arthur (1973–75), Antony Duff (1975–79 and 1983-85), Antony Acland (1979–82), Patrick Wright (1982–83), Percy Cradock (1985–92), Roderick Braithwaite (1992–93), Pauline Neville-Jones (1993–94), Michael Pakenham (1994–96), Paul Lever (1998–99), Peter Ricketts (1999–2001), John Scarlett (2001–04), and William Ehrman (2004–2005).

JOINT SECURITY CONTROL (JSC). An Anglo-American liaison committee established in 1943 by John Bevan and Major General Sir Kenneth Strong to supervise the management of double agents run by British Security Coordination and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the Western Hemisphere and to authorize the release of information to the enemy. The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) interpreted the agreement as a means by which the Americans could be included in the preparation of deception, whereas the Americans regarded it as the right of veto over any sensitive item that was too risky to pass on. In 1944 the dispute focused on LODGE, an SIS double agent based on Montevideo, Uruguay, who had been asked by the Abwehr to supply shipping information.

JOINT SERVICES GROUP (JSG). The specialist military intelligence unit assigned to collect covert intelligence in Northern Ireland, in succession to the Force Research Unit. The JSG is staffed by personnel drawn from all the armed forces and deployed in the province to recruit and run agents within the loyalist and republican paramilitaries.

JOINT SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE (JSIC). A liaison group created during World War II to coordinate the work of those counterintelligence experts concentrating on the analysis of intercepted Abwehr wireless traffic, with Hugh Trevor Roper acting as secretary. Its membership included Felix Cowgill and Captain Ferguson from the Secret Intelligence Service; Guy Liddell, Herbert Hart, and Dick White from MI5; Colonel Maltby and Kenneth Morton Evans from the Radio Security Service; and (Sir) Denys Page and Leonard Palmer from GCHQ.

JOINT SPEECH RESEARCH UNIT (JSRU). A GCHQ section undertaking research in a specialist field in the Communications Security Division.

JOINT TECHNICAL LANGUAGE SERVICE (JTLS). A GCHQ division handling the recruitment, vetting, and training of specialist personnel.

JOINT TERRORISM ANALYSIS CENTRE (JTAC). Following the terrorist attack on New York and Washington, D.C., in September 2001, the British government established the JTAC to act as a clearinghouse for all information from British sources and liaison sources relating to terrorist threats.

JONES, AUBREY. Educated at a secondary school in Merthyr Tydfil, Aubrey Jones graduated from the London School of Economics as a prizewinner with a first-class honors degree. At age 26, he joined foreign staff of the Times, but was recruited into the Intelligence Corps upon the outbreak of war. A transfer to Section V of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) followed, and he was later posted to Bari once the Allies had landed on the Italian mainland.

While still an SIS officer, Jones contested the 1945 general election but failed to win the South-East Essex seat for the Conservatives. At the end of 1946 Jones returned to the Times and fought the Haywood and Radcliffe by-election, which he also lost. Finally, in 1950, after he had joined the British Iron and Steel Federation, he won Birmingham Hall Green. Thereafter Jones’s parliamentary career prospered and he was appointed minister of fuel and supply in December 1955. He retired from the House of Commons in 1965 and took numerous directorships in industry.

In July 1988 Jones made a contribution to the debate on public accountability, prompted by the Peter Wright affair, and argued for a system of supervision for the security and intelligence services.

Several of my acquaintances were members of the secret agencies during and immediately after the World War II. I doubt whether there is anything which they could say of their then experiences which would now prejudice security.... An agency whose servants are obliged for ever to keep everything secret will never develop an objective view of the world. It will see everything around it through a miasma of suspicion and therefore proffer unwarranted observations and conclusions. That is one of the more important lessons of Mr. Peter Wright’s book.

Jones’s own publications are primarily on industrial and economic topics, but The Pendulum of Politics, published in 1946, gave his views at that time, having spent the previous five years in SIS.

JONES, MARTIN FURNIVAL. See FURNIVAL JONES, SIR MARTIN.

JONES, R. V. Whereas most of the academics drafted into the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) during the war were to concentrate on exploiting flaws in the enemy’s cryptographic system, R. V. Jones was recruited with the specific purpose of advising the organization on developments in the scientific field. Of particular concern was Germany’s progress in radar, proximity fuses, and aircraft guidance devices.

One of Jones’s first tasks was to study an apparent windfall from Norway, an anonymous gift of technical data that purported to describe the enemy’s latest work on fuses, acoustic torpedoes, aircraft navigation aids, and bomber production. While SIS was initially inclined to dismiss the document, which became known as the Oslo Report, as a crude exercise in disinformation, Jones undertook some practical experiments and concluded the information was largely authentic.

Jones’s achievement in recognizing the Oslo Report for what it was, a genuine attempt to alert the Allies to recent German scientific advances, enhanced his status in an organization that traditionally was suspicious of anyone manifesting technical skills. Indeed, until Jones joined SIS, the service possessed only one officer with a university background who had studied a scientific subject. In later years Jones was to play a key role in devising countermeasures for German scientific breakthroughs. He helped “bend” the radio beams used to guide Luftwaffe bombers to their targets, developed an apparatus to jam the enemy’s radar, and monitored the production of Hitler’s V-weapons.

After the war, Jones reentered academic life, but in 1952 he was invited back to the Ministry of Defence to head a new Directorate of Scientific Intelligence, a post that coincidentally brought him into contact with Sir Percy Sillitoe, Peter Wright, and the Soviet microphone codenamed SATYR. Jones once more returned to academic life in Aberdeen in 1954. Decades later, he wrote Most Secret War (1978), an unprecedented analysis of his contribution to the scientific war prosecuted behind the scenes by the boffins. His decision to publish this book was prompted by the discovery of various of Jones’s wartime research papers in the Public Record Office. The BBC researchers who uncovered the material announced that they intended to use it in a television series with or without his cooperation. Accordingly, he sought permission to write his own account of his wartime work, in which he describes how the German atomic scientists captured at the end of the war were accommodated at Farm Hall, in a safe house near Cambridge that had been wired for sound. The resulting recordings and transcripts were only officially acknowledged and released by the British government in March 1992, more than 45 years after they were made, but only 14 since Jones advocated that they be made public.

In 1989 Jones published his autobiography, Reflections on Intelligence , in which he elaborated on some of the topics that in 1978 were considered too sensitive for public consumption, among them the true identity of the author of the Oslo Report, Hans Mayer. Jones died in December 1997, his extraordinary contributions to British intelligence unrewarded with any official decorations.

JOYCE, WILLIAM. Known as “Lord Haw-Haw,” William Joyce was an enthusiastic Nazi, of Irish-American background, who left London for Berlin in 1939. He was arrested on the Danish frontier in May 1945 and prosecuted for having collaborated with the enemy by broadcasting German propaganda over the radio. His case was investigated by Jim Skardon of MI5, and he was hanged at Wandsworth in January 1946.

JUNIOR. MI5 code name for Hans Ruser, an Abwehr defector who was exfiltrated from Madrid in November 1943; his Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) code name was ARTHUR. The son of the commodore of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, Ruser’s Abwehr cover was that of a journalist. He handled CELERY when he visited Lisbon in February 1941 and declared himself to be an anti-Nazi. A year later his offer to defect was rejected by SIS for fear of compromising TRICYCLE, but after ARTIST’S arrest, it was decided to bring him to London. Through a miscommunication, Ruser was briefly held at Camp 020 before he was released.

–K–

KEELER, CHRISTINE. One of several beautiful girls escorted to society parties in London in the early 1960s by Stephen Ward, Christine Keeler was a dancer at a West End nightclub when she was introduced to John Profumo, the secretary of state for war, at Cliveden, the country home of Lord Astor at the end of July 1961. They enjoyed a brief affair and MI5 sought to use both in a honeytrap operation aimed at Eugene Ivanov, the Soviet assistant naval attache. Alarmed at MIS’s suggestion, Profumo broke off his relationship with Keeler in early August 1961 and later denied it first in a libel action and then in March 1963 in the House of Commons. Caught in a lie, Profumo resigned in June 1963, but Keeler continued to revel in her notoriety, writing two autobiographies, Scandal! (1989) and The Truth at Last (2001).

KEITH, KENNETH. Born in 1916 and educated at Rugby, Kenneth Keith trained as an accountant and joined the Welsh Guards in 1939. He was transferred to Special Operations Executive in North Africa and subsequently was appointed assistant to Kenneth Strong as General Eisenhower’s intelligence chief at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. Keith followed Strong to the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office in 1946 and later became one of the most successful industrialists of his generation, being elevated to the House of Lords in 1980.

KELL, MAJOR GENERAL SIR VERNON. Director-general of the Security Service from 1909 to 1945, Vernon Kell had been a Daily Telegraph correspondent during the Boxer Rebellion in China. When ill health forced his retirement from active duty with his regiment in 1909, he was appointed head of the Home Section of the Secret Service Bureau. He was sacked by Winston Churchill in May 1940 and died a broken man at his tiny rented cottage in Buckinghamshire in March 1942.

KELLY, DAVID. A former director of Porton Down, Dr. David Kelly was an expert on chemical and biological weapons and served as a UN weapons inspector following the 1991 Gulf War. He was also a consultant for the Defence Intelligence Staff. His suicide in July 2003 prompted a political controversy when it emerged that he had been responsible for leaks to journalists concerning unease within the intelligence community regarding the content of two dossiers: prepared in September 2002 and February 2003 and released by the British government prior to the invasion of Iraq. Lord Justice Hutton conducted an inquiry into Kelly’s death, and the Hutton Inquiry exonerated Tony Blair’s administration of any blame.

KEMP, PETER. Born in 1915 in Bombay, where his father was chief justice, Peter Kemp was educated at Wellington and Trinity College, Cambridge, and fought with the nationalists during the Spanish Civil War. He was wounded by a mortar in the Battle of the Ebro. After his return to London, Kemp was introduced to MI(R) by Douglas Dodds-Parker and was sent to Gibraltar in anticipation of a German invasion. After MAD DOG was abandoned, he was sent on a mission aboard the submarine Clyde to seize a U-boat believed to be in the Canaries, but this too was aborted following an attack by a Royal Navy destroyer. In 1942 Kemp raised the Small-Scale Raiding Force to destroy enemy signal facilities in Brittany and the Channel Islands.

Kemp was parachuted into Albania in 1943, accompanied by Billy McLean and David Smiley. After eight months there, Kemp trekked across the mountains to Montenegro and was evacuated to Cairo for another mission, this time to Poland. Captured by the Red Army, he was imprisoned by the NKVD and spent two months in Moscow before an exit visa was negotiated for him. Soon after his release, he was parachuted into Siam by Force 136.

After the war Kemp joined an insurance company, but in 1956 he traveled to Budapest on behalf of the Tablet and smuggled three students into Austria. Kemp died in November 1939, having written three volumes of his war memoirs: Mine Were of Trouble, No Colours or Crest, and The Thorns of Memory.

KENT, TYLER. A 29-year-old cipher clerk based at the U.S. Embassy in London in May 1940, Tyler Kent had previously served in Moscow. Together with Anna Wolkoff, he was the subject of a lengthy MI5 investigation of the Right Club, a pro-Nazi organization, but when his flat was searched it was found to contain copies of telegrams he had removed from the embassy’s code room. His diplomatic immunity was waived and he was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. After the war he was deported to the United States, where he was investigated as a possible Soviet mole who had been recruited in Moscow.

KENWORTHY, HAROLD. Commander Kenworthy supervised the development of Britain’s covert signals intercept capability, first establishing the Home Office station at Grove Park in 1923 and later the huge facility at Ivy Farm, outside Knockholt Pound in Kent. The latter was known as the Foreign Office Research and Development Establishment and concentrated on the enemy’s teletype radio traffic during World War II.

KERBY, HENRY. Bom in Russia, Henry Kerby operated for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in Malmö, Sweden, during the early part of World War II, operating under consular cover, and later was regarded as a useful agent for the Security Service. In SpyCatcher, Peter Wright recalls an episode in which Kerby was to plant a sophisticated listening device in the Soviet embassy in London, concealed in an ornate silver model of the Kremlin, ostensibly a gift from a member of Parliament to the ambassador. The scheme was dropped when the proposal was put up to the Foreign Office and vetoed.

Educated at Highgate and on the Continent, Kerby had joined the army in 1933, aged 19, but left four years later. In 1939 he was on the staff of the British Legation in Riga with the status of honorary attaché, and this was where he came into contact with Leslie Nicholson, the local SIS head of station. In 1940 Kerby was switched to Malmö, and according to his uninformative entry in Who’s Who, he spent the remainder of the war “specially employed under War Office.” At the end of the war, he received decorations from Finland, Poland, Norway, Yugoslavia, and Denmark, which gives a clue to the territories he dealt with while in SIS.

Kerby was unsuccessful when he contested the 1945 general election in Spelthorne, Middlesex, for the Liberals, and in Swansea West for the Conservatives in 1951. In 1947 he married Enid Herchen-roder, and they had two daughters. He was finally elected to the Commons in March 1954 at a by-election as the Tory MP for Arundel, West Sussex. Because he was a fluent Russian speaker, Kerby was the official interpreter for Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to England in 1956.

Until 1966, when Harold Wilson instructed MI5 not to run MPs as agents, Kerby was a valued source for the Security Service, reporting on his many trade visits to Moscow. He was frequently seen as a guest at the Soviet embassy in London, and in 1952 approached Kim Philby with an invitation to tea and a curious story. He claimed to have been sacked from SIS and offered to use his position in Parliament to attack the Foreign Office if Philby could supply him with any ammunition. According to Philby’s version of this episode, in My Silent War, he rejected the proposition.

When Kerby’s friend Leslie Nicholson announced his intention to publish his memoirs, designed to wrongfoot SIS, Kerby gave his support and contributed an endorsement which was calculated to inflict maximum embarrassment.

Kerby was widely distrusted by his own party, and after his death in January 1971 at age 56, it was revealed that he had been on surprisingly close terms with Wilson, the Labour leader, to the extent that some regarded him as a spy for the Socialists inside the Tory camp. Nevertheless he had been returned at the 1970 general election with a huge majority, a not-inconsiderable achievement bearing in mind that he had suffered a heart attack in February of that year.

KESSLER, ERIC. A Swiss journalist based in London before World War II, Eric Kessler joined the Swiss embassy as a diplomat and was recruited by Guy Burgess as a source, codenamed ORANGE. Kessler proved to be an important asset and allowed MI5 access to all the reports sent back to Bern in the Swiss diplomatic bag. It is unlikely that Kessler was aware that Burgess was also keeping the NKVD fully informed about the activities of his homosexual friend.

KESWICK, SIR JOHN. A member of the famous merchant family that ran Jardine Matheson’s commercial empire in the Far East, John Keswick was also the Special Operations Executive (SOE) Oriental Mission’s representative in Chungking. He negotiated with Chiang Kai-shek for SOE to develop training facilities on his territory in January 1942. An embryonic Special Training School (STS) was opened near Chungking in March, but thereafter the relationship had faltered, principally because of the head of Chiang’s intelligence service, General Tai Lio, who among other demands insisted that a Chinese officer should head the STS. Instead of finding a compromise, Keswick and his colorful White Russian deputy, Vladimir Petropavlovsky, were ordered to leave the country forthwith. The British ambassador, Sir Alexander Clark Kerr, reported this unfortunate episode in the following terms:

SOE got into such bad odor with the Chinese because its personnel were almost exclusively representatives of British interests and their tactless and misguided activities, that Chiang Kai-Chek himself ordered them out of China and refused them permission to operate.

Both Keswick and Petropavlovsky were redeployed, the former to London where he was appointed director of missions, Area C—covering India, the Far East, and the Americas—the latter to the Balkans.

KEY, JOSE ESTELLA. A 33-year-old British subject of Spanish parentage, Jose Key was a laborer in the Gibraltar dockyard when he was arrested in March 1942. While awaiting interrogation by the defence security officer, Philip Kirby Green, Key attempted to escape but was recaptured. He confessed to having been recruited by a Falangist working on behalf of the Abwehr and was sent to London for trial. He was convicted under the Treachery Act in May 1942 and executed at Wandsworth in July.

KGB. The Committee for State Security (Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti) was the principal Soviet intelligence agency from its formation in 1954, under the leadership of Ivan Serov, to its replacement in 2001 by the SVR, the Russian Federation’s Foreign Intelligence Service. The KGB represented a formidable adversary for British Intelligence, running operations in London through both the rezidentura at the Soviet Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens and a parallel organization headed by an illegal rezident. Britain was the target of the Third Department of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, and its embassy in Moscow was kept under surveillance by the Third Chief Directorate.

The headquarters of the KGB in Moscow has always been known as “Moscow Center” or “the Center” and its respected personnel have been known as “Chekists” as direct descendants of the Bolshevik tradition during the period when the Soviet Union’s security and intelligence apparatus was known as the Cheka.

KGB ARCHIVES. In 1993 the publication of Deadly Illusions by John Costello and Oleg Tsarev marked the beginning of a declassification program sponsored by the SVR with an American publisher to allow five Western authors access to selected files in the old KGB archives to write on specific topics with a KGB coauthor. The result was the publication of One Hell of a Gamble by Tim Naftali and Aleksandr Fursenko; Battleground Berlin by David Murphy and Sergei Kondrashev; The Haunted Wood by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev; and The Crown Jewels by Tsarev.

Since this project, negotiated by the Cambridge-educated historian Costello, further disclosures from the Illegals Directorate archive have been made by a defector, Vasili Mitrokhin, who reached England in 1992 with a vast quantity of documents he had copied at the KGB First Chief Directorate’s headquarters at Yasenevo, an illicit undertaking that resulted in the release of The Mitrokhin Archive in 1999.

KHAFAJI, JABBAR AL-. A member of the Iraqi National Accord, political opponents of Saddam Hussein, Jabbar al-Khafaji acted as a conduit for a joint Central Intelligence Agency-Secret Intelligence Service operation based in London to prevent the Iraqi military from defending the country when Coalition forces invaded in 2002. Trained in tradecraft at a safe house in Syon Park, he was supplied with Thuraya satellite phones to smuggle into Baghdad and distribute to military commanders seeking to negotiate terms of their withdrawal from the conflict. As a result, 41 Iraqi MiG-25 Foxbat fighters survived the conflict intact at al-Asad airfield; General Mahar Doufiane al-Tikriti, commander of the Iraqi Special Republican Guard, ensured his elite troops did not fight; and the Mukhabarat’s director, Tahir Jalil al-Habbush al-Takriti, simply disappeared.

KIEBOOM, CHARLES VAN DER. Charles Van Der Kieboom was one of four Abwehr agents who landed in a dinghy on the Kent coast in 1940 but were captured within hours of their arrival. All four were carrying identity documents in names supplied by SNOW. One of his companions, Sjoerd Pons, was acquitted at his trial under the Treachery Act in November 1940 but detained for the remainder of the war. Kieboom and the other two, Carl Meier and Jose Waldberg, were hanged at Pentonville Prison in December.

KILOWATT. Code name for an international antiterrorist intelligence exchange sponsored by the Israeli Mossad established in 1977 to which MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service subscribe. It concentrates on information relating to the identity and movement of suspected Palestinian extremists.

KING, ANDREW. Originally recruited into the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in 1938 as an agent for the Z Organisation, Andrew King was educated at Wellington and read economics at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and operated under London Films cover. During World War II he was posted to Switzerland, where he ran Halina Szymanska, an important Polish agent with access to Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. After the war he was appointed SIS’s controller, Eastern Area, in charge of the SIS stations in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. He was later SIS’s head of station in Vienna and Hong Kong but took early retirement when he acknowledged his homosexuality, his prewar membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and his university friendship with Kim Philby. He died in October 2002 aged 87.

KING, CECIL. A powerful newspaper magnate, proprietor of the Daily Mirror from 1951 to 1963, and later chairman of the Newspaper Publishers Association, Cecil King was a long-term MI5 agent with access to Fleet Street gossip. It was King who first alerted MI5 to a story circulating that Christine Keeler was attempting to sell proof of her adulterous relationship with the minister of war, John Profumo.

KING, JOHN. Captain John King was of Irish birth and fought in World War I in the Artist’s Rifles. After the war he became a Foreign Office cipher clerk but was dissatisfied with the level of pay he received for handling some of the government’s most sensitive documents. In October 1934 he began selling copies of secret telegrams to the Soviets to support his wife and son, a grown-up student, but he lost contact with his handler in 1937 when Theodore Mally left England. King was arrested in September 1939 as a result of information supplied in the United States by Walter Krivitsky, and separately by Conrad Parlanti in The Hague, and was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment.

KING DAVID HOTEL. The headquarters of the British Army in Palestine, the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was the target of a bomb packed into seven milk churns and detonated under the hotel’s south wing, killing 19 and injuring 110. The attack was undertaken by the Irgun, the Jewish terrorist organization headed by Menachim Begin, apparently in retaliation for BROADSIDE, the arrest of 3,000 terrorist suspects who were detained and interrogated at Rafiah.

KING’S MESSENGERS. British diplomatic mail is carried by couriers, usually retired military personnel, who are employed by the Foreign Office and known as king’s or queen’s messengers. Before World War II, several Section D officers were enrolled as king’s messengers to carry explosives and other sabotage matériel into the Balkans under diplomatic protection.

KISLITSYN, FILIP. A junior member of the NKVD’s rezidentura in London during World War II, Filip Kislitsyn was identified by the defector Vladimir Petrov as the source of his information, gleaned from canteen gossip at Moscow Center, that Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had been long-term Soviet spies who had been recruited at university and had swamped the rezidentura with copies of valuable documents.

KLATT. Abwehr code name for Richard Klauder, a spy whose radio traffic exchanged between Sofia and Vienna was intercepted at Bletchley Park from December 1941. The issue of whether KLATT’S exceptionally well-informed spy ring was an extraordinarily elaborate Soviet deception preoccupied British counterintelligence experts for years. When the Secret Intelligence Service tipped off the Soviets to the apparent leakage of information, they took no action, leading to the conclusion that the network had always been under Soviet control.

KLUGMANN, JAMES. Educated at Gresham’s, Holt, and Cambridge, James Klugmann joined the Yugoslav Section of Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Cairo in 1941 after military service in the Pioneer Corps. A lifelong Communist Party of Great Britain member, he was a university friend of Guy Burgess and wrote the party’s official history. According to Anthony Blunt, he was also a talent spotter for the NKVD, and John Cairncross asserted that Klugmann had introduced him to his recruiter, Arnold Deutsch. Klugmann died in September 1977, having refused to be interviewed by MI5. Postwar scrutiny of SOE’s policy toward Draza Mihailovic ’s Cetniks suggested that Klugmann may have suppressed information favorable to the Royalist leader in favor of the Communists, led by Tito, who received massive support from the Allies.

KNIGHT, MAX. Max Knight was probably MI5’s most unconventional—and most successful—case officer. He joined the organization in 1925, having been a naval cadet, and proceeded to recruit long-term sources in various political groups regarded as subversive. Perhaps his greatest coup was the insertion of Olga Gray into the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), and it was due to her evidence for the prosecution that a Soviet spy ring operating at Woolwich Arsenal was rounded up. Her appearance as a surprise witness led to the conviction in 1938 of Percy Glading, a veteran Communist activist, and three of his agents in the Arsenal. Knight’s specialty was the cultivation of agents who could spend years maneuvering themselves into a position of access. In Gray’s case, it took nine years for her to accumulate sufficient information to call in the police. Similarly, Knight employed Joan Miller to ingratiate herself with the Link, a group of suspected Nazi sympathizers; in 1940 this led to the appearance of Anna Wolkoff and Tyler Kent at the Old Bailey in 1940 on a charge of having stolen hundreds of secret telegrams containing Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s correspondence to President Franklin D. Roosevelt from the U.S. embassy. Another of his agents was Tom Driberg, who was eventually betrayed by Anthony Blunt and expelled from the CPGB, an incident that convinced Knight that the Soviets had penetrated MI5.

Knight enjoyed a wide circle of friends in London and used them as a useful pool from which to recruit informants and obtain assistance. He approached Dennis Wheatley for permission to employ his stepson, William Younger, as an agent while he was still at Oxford. He also arranged for Wheatley to provide cover for another of his agents, Friedle Gaertner, by hiring her as his secretary. Still other agents included Marjorie Mackie and William Allen, both used to penetrate potential Fifth Columnists.

In 1934, while working for the Security Service, Knight published a thriller, Crime Cargo, and after his retirement, when he was making radio programs as the BBC’s expert on animals, he wrote Pets Usual and Unusual and coauthored The Senses of Animals with L. Harrison Matthews in 1963. Fluent in German, Knight also translated A Confidential Matter: The Letters of Richard Strauss and Stefan Zweig, 1931–1935.

Although Knight enjoyed phenomenal success in counterintelligence and trained a generation of case officers such as John Bingham, his accomplishments were marred by the Benjamin Greene episode in which one of his agents, an Austrian named Harald Kurtz, concocted evidence against an espionage suspect who proved to be exceptionally well connected. Greene and his family pursued Kurtz for years and eventually brought the case to the House of Lords. Greene was released from custody and Kurtz was exposed publicly as an unscrupulous Security Service stool pigeon who had manufactured a spurious case against an innocent man for financial reward.

By any standards Knight was an unconventional man who commanded great loyalty from his subordinates and agents. He retired from MI5 in 1956 and established a reputation as a broadcaster, before succumbing to pneumonia in January 1968.

KNOBLOCK, EDWARD. Born in New York in 1874, Edward Knoblock was educated at Harvard. His first play was Faun (1911), and he coauthored Milestones (1912) with Arnold Bennett. Fluent in French, he lived in both Paris, where he had an apartment overlooking the garden of the Palais-Royal, and rooms in Albany.

Early in 1916 he was introduced to the War Office’s military intelligence branch by Somerset Maugham and took over Maugham’s duties in Switzerland, working for Sir John Wallinger. In the autumn he transferred to the Mediterranean theater, where he served with Compton Mackenzie. Little is known about his clandestine work in Switzerland, although Mackenzie gave an entertaining account of Knoblock’s recruitment by him into the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in October 1916, apparently at a party. Admiral Mansfield Smith-Cumming, whom Knoblock referred to as “the skipper,” apparently promised him a naval commission in the naval reserve, but it was soon discovered that as an American citizen he was ineligible. Instead, the Chief suggested a commission in the Royal Naval Air Service but no sooner had the playwright bought the uniform before he was obliged to accept a General Service commission and change his naval uniform for the khaki and green tabs of an intelligence officer. Mackenzie recalled:

As we were due to leave England on November 3rd and as Knoblock’s commission could not possibly be gazetted until long after that, we decided it would be safest to take all three uniforms out to Greece, and possibly dispose out there of the superfluous equipment when it was settled which service he was to join. In his enthusiasm he even bought two swords, a naval and a military one.

Mackenzie and Knoblock shared the train journey to Greece, taking the boat train to Paris and crossing the Italian frontier at Modane. After a couple of days rest in Rome, they continued to Taranto. Mackenzie went ahead to Piraeus, in the role of a king’s messenger, on a French destroyer while Knoblock waited for a French dispatch boat, the Fauvette, which took him to Corfu and then Patras. Upon his arrival in Greece, Knoblock was installed at the British Legation’s annex where SIS operated under Port Control cover. Soon afterward Athens was turned into a battleground as the supporters of Venizelos made a vain attempt to dethrone the king and seize power.

After this exciting episode, Knoblock, acting as Mackenzie’s deputy, moved to the island of Syra, which had recently been occupied by the Turks. In Aegean Memories, Compton Mackenzie recalled that “even the indefatigable Knoblock was wilting under the strain of coding and decoding, for the Secret Service cipher was a diabolical device to torment the mind of man.” During their four months on Syra, broken only by Knoblock’s occasional visits to Salonika and Athens, the two novelists collaborated on a play, All’s Fair. By July 1917 Knoblock was struck down by dysentery and, when his weight dropped to 98 pounds, he was sent home.

After two months sick leave, Knoblock returned to work for Smith-Cumming, and until May 1918 was accommodated in an office next to that occupied by singer Kennerley Rumford. Thereafter he spent a greater part of his time in France, either carrying dispatches between Paris and London or working from an SIS outstation known as “the Nunnery,” somewhere in the French Alps. He was there when the Armistice was declared and later was assigned the task of supervising the return of British PoWs from Germany. He represented his Chief at the French victory parade at Strasbourg and attended the Paris Peace Conference on behalf of SIS. Knoblock’s return to civilian life took place in January 1919, but not before he had expressed a wish to stay in SIS permanently. As he told Smith-Cumming, “One doesn’t have to think. You do the thinking for us. We just obey orders. That’s the beauty of the service. I almost wish I could remain in it for the rest of my life.” Knoblock died in July 1945, six years after the publication of his autobiography, Round the Room.

KNOX, DILLWYN. A classicist from King’s College, Cambridge, Dilly Knox joined Room 40 as a cryptographer in 1915 and during World War I helped solve the German Admiralstab’s three-letter Flag code. After the war he remained on the staff of the Government Code and Cipher School and in 1940 solved the Abwehr’s Enigma key, known thereafter as ISK. He was working on Soviet one-time pads when he died in February 1943.

KORDA, SIR ALEXANDER. A movie producer and head of London Films, Sir Alexander Korda supplied commercial cover for Secret Intelligence Service personnel working for Claude Dansey’s Z Organisation.

KRASIN, LEONID. The head of the Soviet Trade Delegation and the commissar for foreign trade, Leonid Krasin was also the Soviet government’s official envoy to the United Kingdom after the Revolution and was kept under surveillance by MI5. He arrived in London in May 1920 and undertook not to interfere in British domestic politics, but his secretary Nikolai Klishko was spotted meeting British revolutionaries almost immediately. Krasin’s cables to Moscow were intercepted and read by the Government Code and Cipher School, which revealed that the Soviets were providing a large financial subsidy for the Daily Herald, in breach of Krasin’s promise.

KREIPE, GENERAL KARL-HEINRICH. Recently arrived in Crete from the Russian front, Major General Kreipe was abducted in a Special Operations Executive (SOE) operation undertaken in 1944 by Patrick Leigh Fermor and another inveterate traveler, W. Stanley Moss. Their original target had been General Muller, commander of the 22nd Sevastopol (Bremen) Division, but by the time the SOE team had flown separately from Tocra and assembled in early April, Muller had been replaced by Kreipe of the 22nd Panzer Division.

Despite his unpopularity among his brother officers, Kreipe was promoted to the rank of lieutenant general the day after his capture, and he spent the rest of the war in PoW camps in Sheffield and Canada before being repatriated to Hannover in 1947. The 13th child of a pastor, Kreipe resented the teasing he received from his fellow prisoners in England and was pleased to be sent to Canada. He also suffered from diabetes, and twice had been treated at Hospital Camp 99 at Shugborough Park in Staffordshire. Kreipe was tormented by his experience, and when Moss’s Ill Met by Moonlight was published, he sued successfully in Germany to prevent a German edition on the grounds that it was defamatory to assert that he had given his word of honor to his captors not to attempt to escape. He also obtained a similar injunction to stop a film based on the book from being distributed in Germany, insisting that Moss’s account contained many errors, not the least of which was the omission of the beating he had received with a rifle-butt on his capture.

Kreipe’s complaint was only partly justified, as the errors in the movie were of no great significance and largely reflected well on him. For example, he was given an impressive fluency in English, for obvious dramatic reasons in the film, and was portrayed as having deliberately left a trail of his possessions, including his medal, badges, and cap, as clues to help the German hunt for his captors. The film version also opened with an entirely fictional scene in which two German Feldgendarmerie military policemen were shot dead while attempting to examine Leigh Fermor’s papers as he reclined in a dentist’s chair, as explanation for the source of the enemy uniforms used in the abduction.

Apart from demonstrating that SOE was capable of pulling off quite impressive coups in enemy-occupied territory, the operation achieved little else, for Kreipe had not participated in any of the atrocities that so characterized the German occupation. On this occasion SOE went to considerable lengths to inform the German garrison, through the medium of leaflets dropped from aircraft, that there had not been any local participation in the abduction. However, this did not prevent the Germans from persisting with their policy of reprisals, taking 10 Cretan lives for each German soldier lost. Every house in Anoyia was dynamited and dive-bombed in August 1944, and the villages of Lokhria, Saktouria, Magarikari, and Kamares were also razed to the ground in retaliation for British-inspired operations. Altogether, several thousand Cretans were massacred as a result of Axis reprisals for Allied raids.

KREMER, SIMON. Working under diplomatic cover at the Soviet embassy in London in 1940, as secretary to the military attaché, Simon Kremer was actually the GRU’s rezident, identified in February 1940 by defector Walter Krivitsky. Kremer put Klaus Fuchs in contact with Ursula Beurton (codenamed SONIA) and appeared in the VENONA traffic as BARCH and later ALEXANDER. Study of the GRU VENONA messages showed Kremer was supervising the spy ring known as the X Group in 1940 and running André Labarthe (codenamed JEROME).

KREUGER. OTTO. Codenamed TR-16 by the Secret Intelligence Service, Otto Kreuger was a German marine engineer from Godesberg who had made the mistake of striking a brother officer who happened to be related to the kaiser. Kreuger was court-martialed, and in November 1914, when he offered his services to Richard Tinsley at the British legation in The Hague, was still embittered. Aged 39, Kreuger proved to be an exceptional agent, with access to all the German naval bases, Zeppelin sheds, and construction yards and with the professional skill to know precisely what he was looking at. He possessed a phenomenal memory and made regular trips to Holland to report to Tinsley without the necessity of carrying any notes over the frontier. He was also sufficiently adept to escape any suspicion, even being elected a director of the Federation of German Industries, until 1939 when he was finally trapped by the Gestapo and beheaded.

KRIVITSKY, WALTER. Born Samuel Ginsberg in Galicia, Walter Krivitsky was known in The Hague, where he ran an art gallery on the fashionable Celebestraat, as the wealthy antiquarian bookseller “Dr. Martin Leissner.” In fact he was the head of Soviet military intelligence for Western Europe and ran a large network of illegals that stretched right across the Continent. At the end of September 1937 he was ordered back to Moscow but, fearing that he was intended to become a victim of Stalin’s purges like his friend Ignace Reiss, he fled to Paris, where he sought political asylum. The French Sureté extracted enough information from him to fill 80 volumes but he was unimpressed by their protection. He moved to the United States, where he gave interviews to the Saturday Evening Post and testified before the Dies Committee, and then to Canada. It was not until September 1939 that the British ambassador in Washington, D.C., Lord Lothian, was told by journalist Isaac Don Levine that Krivitsky could implicate a spy in the British Foreign Office.

The spy was identified as a cipher clerk, Captain John King, who was arrested, convicted of espionage, and sentenced to a long term of imprisonment. Impressed by Krivitsky’s evidence, MI5 brought him across the Atlantic to be interviewed by Jane Sissmore in London and then returned him to Canada, where he was the subject of two assassination attempts. His book, In Stalin’s Secret Service, was published in 1940 and was the subject of much criticism from his friend Elisabeth Poretsky who asserted:

Krivitsky in his ghostwritten book took credit for operations he had nothing to do with. Unable to write in English, he had to rely on ghost-writers, and he knew nothing of the American press. Whoever wrote his book cared only for one thing: to make it as sensational as possible. I am sure he simply gave the writers the information and then looked on, as he had always done, while they distorted it. The errors and exaggerations I have pointed out are only the most obvious ones; the omissions from the book are almost as serious as the distortions. It did create a sensation—a sinister one, in Europe, and for me.

Krivitsky was eventually found shot dead in his locked Washington, D.C., hotel room in February 1941—apparently the victim of suicide, although many believe that, despite the note he left, he finally had been cornered by one of the assassination squads that had been sent to Canada to liquidate him. Whether self-inflicted or otherwise, Krivitsky had inflicted massive damage on the GRU and was known to have been a priority target. In addition to tipping off MI5 to Captain King’s espionage, he revealed to the French Sureté and the Federal Bureau of Investigation the extent of the Soviet networks in Europe and America.

KROTKOV, YURI. A well-known Soviet playwright and the author of the anti-American play John: Soldier of Peace, based on the life of Paul Robeson, Yuri Krotkov’s name first became known when he was implicated in a scheme masterminded by the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate to discredit the French ambassador in Moscow, Maurice Dejean. Dejean and his wife had been targeted for a honeytrap and as soon as Krotkov revealed the plot, to MI5 interrogators in September 1963, the diplomat was recalled to Paris.

A Georgian by birth, Krotkov’s parents were an actress and an artist. After university in Tbilisi, Krotkov moved to Moscow in 1938 and joined the Literary Foundation of the Union of Soviet Writers. He served in the Red Army during the war and as a TASS correspondent. In 1959, as a favored intellectual, he made a journey by car across Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. In 1962 he visited Japan and India, and the following year defected in London while on an approved visit, accompanied by the usual contingent of KGB escorts. He arrived on 4 September and while staying at a hotel in Bayswater he declared his decision not to return home to an English acquaintance, who in turn contacted the Security Service. MI5 kept him under discreet surveillance and ensured his plan to elude the KGB went off unhindered.

After his defection in London, Krotkov continued to write and in 1967 published The Angry Exile, a critique of postwar social conditions in Moscow. Two years later he gave evidence to the U.S. Senate Committee on Judiciary under the name “George Karlin” and in 1979 published Red Monarch, a semisatirical biography of Stalin. Krotkov was allowed to settle in the United States but was never accepted as an authentic defector, and he eventually died in Spain.

KUCZYNSKI, JURGEN. A lifelong Communist, Professor Jurgen Kuczynski came to Britain, where his father was an Oxford academic, as a refugee before World War II. He was approached by Klaus Fuchs in 1941 to put him in touch with Soviet intelligence. This he had done by visiting the Soviet embassy and seeing Simon Kremer, ostensibly a secretary but actually the GRU’s London rezident . A leading member of the German anti-Nazi expatriate community in England, Kuczynski had been employed during the war by the U.S. Army Air Force Bombing Survey. Immediately after the war he performed the same service for Fuchs, who had returned to London from Los Alamos, and then settled in East Berlin. It was not until some years later that he learned the GRU contact assigned to handle Fuchs in 1941 had been his sister, Ursula Beurton, although he was not allowed to mention the fact in his Memoirs, published in 1983.

KÜHLENTHAL, KARL-ERICH. An Abwehr officer based in Madrid throughout the war, Karl-Erich Kühlenthal was responsible for the recruitment of the double agent Juan Pujol, known to him as ARABEL but codenamed GARBO by MI5. Kühlenthal never suspected he had been duped and at the end of the war he remained in Spain. When GARBO visited him in 1945 he reported that neither Kühlenthal nor his dispirited chief, Fritz Knappe-Ratey, represented any threat, and their main concern, so GARBO reported, was simply self-preservation in an increasingly hostile country that previously had treated them as honored guests. Now Kühlenthal was in isolation, under police surveillance, at his home in Avila, while Knappe-Ratey was under house arrest in Caldas, apparently as a result of pressure exerted on the Spanish authorities by the British. Kühlenthal remained in Spain until his death in 1975.

KURTZ, HARALD. When Harald Kurtz arrived in Britain in 1936, the 23-year-old was given accommodation by a Quaker agency dedicated to helping refugees. The same organization also had close links to MI5, which occasionally recruited newly arrived immigrants for its own purposes. Kurtz was one of those who volunteered to help the Security Service, and he was run as an informer by Max Knight, a veteran member of the counterespionage division.

Born in Stuttgart and educated in Switzerland and at Kurt Hahn’s famous Odenwald School, Kurtz had a distant connection to Queen Mary, which he mentioned at every opportunity. When he first arrived, he was given a job at the BBC as a translator, but in his spare time he worked for Knight. Under normal circumstances Kurtz’s clandestine career would have remained a closely guarded secret, buried deep in the recesses of MI5’s archives, but the agent’s overzealous approach to his work led to his public exposure and litigation that reached the House of Lords and virtually ruined Knight as MI5’s agent-runner.

Kurtz’s assignment was to work as a stool pigeon, posing as a Nazi in civilian internment camps to identify party members, but he operated independently on the outside, pretending to be a Fascist sympathizer with the intention of entrapping others who expressed pro-Nazi views. Once reported to MI5, the compromised suspect invariably became the subject of a detention order made under the Emergency Regulations. However, in the case of Benjamin Greene, Kurtz, who was paid by Knight on the basis of each individual he denounced, overreached himself. Greene, a pacifist member of the famous Berkhamsted family and a first cousin of Graham Greene, was arrested in May 1940 after an encounter with Kurtz, but instead of meekly submitting to imprisonment at Brixton, his brother employed the City solicitor Oswald Hickson to discover the grounds of his internment. After a lengthy investigation, Hickson traced Kurtz and persuaded him to admit that he had fabricated a damaging account of an entirely innocent meeting with Greene at which the latter, a deeply religious Quaker and pacifist, had generously offered his family company’s resources to help the refugee reestablish contact with relatives in South America. When Kurtz had reported the episode to Knight, he had put the most damaging construction on it, falsely claiming that Greene had expressed a willingness to put the refugee in touch with a Nazi spy ring in Brazil.

Once Greene’s solicitors had obtained a signed statement from Kurtz, in which he admitted having framed Greene for a bonus payment from Knight, habeas corpus proceedings were initiated in the High Court. At first the Home Office resisted the application, but Greene was released when he sued for wrongful arrest and the matter was raised in the House of Lords in January 1942, naming Kurtz as the most mercenary of agents provocateur. Perhaps not entirely by coincidence, Graham Greene gave the name “Kurtz” to a villainous character in his 1950 thriller, The Third Man.

Following his public humiliation, Kurtz was employed as an interpreter at the Nuremberg trials, and he later moved to Oxford, where he eked out a living as an occasional contributor to History Today and writing the biographies Wilhelm II and The Empress Eugenie in 1964. A year later he translated The Unpublished Correspondence of Madame de Staël and the Duke of Wellington, published by Cassell. As a historian, he was highly regarded and counted Hugh Trevor Roper, then Regius professor of history at Oxford, among his friends before he lapsed into alcoholism and experienced problems over allegations that he had purloined documents. A homosexual, his career as a teacher at a school in Kent ended abruptly, although he later was employed to give weekly history lectures at Eton. Only a handful of friends attended his funeral in Oxford in 1972, among them Lady Pakenham, who admired his scholarship, but not his brother who had disapproved of his decision to move to Britain.

KUZICHKIN, VLADIMIR. A member of the KGB’s elite Illegals Directorate, Vladimir Kuzichkin spent five years at Moscow University studying Iran, followed by the usual two years at the First Chief Directorate’s Red Banner Institute, before he was posted to the Soviet Consulate in Tehran in the summer of 1977 under diplomatic cover as a Line N officer specializing in the handling illegals. Fluent in Farsi and English, he ran a small network of KGB illegals, but in September 1981 his two best agents, a husband and wife team operating on West German passports, were arrested in Switzerland. Not long afterward, in May 1982, Kuzichkin realized that an undeveloped roll of film, on which secret documents were routinely stored in the referentura, had disappeared while in his care.

Faced with the extreme penalties for the loss of classified documents, Kuzichkin made contact with the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and was exfiltrated early in June 1982. His motives only seem to have become clear after he had been resettled in London for, as he admitted:

I had never been pro-Western. I always thought that the West had its own interests, and that it needed a strong Russia like a hole in the head, whether it was a communist Russia or a free Russia. I believed that we, the Russians, had to solve our own problems, and that changes in the Soviet structure were possible only from within, and absolutely not from outside. Interference from outside would always unite the people and only strengthen the regime.

As well as identifying the complete KGB and GRU order of battle in Iran and the identities of those illegals he had handled personally, Kuzichkin was to give SIS an authoritative account of the KGB’s role in supporting the Tudeh party, then the subject of considerable repression by the Ayatollah’s regime. Kuzichkin was resettled in London, where he now lives with a new wife. His autobiography, Inside the KGB, was published in 1990.

KUZNETSOV, PAVEL. A member of the KGB London rezidentura in April 1952, working under third secretary diplomatic cover, Pavel Kuznetsov was spotted by an off-duty MI5 watcher meeting William Marshall at a park in Kingston-upon-Thames. The result of this accidental sighting was surveillance on Marshall, who was employed by the Diplomatic Wireless Service. Kuznetsov was expelled, but he was later identified as a diplomat posted to Belgrade and in 1972 was promoted to ambassador in Indonesia.

–L–

LABARTHE, ANDRÉ. The editor of France Libre and a prominent anti-Gaullist in London during World War II, André Labarthe was a Soviet GRU spy identified in VENONA as JEROME. Before the war, Labarthe had been associated with a Soviet network in London headed by Ernest Weiss, and references to his activities as a spy were found in the papers seized by the Gestapo at the home of Henri Robinson in December 1942. Labarthe was challenged by the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire in 1965 in Paris and made a confession. However, no action was taken against him because of his political connections, and he died five years later, in 1970, of a heart attack.

LANCASTER, DONALD. During World War II, Donald Lancaster commanded a motor torpedo boat squadron in the Adriatic, running agents across from Italy to Yugoslavia. In 1944 he sank the cruiser Dalmacija, the 3-inch-gun cruiser (formerly the German Niobe, refitted in 1926 as the pride of the Yugoslav fleet before being taken over again by the Germans), and he was decorated with the Distinguished Service Cross.

After the war Lancaster joined the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and operated in the Far East, serving in Saigon between 1950 and 1954 under diplomatic cover. His task was to develop contacts among the Vietnamese nationalists, and he became especially close to Ngo Dinh Nhu, the future president’s younger brother and the chief of Vietnam’s many security agencies. Thereafter, in 1955 Lancaster officially retired from the diplomatic service to become Prince Norodom Sihanouk’s private secretary, but in reality he continued to work for SIS and proved to be an exceptionally valuable source, accompanying Sihanouk to China twice. Despite his considerable contribution, Lancaster received no recognition or compensation from Maurice Oldfield, and he died in somewhat reduced circumstances in France in 1990.

Lancaster’s book, The Emancipation of Indo-China, was published in 1961 under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and is a comprehensive history of the region from the arrival of the first Europeans to the beginning of the American conflict.

LANDAU, HENRY. Born in South Africa of Anglo-Dutch parentage, Henry Landau graduated from Cambridge shortly before the outbreak of World War I. He volunteered for military service and was commissioned in the Royal Field Artillery, but in 1916 he received a summons to Admiral Mansfield Smith-Cumming’s headquarters in Whitehall Court. Fluent in German, Dutch, and French, Landau was instructed to rebuild the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) train-watching service in Belgium, which monitored the enemy’s troop movements right across the Western Front. The ring operated behind the German lines and was codenamed WHITE LADY.

After the war, following the success of his train-watching activities, Landau moved to the United States, where he was out of reach of the British courts. No action was taken against All’s Fair (1934), but the government apparently threatened to place a ban on the distribution of the sequel, Secrets of the White Lady (1935). In it, he admitted that he had “not attempted to disguise the names of Allied agents. My friends in Belgium and France assure me that if damage could be done by divulging them, it was done years ago when a complete list of agents’ names was published in the various decoration lists.” Landau’s other books were The Enemy Within and Spreading the Spy Net, both published in 1937, which dealt in some detail with his experiences in SIS and can today be recognized as the first in a genre. SIS’s embarrassment at the publication of Secrets of the White Lady was enhanced considerably by the author’s assurance that the documents quoted in the text “have been taken from secret service records which have hitherto been unavailable for publication.”

LANDER, SIR STEPHEN. Director-general of the Security Service from 1996 to 2001, Stephen Lander was educated at Bishops Stortford College, read history at Queen’s College, Cambridge, and joined the Security Service in 1975, having spent three years at the Institute of Historical Research at London University. After his retirement, Lander was appointed to the Board of Customs and Excise and made chairman of the Law Society’s Complaints Committee. In 2004 he became director of its Serious and Organised Crime Agency.

LANGLEY, J. M. The son of a high court judge, Jimmy Langley was a captain in the Coldstream Guards when he was badly wounded at Calais. Late in 1940, having lost his left arm, he was helped to escape from a hospital for prisoners of war in Lille and was escorted to Paris. Later he crossed into the unoccupied zone and, declared unfit for future military service, he was repatriated by the Vichy authorities.

Back in England, Langley was recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service to organize a sophisticated network of escape routes, managed by paid guides—a task that in early 1941 must have seemed impossible. However, Donald Darling had already made a start from Lisbon, and an embryonic line of volunteers had been established from Belgium down to the Pyrenees. Posing as an architect assessing repairs needed to British diplomatic premises, Langley made an unsuccessful tour of MI9’s assets in Lisbon and Madrid and swiftly fell foul of Sam Hoare.

By September 1943 Langley had helped create a relatively sophisticated organization, with agents and couriers running escape lines the length of occupied France, moving hundreds of evaders over the Pyrenees into Spain. At this point Langley passed the command of MI9 to Airey Neave and concentrated on the development of a special intelligence school where Allied personnel were trained in escape techniques in anticipation of the invasion. The course included simulated enemy interrogations and an introduction to some of the ingenious equipment that had been concealed in ostensibly ordinary clothing for use in escapes.

Soon after D-Day, Langley went to France to supervise the mobile interrogation teams created to screen returning Allied PoWs, and he was in Paris as it was liberated. As the 21st Army Group moved through Belgium and Holland, specialist MI9 groups made contact with groups of evaders and returned them to their units. At the end of the war, “Intelligence School 9” had established itself in Bad Salzuffen; it was finally disbanded in July 1945 when Langley was appointed town major of Antwerp.

Langley was demobilized in 1946 and, although offered a permanent post in the Secret Intelligence Service, preferred to join Fisons to work on long-term surveys into raw materials. He attended the Harvard Business School in 1954, and in 1967 opened a bookshop. He later moved to Ipswich, where he took over another bookshop, and died there in April 1983, having collaborated with Professor M. R. D. Foot on a history of MI9 that was published in 1979.

LAWRENCE, T. E. Born in Tremadoc in North Wales in 1888, “Lawrence of Arabia” won an exhibition to Jesus College, Oxford, and developed a deep love of literature and architecture and wrote a modern history there on the Crusades. Awarded a scholarship by Magdalen College, he spent four years traveling in Palestine and Syria and in 1914 was granted a commission in the Geographical Section of the War Office. Lawrence was posted to Cairo and spent two years in the Arab Bureau, the regional British intelligence agency, before accompanying (Sir) Ronald Storrs to Jidda to negotiate with the grand sharif of Mecca. The sharif’s third son, Faisal, was to become Lawrence’s lifelong friend, and he helped the Arab tribes unite. Lawrence led an Arab force to seize the Turkish-garrisoned town of Aqaba in August 1917 and in October 1918 defeated the Turkish 4th Army and occupied Damascus. His unorthodox tactics, which included train-wrecking on a massive scale, appealed to the Arabs and outmaneuvered the enemy. The Turks put a large price on his head, but when he was briefly captured at Deraa, they failed to recognize him, thus allowing him to escape after a traumatic beating.

After the war, Lawrence returned to Oxford as a research fellow at All Souls but was persuaded in 1921 by Winston Churchill to join the Colonial Office as an adviser on Arab affairs. However, disillusioned with government policy and dismayed by the publicity attracted by the success of his war memoirs, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, he changed his name to J. H. Ross and joined the ranks of the Royal Air Force. In 1926 he was posted to the northwest frontier of India but was withdrawn when the Soviets, suspicious of the presence of such a notorious figure, complained to the British government. The remainder of his military service was spent testing high-powered rescue craft on the Solent. Four months after his retirement in February 1935, at the age of 46, he was killed in a motorcycle accident.

LE CARRÉ, JOHN. See CORNWELL, DAVID.

LECONFIELD HOUSE. The postwar headquarters of the Security Service, Leconfield House is located on the corner of Curzon Street and South Audley Street. From 1945 it accommodated the office of the director-general, the Registry, and the transcription center. It was too small to house the entire organization, so MI5 spread into numerous other buildings in Mayfair, and in 1974 moved to a larger office block at 140 Gower Street.

LEE, RUSSELL. Born in November 1912 and an amateur license holder from Liverpool at the outbreak of World War II, Russell Lee was recruited into the Radio Security Service and was appointed to supervise the broadcasts of TATE. After the war he remained in MI5 and was appointed personal assistant to Director-General Sir Percy Sillitoe. Lee also ghostwrote Sillitoe’s memoirs, Cloak without Dagger . He died in 1992.

LEGGETT, GEORGE. George Leggett began to research the Soviet intelligence and security apparatus when he joined MI5 during World War II. He retired in 1971 having accumulated a mass of knowledge about the subject. Leggett published The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police in 1981, the fruit of many years of academic research. Though drawn entirely from unclassified sources, it nevertheless provides a fascinating and authoritative insight into British perceptions and, in particular, Secret Intelligence Service operations in the Soviet Union, including those conducted by Sidney Reilly and George Hill. Leggett relied upon many academic sources for his study of the Cheka, Feliks Dzerzhinsky’s secret police, and he has acknowledged the help he received from Ray Rocca, a senior member of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Counterintelligence Staff, and Edward Ellis Smith, another CIA professional who had been the first chief of station in Moscow. Despite his swift departure from the CIA following an encounter with Soviet blackmailers seeking to exploit an affair he had conducted with his attractive Soviet housekeeper, Smith was later to compile a bibliography of Soviet intelligence literature, and it was his impressive card index of titles that Leggett drew upon. Leggett, who is married with a son, still lives in London and is researching a biography of Dzerzhinsky.

LEIGH FERMOR, SIR PATRICK. A well-known travel writer, Paddy Leigh Fermor wandered across Europe during the four years before World War II as an alternative to going to university, and in 1940 he joined the Irish Guards and was transferred to the short-lived British Military Mission to Greece. In 1943 he joined the Greek Section of Special Operations Executive (SOE) and participated in one of the most daring operations of the war.

The original idea, to abduct a senior German officer in Crete, had been dreamed up by Leigh Fermor and W. Stanley Moss, and their target was General Muller, the hated commander of the 22nd Sevastopol (Bremen) Division. However, by the time their team had assembled, having flown separately from Tocra, near Benghazi, in April 1944, Muller had been replaced by Major General Karl-Heinrich Kreipe of the 22nd Panzer Division, a veteran of Verdun in poor health who had arrived five weeks earlier to convalesce, following two years on the Russian front. The original plan was to parachute onto the Katharo Plateau to an SOE reception committee headed by Sandy Rendel, formerly the Times’s diplomatic correspondent, but after Leigh Fermor had jumped, the plane flew into cloud and Moss and the two Cretans accompanying them were unable to follow and they returned to Brindisi. Over the next two months they made a further seven attempts to reach the drop zone, but in the end they were delivered by sea, at Soutsouko.

Despite opposition to the SOE plan from ELAS, the Greek Communist guerrilla movement, which anticipated heavy reprisals taken against the civilian population, Leigh Fermor and Moss succeeded in using a traffic signal to stop the general’s unescorted Opel staff car at a road junction outside Heraklion on the night of 26 April, en route from the officers mess in Ano Arkhanais to his residence, the Villa Ariadne in Knossos. Dressed as German Feldgendarmerie military policemen, the two SOE officers silenced the driver with a cosh and then, having bundled the general onto the back seat, handcuffed to a pair of Cretan partisans, drove through the center of Heraklion, with Leigh Fermor sitting in the front seat wearing the general’s cap, and past no less than 22 traffic controls and roadblocks, into the mountains where they evaded German search parties for the next three weeks. According to Dilys Powell, who interviewed the two Cretans that sat on the general, Micky and Elias Athanasakis, his driver was killed by other guerrillas who had been at the road junction and later melted away into the night.

In the abandoned car they left a British greatcoat and a commando beret, and a letter declaring that only British personnel had participated in the abduction. This was intended to prevent reprisals, but the debate continues about whether the ruse was successful. The hated Muller was recalled to Crete and was responsible for many atrocities, for which he was hanged in Athens in December 1945. On 15 May, having endured the company of Kreipe, with whom they communicated in schoolboy French and Latin, the only languages they had in common, they boarded a British motor launch and took their prisoner to Mersa Matruh.

When the operation was recounted in Ill Met by Moonlight, a movie version of Moss’s book, there was but a single mention of hostages being taken from villages around Heraklion in reprisal to the abduction, a fact also skated over in Moss’s book, which suggested that the hostages had been taken much later and that the principal atrocities, such as the complete destruction of whole villages, including Lokhria, Sakiouria, Magarikari, and Kamares, had been in retaliation for quite separate incidences of arms smuggling. Later, in 1944, every house in Anoyia was dynamited, and the ruins then dive-bombed by the Luftwaffe, and the connection between the two events—Kreipe’s abduction and the execution of hostages—remains highly controversial on the island to this day. Obviously these were topics that neither Moss nor the filmmakers wished to pursue, but they were certainly known to Xan Fielding, the production’s technical adviser, not least because his SOE colleague Bickham Sweet-Escott, in his 1965 memoirs Baker Street Irregular, claimed that 200 Cretans had been shot as a direct consequence of the escapade.

After the war Leigh Fermor settled in Greece and established a reputation as a leading travel writer. He was knighted in 2004, for encouraging Anglo-Hellenic relations, having previously declined a similar honor for his contribution to literature.

LETTER INTERCEPTION UNIT (LIU). Always an essential weapon for the Security Service, the mail intercept warrant issued by the home secretary has enabled MI5 to monitor the correspondence of suspects through the service provided by the LIU of the General Post Office (GPO) based at Mount Pleasant. Monitoring of mail addressed to Karl Gustav Ernst in 1913 led to the detention of more than 21 other German spies on the first day of hostilities in August 1914.

During World War I this work was undertaken initially at Salisbury House, and then by teams of skilled men and women at MI5’s London headquarters overlooking Trafalgar Square. After the war a specialist department was established at St. Martin-le-Grand, the GPO’s main sorting office in the City of London.

LIDDELL, CECIL. Having won a Military Cross in World War I, like both his brothers David and Guy, Cecil Liddell went into advertising but in 1939 was recruited into the Security Service by his brother, Guy Liddell, to head the Irish Section, B1(h), which he ran unaided until May 1940 when he was joined by a barrister, (Sir) John Stephenson. At the end of hostilities Liddell wrote an account of his section’s wartime work, which was declassified and released to the Public Record Office in 1999. As well as liaising with Colonel Liam Archer of Ireland’s intelligence service, G-2, Liddell also worked closely with his Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) counterpart, Jane Archer; the passport control officer in Dublin, Captain Collinson; and the SIS representative in Belfast, Victor Caroe.

LIDDELL, GUY. Decorated with the Military Cross during World War I, Captain Guy Liddell joined Scotland Yard as a civilian counterintelligence officer in 1919 and was transferred to MI5 in 1932. In 1940 he succeeded Jasper Harker as director, B Division, and in 1945 was appointed deputy director-general, a post he held until 1953 when he retired to become security adviser to the Atomic Energy Authority. He died in 1958.

Before World War II Liddell had visited Ottawa and Washington, D.C., to establish liaison channels, and he is widely regarded as being the doyen of British counterintelligence. The latter part of his career was clouded by his friendship with Guy Burgess and his appointment in 1940 of Anthony Blunt as his personal assistant. In 2001 his remarkable wartime diaries, codenamed WALLFLOWER, were declassified and released to the Public Record Office. See also LIDDELL, CECIL.

THE LINK. A secretive, pro-Nazi club formed in 1937 and chaired by Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, the Link was the subject of intensive MI5 surveillance and penetration in 1940. It boasted 35 branches and a membership of 4,329 and published the Anglo-German Review to improve relations with the Nazis. The organization was dissolved the day after war was declared in September 1939.

LISZT. NKVD code name for Lord Hankey’s secretary John Cairncross. LISZT is attributed with passing a copy of the Maud Committee report to Vladimir Barkovsky in September 1940, which was transmitted to Moscow by the London rezident, Anatoli Gorsky.

When the full text of LISZT’s message was first declassified and released in Moscow, General Pavel Sudoplatov (or his coauthor Jerry Schechter) made a fundamental mistake that was to cause considerable confusion and lead to accusations of obfuscation. Whoever translated the document misread LISZT as LIST—and then mistakenly translated LIST with the Russian word for “leaf.” Therefore the source codenamed LISZT was transformed into LEAF, which prompted two further errors. First, there was no Soviet agent codenamed either LIST or LEAF, and secondly, LEAF was incorrectly attributed to Donald Maclean. In fact the true explanation is that Cairncross had two successive codenames, MOLIÈRE and then LISZT, and the latter was written in some of the translated original NKVD documents as LIST. Both codenames had a connection with Cairncross, for he was a Molière scholar, and Liszt was his favorite composer. Having put that complication to one side, one can see that Cairncross removed the paper from the Cabinet Office registry, and in Gorsky’s message there is a reference to Lord Hankey as BOSS, which is a further indication of the relationship between the source and his superior. Of course the SVR, as the declassification authority, was unenthusiastic about naming Cairncross as the source of this important document, especially as he had specifically denied having even seen it, so it suited them to perpetuate the myth that Maclean, who was by then dead, had been responsible, and thus the unnecessary confusion was allowed to continue.

LOEHNIS, SIR CLIVE. Director of GCHQ from 1960 to 1964, Clive Loehnis was educated at Osborne and Dartmouth and served as a midshipman during World War I and then as a signals officer. In 1935 he retired from the Royal Navy to work in the movie industry, but returned in 1938. He served in the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre during World War II, and in 1944 was a member of the group from GCHQ that accompanied the director of naval intelligence, Harry Hinsley, and Sir Edward Travis on a world tour of inspection to decide how Britain’s cryptographic resources could best be switched from Europe to fight the Japanese. In 1952, when GCHQ moved to Oakley Farm, Cheltenham, Loehnis was appointed deputy director. He retired from GCHQ in 1964 but later spent three years as deputy chairman of the Civil Service Selection Board and died in May 1992.

LOI TAK. The Russian-trained general-secretary of the Malay Communist Party (MCP), Loi Tak was also on the payroll of the local Special Branch. In December 1941, he held a secret meeting in Singapore attended by two Special Branch officers, G. E. Devonshire and Innes Tremlett, with Freddie Spencer Chapman representing Special Operations Executive. This initial contact was followed by a similar but higher-level rendezvous between John Dalley, the Special Branch’s head of counterespionage at Kuala Lumpur, Chapman, and the Communist leadership on the last day of 1941. The agreement reached on that occasion committed the British authorities to release their MCP detainees and send them to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) Special Training School, designated STS 102, in requisitioned premises at the Chunjin Chinese school near Kuala Lumpur, under the direction of Major Rosher, to train and equip MCP cadres. Ironically, among SIS’s early recruits was John Davis, a Chinese-speaking Special Branch officer who found himself dealing with the newly recruited Communists he had himself only recently had imprisoned. See also MALAYA EMERGENCY.

LONDON CAGE. Located at 6–7 Kensington Palace Gardens, the mansion known as “the London Cage” accommodated the MI19 prisoner of war reception center, where new arrivals underwent interrogation by a staff headed by Colonel Alexander Scotland before being assigned to a long-term camp or to the Air Intelligence center at Trent Park, Cockfosters.

LONDON RECEPTION CENTRE (LRC). Housed at the Royal Victoria Patriotic School on Clapham Common, South London, and staffed by MI5 personnel, the London Reception Centre screened refugees arriving in Britain from the Continent during World War II. The objective was to identify and isolate any enemy spies attempting to enter the country posing as refugees. The interrogation process could take months, and several spies were caught during cross-examination.

LONDON SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE BOARD (LSIB). Created in 1941 to coordinate and supervise signals intelligence operations, the LSIB is chaired by the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service and is attended by all the directors of intelligence.

LONG, LEO. A Cambridge graduate, Leo Long was recruited as a Soviet spy during World War II by Anthony Blunt and supplied him with information from MI14, where he was an expert on the German order of battle, using information derived from ULTRA. After the war, Long was transferred to the Intelligence Division of the British Control Commission for Germany and made an unsuccessful attempt to join MI5. Later he worked for a film company in London as an administrator and was named by Blunt as one of his sources to MI5 in 1964. Assured that he would not be prosecuted, Long made a full confession. He was not publicly exposed as a Soviet mole until 1981.

LONSDALE, GORDON. See ELWELL, CHARLES; HOUGHTON, HARRY; PENKOVSKY, OLEG.

LYALIN, OLEG. Born in Stavropol in June 1937, Oleg Lyalin joined the KGB in the 1950s. His first overseas assignment was to London, where he was posted under Soviet Trade Delegation cover. Details of his career, in Department V, were to become known following his entrapment with his secretary, Irina Teplyakova, in 1971. As well as running several agents, among them Sirioj Abdoolcader, Lyalin was responsible for planning sabotage contingency plans in the event of hostilities with Britain. He surveyed the early-warning radar base at Fylingdales in Yorkshire and prepared a plan to flood the London Underground.

Recruited by a joint MI5-Secret Intelligence Service counterintelligence unit headed by Tony Brooks, Lyalin supplied information from inside the London rezidentura until he was arrested for drunk driving in the Tottenham Court Road and forced to contact MI5. As a result of Lyalin’s defection, Operation FOOT was advanced and 105 Soviet intelligence officers were either expelled or refused reentry to the United Kingdom; Lyalin’s former colleagues in Montreal, Paris, Bonn, and Mexico were also hurriedly withdrawn. Lasting damage was inflicted on the KGB’s First Chief Directorate.

After his defection Lyalin was resettled in the north of England and married Teplyakova. He died at home, after a long illness, in February 1995.

LYALL, ARCHIE. Archie Lyall was a traveler, expert linguist, and the author of The Languages of Europe when he was recruited into Section D in 1938. Lyall’s prewar books include the novel Envoy Extraordinary, The Balkan Road, and It Isn’t Done, and he enjoyed an unparalleled reputation as a bon viveur and raconteur quite apart from his skills as a professional intelligence officer who remained in the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) long after the war. David Walker, a fellow recruit in Section D who worked alongside him in prewar Belgrade recalls him as an “admirable character” who “carried a revolver in case of accidents and a monocle in case of serious trouble.” Like many others in Section D, Lyall was absorbed into Special Operations Executive and he was for a time based in the Yugoslav Section in Bari. He married a Yugoslav, but the relationship was short lived and he returned to SIS.

During the mole-hunting era of the late 1960s, he came under suspicion as a Soviet sympathizer and a possible traitor. Years after his death in 1964 the counterintelligence ferrets pursued several clues that suggested he might have betrayed information to the KGB. One item of purely circumstantial evidence were his remarks, published in 1933, regarding the Soviet system. In that year he visited Moscow with a group of committed Communists in order, as he put it, to experience the pilgrimage-like effect of religious zealots reaching their particular Mecca. The result was Russian Roundabout: A Non-Political Journey, in which can be found some revealing observations about the attraction of Leninism.

One of those who investigated Lyall was MI5’s Peter Wright, who discovered that at one point in his career Roger Hollis had been Lyall’s next-door neighbor. When confronted with this fact during an interrogation, Hollis affected not to remember having spent two years in close proximity to a fellow British intelligence officer, a matter that Wright interpreted as highly suspicious.

–M–

M. Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre code name for the technique, extensively used during World War II, of recording the conversations of prisoners through the use of concealed microphones, usually in a specially prepared cell immediately after an interrogation session.

MACARTNEY, WILFRED. In 1927 Wilfred Macartney was working in the Lloyd’s insurance market and approached a broker, George Monkland, for information about shipments of weapons to the Baltic. Monkland reported him to Admiral Reginald Hall and an MI5 investigation showed that Macartney had passed a Royal Air Force manual to a Russian employee of the All-Russia Cooperative Society. Macartney, a Communist Party of Great Britain member who had served under Compton Mackenzie during World War I, was arrested when he met a German contact, Georg Hansen. He was convicted of offenses under the Official Secrets Act and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. Upon his release, Macartney published Walls Have Mouths (1936) and Zigzag (1937) and volunteered for the International Brigade to fight during the Spanish Civil War. He became commandant of the British Battalion and was wounded in January 1937. After World War II Macartney was prosecuted a second time, for collaborating with Eddie Chapman to publish his story as an MI5 double agent. On that occasion he escaped with a fine.

MCCOLL, SIR COLIN. Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) from 1988 to 1994, Colin McColl was son of a Shropshire general practitioner and served in the army for a year between 1951 and 1952. He joined SIS in September 1956, having attended Shrewsbury School and graduated from Queen’s College, Oxford. SIS sent him to the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University to learn Siamese in October 1957.

McColl’s first posting was to Bangkok in September 1958, where he married Shirley Curtis, followed by Vientiane in April 1960. Two years later McColl was back at Broadway, then in 1966 went to Warsaw. In January 1973 he was posted to Geneva. He returned to London four years later to spend the next 10 years in senior posts at Century House, before being appointed chief by Prime Minister Thatcher in November 1988.

McColl proved highly effective and quickly established a reputation for flamboyant dress, colorful ties, unconventional attitudes, and a no-nonsense attitude. He also had an interest in music and was not unknown to whip out his flute to put visitors at their ease. While coping with the demands of the Scott Inquiry, McColl was also preoccupied with the drafting of the Intelligence Services Act, which for the first time brought SIS onto a statutory footing and created an element of parliamentary oversight for all three intelligence and security services. This was probably McColl’s most significant and lasting contribution to the service, and his retirement was delayed to allow the passage of the Bill through the Commons.

A colorful, affable raconteur, McColl was the first SIS chief to refer to his position in his Who’s Who entry as “head of MI6.” With a new family and a young son, McColl found work as a consultant to a financial group in Edinburgh and now lives in Oxfordshire.

MACDERMOTT, NIALL. A wartime MI5 officer, Niall MacDermott was educated at Rugby and read modern languages at Cambridge and then law at Oxford. While an undergraduate at Balliol, he was prosecuted, and acquitted, for the manslaughter of a fellow student. MacDermott was elected the Labour MP for Lewisham North in February 1957, but his political career came to an end when in August 1966, as minister of state in the Department of Housing and Local Government, he married his longtime Russian mistress, Ludmila Benvenuto, after divorcing his wife. She was interrogated by MI5 in February 1968 and when MacDermott was told her answers had been unsatisfactory, he retired from the House of Commons at the next general election and went to live in Geneva where he worked as secretary-general of the International Commission of Jurists from 1970 and died in February 1996.

MACDONOUGH, SIR GEORGE. Born in March 1865, George Macdonough entered the army at the age of 19, qualified as a barrister, and in 1916, with the rank of major general, was appointed director of military intelligence. After his retirement in 1925 he was elected president of the British Federation of Industry.

MACKENZIE, SIR COMPTON. In October 1932 Compton Mackenzie attempted to publish the third volume of his war memoirs, entitled Greek Memories, in which he gave a detailed account of his work for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in the Aegean in 1917. Not only did Mackenzie reveal that Mansfield Smith-Cumming was known within Whitehall by the initial “C” but he also identified dozens of officers with whom he had served during the war, including a few that had remained active in the region after the conclusion of hostilities. Mackenzie had earlier published Extremes Meet, in which he described his experiences in fictional terms, without experiencing any difficulties, but the new book was instantly the subject of a ban and a short time later the author appeared at the Old Bailey charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act. What made the prosecution’s case so awkward was the fact that Mackenzie had received informal consent to publish from Sir Eric Holt-Wilson, one of his former colleagues in the Near East who subsequently had been appointed deputy director-general of the Security Service. Holt-Wilson, whose name appeared in the text, sat in the well of the court during the proceedings and saw Mackenzie plead guilty and be fined £100.

Mackenzie was deeply resentful of his treatment and later wrote the hugely popular Water on the Brain as a wickedly entertaining satire on the Secret Service to pay the costs of his defense. It was not until 1938 that a sanitized version of Greek Memories was published with SIS’s permission, and it would be nearly 50 years before University Publications of America acquired a rare copy of the first, unexpurgated edition and released it with the offending passages highlighted in bold print. The first volume of his memoirs, Gallipoli Memories, was published without difficulty, and the sequel to Greek Memories, First Athenian Memories, was released in March 1931. Aegean Memories was published in 1940 and dedicated to brother officer and lifelong friend, Edward Knoblock.

Mackenzie had joined SIS in 1916, age 33, after he had been wounded in the Dardanelles offensive and invalided out of the Royal Marines. He was by then, of course, already a successful author, having made his name with Sinister Street. Born in West Hartlepool, he had read modern history at Magdalen College, Oxford, and then had joined the 1st Hertfordshire regiment in 1900. Among his many later literary successes were Extraordinary Women and the comedy Whisky Galore, which was based upon the true story of the wreck of a freighter loaded with a cargo of whisky during World War II. After the war, which Mackenzie spent on the island of Barra, he helped one of his former subordinates, Wilfred Macartney, publish the story of Eddie Chapman, the MI5 double agent codenamed ZIGZAG, but the enterprise failed. Macartney had been convicted of espionage on behalf of the Soviets in 1928 but this misfortune did not prevent Mackenzie from giving him his support when he attempted to publicize Chapman’s remarkable story.

Always willing to back unpopular causes—he was one of the few to back P. G. Wodehouse when the latter was in danger of being prosecuted for his unwise broadcasts for the Nazis—and married thrice, he died in Edinburgh in November 1972, 20 years after he had received his knighthood.

MACKIE, MARJORIE. Adopting the alias “Mrs. Amos,” Marjorie Mackie was one of Max Knight’s MI5 agents, whom he employed to penetrate the Right Club in 1940. She masqueraded as a Fascist sympathizer to ingratiate herself with Archibald Ramsay’s wife and Anna Wolkoff and introduced another MI5 agent, Joan Miller, to their circle of friends and political sympathizers. When Wolkoff was arrested and charged with Tyler Kent, Mackie gave evidence against them at the Old Bailey.

MCLEAN, BILLY. Born in November 1918, Billy McLean was educated at Eton and was commissioned at Sandhurst into the Royal Scots Greys in 1938, joining his regiment in Palestine the following year. He volunteered for the Somaliland Camel Corps with David Smiley, but had only reached Egypt when he was diverted to join Orde Wingate’s irregular force in Abyssinia. In February 1942 McLean was posted to the Yugoslav Section of Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Cairo, but in the absence of any missions to undertake, he obtained a transfer to MI9 and went to Istanbul to organize escape lines for Allied evaders. In April 1943 he was invited by Julian Amery to accompany him and Smiley on CONSENSUS, a mission to Albania, and they dropped into Greece and trekked across the mountains and over the frontier, escorted by Greek guerrillas. In June 1943 they made contact with the Communist partisan Enver Hoxha, and they remained in Albania until November when they were extracted by a motor torpedo boat to Bari.

In April 1944 McLean went on a second mission to Albania and remained with Hoxha until October when he was exfiltrated to Italy. He then returned to London to report directly to the Earl of Selborne and volunteered for duty in Ceylon. Disappointed by the lack of missions available from Colombo, he flew to Delhi and was assigned to Kashgar in the Himalayas, but by the time he returned to India, SOE had ceased to exist so he was attached to the viceroy’s staff. McLean finally returned to London and resigned his commission in 1947, only to be recruited by Alan Hare to participate in VALUABLE, the Secret Intelligence Service’s scheme to overthrow Hoxha in Albania. The operation failed, and in December 1954 McLean was elected the Conservative MP for Inverness at a by-election, a seat he retained until October 1964. He died in December 1986.

MACLEAN, DONALD. One of the notorious Cambridge Five, Donald Maclean, the son of a Cabinet minister, was a Soviet spy recruited by Arnold Deutsch. Maclean supplied Deutsch with documents as soon as he joined the Foreign Office in October 1935 and continued to spy until his defection to Moscow with Guy Burgess in May 1951. He knew Kim Philby slightly and briefly worked in the same office as John Cairncross. Codenamed WAISE (“orphan” in German) and later HOMER by the NKVD, Maclean was run in London, and then in Paris when he was transferred to the British embassy there in September 1938, by Kitty Harris. Maclean married Melinda Marling in Paris in June 1940 and was later transferred to the British embassy in Washington, D.C. Prolonged study of the VENONA messages sent from New York in 1944 finally incriminated Maclean in 1951 but he fled England before he could be confronted by MI5. He finally emerged at a press conference in February 1956 held jointly with Burgess in Moscow, where he remained until his death in 1983. See also MACLEAN, MELINDA.

MACLEAN, SIR FITZROY. Born in Cairo, Fitzroy Maclean was educated at Eton and in 1928 won a scholarship to read modern languages at King’s College, Cambridge, before joining the Foreign Office. In 1934 he was sent to Paris and then in 1937, at his own request, was posted to Moscow. Back in London in September 1939 he resigned from the Foreign Office to be elected the Conservative MP for Lancaster and joined the Cameron Highlanders as a private.

In August 1941, having been promoted to lieutenant, Maclean joined the newly formed Special Air Service (SAS), and in 1943 he was parachuted into Yugoslavia as the prime minister’s personal representative to the partisans. This proved to be a turning point for Special Operations Executive in Yugoslavia, in both military and political terms. Maclean instantly took to Tito, as he wrote in his autobiography, Eastern Approaches. He came with the status of Winston Churchill’s emissary, and in so doing gave de facto recognition to Tito’s ascent over Draza Mihailovic. Unlike the ramshackle headquarters run by Brigadier Armstrong, Colonel Hudson, and Major Jack, Maclean’s organization boasted an astonishing elite of the British military establishment, complete with experienced SAS officers, expert sappers and commandos, separate lines of communications, and a network of sub-missions spread across the country. Maclean’s staff had direct access to the very highest levels in Cairo and London and also included, at one moment in 1944, Evelyn Waugh and Randolph Churchill. Waugh witnessed the lack of logistical support given to the British military missions and noted that in Glina the local British liaison officer was “in a rage about the miscarriage of his supplies.... It was plain from the figures he gave us that supplies are sent haphazard as they become available without reference to the laboriously prepared tables of priority.”

After the Liberation, Maclean took up residence in Belgrade, his military mission having been transformed into more of a diplomatic one with his staff, fresh from the mountains, turning their hands to more mundane, administrative matters. He formed a lifelong friendship with Tito, who gave him a home on the island of Korcula, and at the end of the war returned to politics and remained in the House of Commons until February 1974. He was an accomplished travel writer, often visiting Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and died in June 1996.

MACLEAN, MELINDA. A student at the Sorbonne in 1939 from a wealthy New York family, Melinda Marling married Donald Maclean in Paris in June 1940 and accompanied him to London when the British embassy was evacuated. Shortly before their marriage he told her that he was a Soviet spy, and she became his willing coconspirator. When he defected in May 1951, she participated in a charade at their home in Tatsfield, Kent, which had been wired for sound by MI5, to conceal the identity of their visitor, Guy Burgess (whom she referred to as “Roger Styles,” for the benefit of the microphones). Following his departure, Melinda moved with her three children to Geneva, and from the end of July 1953 until early in September, accompanied by her children and her mother, she stayed in Cala Rat-jada on Majorca. Almost as soon as they returned to Switzerland, she unexpectedly took her children by train to Austria, where they disappeared, only to emerge in Moscow. Between 1967 and 1969 she had an affair with Kim Philby, and she later moved to New York, where she now lives.

Highly suspicious of her sudden departure to Moscow in September 1953, MI5 suspected she had received instructions from the Soviets while in Majorca, and theorized that Tomás Harris, the wartime MI5 officer who had been close to Philby and then lived in Majorca, might have acted as a conduit to her.

MAD DOG. Special Operations Executive (SOE) code name for a plan to sabotage all rail and road links to the east in Spain in the event of a German occupation, to be undertaken by H Section. SOE’s Spanish branch was assembled in Gibraltar in April 1941 for deployment if the worst happened and occupied an office there to supervise operations in Iberia and northwest Africa, headed by Peter Quennell and Harry Morris, but a mission codenamed RELATOR, consisting of John Burton, David Muirhead, Adrian Gallegos, and Peter Kemp was organized for operations in Spain. H Section’s existence remains a secret to this day and the name of its head, Major L. J. W. Richardson, appears in none of the official histories. Nor, for that matter, do those of his immediate subordinates, Major J. A. S. Hamilton or Captain K. M. D. Mills. When Gallegos wrote his wartime memoirs, From Capri into Oblivion, he diplomatically omitted any reference to his work in Gibraltar. However, Kemp has given accounts of RELATOR in No Colours or Crest and The Thorns of Memory, although he too is discreet in naming other members of the section.

Colonel Edward Hinchley-Cooke, MI5’s principal prewar interrogator, who supervised most of the German espionage cases.

Maxwell Knight, MI5’s star case officer, who recruited agents to penetrate extreme political organizations of the right and left.

Karel Richter, accompanied by his MI5 captors, recovering his parachute following a landing in May 1941.

The Abwehr transmitter (a) and ciphering equipment (b and c) captured from Robert Petter, a spy who landed in Scotland in September 1940.

R. A. Robertson and William Luke, two of MIS’s wartime double-agent handlers, who laid the foundations for the famous double cross system.

Pierre Neukermans, a Belgian army officer and one of thirteen enemy agents arrested by MI5 and executed during World War II.

The elegant headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service in London for forty years, 21 Queen Anne’s Gate.

Sir Stewart Menzies, the Secret Intelligence Service’s third chief, who was appointed in 1939 and retired in 1952.

The British Passport Control Office in The Hague, scene of a financial scandal in 1936, resulting in the suicide of the head of the station. Three years later, his replacement was abducted by the Nazis from Venlo.

Claude Dansey, SIS’s ruthless deputy chief and architect of the mysterious Z Organisation.

Monty Chidson, the SIS officer who recovered Holland’s strategic stocks of industrial diamonds just as the Nazis occupied Amsterdam in 1940. He later served in Ankara.

Dick Ellis, deputy head of British Security Coordination in New York throughout the war, who later served in the Far East and eventually confessed to having sold secrets to the Germans before the war.

Sir David Petrie, the former head of the Delhi Intelligence Bureau, who was appointed director-general of the Security Service in 1940.

Captain Guy Liddell, the Scotland Hard analyst who joined MI5 in 1931 and was appointed director-general of the counterespionage division in 1940.

Klaus Fuchs, the German-born physicist who betrayed atomic secrets to the Soviets from Los Alamos and Harwell and was eventually compromised by VENONA.

Jim Skardon and Henry Arnold, the MI5 officers who attended the brief trial in 1950 of Klaus Fuchs. Both had interrogated him and succeeded in extracting a confession without revealing the VENONA source.

The embarrassing newspaper article marking the departure of MI5’s director-general, Sir Percy Sillitoe, to Washington, D.C., in May 1951 following the defections of foreign office diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean.

Konon Molody, alias Cordon Lonsdale of the KGB, who was arrested in London in 1961 following a defector’s tip.

George Blake, the Dutch-born SIS officer who hemorrhaged secrets to the KGB and then escaped from prison.

John Vassall, the Admiralty clerk caught in a classic KGB “homosexual honeytrap ”in Moscow, who continued to spy after his return to London.

Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, the GRU officer who “paid the rent” for SIS until he was finally caught in 1962, tried, and executed.

Douglas Britten, an RAF technician who spied for the Soviets for six years until he was betrayed by a defector.

Stephen Ward, the MI5 agent whose attempt to entrap the Soviet assistant naval attaché caused the Profumo crisis, which ended the Macmillan government.

Eugene Ivanov, the Soviet assistant naval attaché whose amorous pursuits on the London social scene made him a target for MI5.

Frank Bossard, the guided weapons expert who sold secrets to the KGB but was identified by the ClA as the source of Air Ministry leaks.

Josef Frolik, the Czech defector who named many of his former contacts as StB sources, among them three members of Parliament.

Sir Roger Hollis, MIS’s expert on Communism, who served as director-general for nine years but was suspected of having been a Soviet mole.

Oleg Lyalin, the KGB defector whose evidence led to Operation Foor, the expulsion of the entire KGB and GRU rezidenturas in London.

David Bingham, the officer who sold the Royal Navy’s secrets to the Soviets but was caught by a telephone tap on the embassy.

Sir Martin Furnival Jones, director-general of the Security Service from 1965 to 1972 and a keen amateur birdwatcher.

Kim Philby, pictured as he protested his innocence of the claims that he had acted as “the third man” and tipped off Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951.

Monty Woodhouse, one of the key participants in the Iranian coup, codenamed Operation BOOT, to remove Prime Minister Mussadeq from power in Tehran.

Sir John Sinclair, chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, whose early retirement in 1956 followed the embarrassment of the discovery of a frogman in Portsmouth Harbor while Nikita Khrushchev and Marshal Bulganin were on a state visit.

Lionel “Buster” Crabb, a diver employed by SIS to conduct a clandestine survey of Soviet warship hulls. His mysterious disappearance during his last operation led to a political crisis.

Greville Wynne, SIS’s intermediary with Oleg Penkovsky, who was arrested in Budapest and placed on trial in Moscow. His confession included details of his work for SIS and caused considerable embarrassment.

Maurice Oldfield, SIS chief who was called back from retirement in 1979 to reorganize the security apparatus in northern Ireland, only to retire again soon afterward when it was discovered that he had concealed his homosexuality for years.

Oleg Gordievsky, SIS’s star agent inside the KGB, who supplied his handlers with the Kremlin’s secrets for more than a dozen years before his exfiltration from Moscow in 1986.

Kemp was sent to Gibraltar on HMS Fidelity with the intention of linking up with local anti-Nazi partisans in Extremadura, but Sir Sam Hoare “categorically refused to allow SOE to take any measures in Spain to prepare for our operations.” Clearly very little research had gone into RELATOR’S planning. Any anti-Nazis in the area assigned to Kemp and Butler were likely to have been republicans—and Kemp had fought in the Spanish Civil War for nearly three years on the nationalist side. Kemp recalls:

It was difficult for us to feel great enthusiasm for such a vague and ill-planned scheme, or to take much interest in its preparation. The method by which it was proposed that we should reach our areas had the one merit of simplicity: as soon as the German invasion began, each party would climb into its lorry—already loaded with arms, explosives and wireless—and drive by the shortest route to its destination; how many of us would get there, or even succeed in crossing the International Zone to La Linea, was anybody’s guess.

RELATOR was eventually disbanded in August 1941, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, when SOE recognized that there was no further need for MAD DOG. However, another group was assembled in time for TORCH, the invasion of North Africa, the following year.

MAGAN, WILLIAM. No history of the postwar Security Service would be complete without a reference to Brigadier William M. T. Magan, one of the most remarkable intelligence officers of his generation. Known to colleagues as Bill, he was born and brought up in Eire in an old Anglo-Irish family and became a master of foxhounds. He was a brilliant linguist and in later years was fluent in several dialects spoken in the Middle East. Commissioned from Sandhurst in 1928, he joined the Indian Cavalry and had many adventures in Persia and the Northwest Frontier both before and during the war. In 1948 he joined MI5, rising to become the director of E Branch, responsible for liaison with Britain’s colonies, for more than a decade until his retirement in 1968. During that period he supervised antiterrorist operations in Cyprus and, at the request of Sir Martin Furnival Jones, undertook a detailed investigation into the possibility that his predecessor, Sir Roger Hollis, had been a Soviet mole. He also played a key role in antiterrorist operations in Ulster.

After his retirement, he and his wife Maxine, an artist of some note, started a successful pottery and he turned his hand to his family history. His book Umma-More is not merely the chronicle of an Irish family from its pre-Celtic roots in County Westmeath to the present day but also a fascinating account of Ireland’s rural history as seen through the experiences of the descendents of Humphry Magan, a landowner from Emoe in the parish of Ballymore—a place known in ancient times as Umma-More. Although he now lives in Sussex, Magan retains his strong Irish connections and several members of his family still live in Eire.

Virtually nothing in Umma-More would lead the reader to suspect that its author was a senior intelligence officer, and he states that it was never his intention to take the narrative beyond his parents’ generation but, as he says, the evolving relationship between England and Ireland “is in one of its acute phases,” so accordingly he added some “current commentary” on recent events. This material is of considerable significance because it is the only example of a Security Service officer writing, in open literature, about the Provisional IRA. Later Magan was to write An Irish Boyhood and Middle Eastern Approaches: The Recollections of an Intelligence Officer, 1939–1945 (2001).

MAIN LINE. Secret Intelligence Service code name for the radio station at Whaddon Hall established by Section VIII in 1939 and designated Special Communications Unit (SCU) 1 to handle PRODROME traffic from British diplomatic missions overseas and MEDAL signals from agents using clandestine transmitters. During World War II, MAIN LINE provided Bletchley Park with a direct and instantaneous link to its satellites at Heliopolis, Egypt; Delhi, India; and Kandy, Ceylon.

MAKARIOS, ARCHBISHOP. Strongly suspected of providing secret support to the EOKA (National Organization of Cypriot Combatants) movement during the Cyprus Emergency and offering political advice and leadership to Colonel George Grivas, the American-educated Archbishop Makarios III was the subject of MI5 surveillance conducted by Philip Ray from MI5 and the local Special Branch, headed by George Meikle. He was finally arrested and detained in March 1956. After his release from internment in the Seychelles, Makarios negotiated independence for Cyprus in 1959 and a settlement with the British, which brought him under pressure because of his fear that details of his homosexual relationships, including one with a Secret Intelligence Service source, would be disclosed.

MAKAROV, VIKTOR. A former KGB officer working in the super-secret 16th Directorate, which handled communications, Viktor Makarov was arrested in Moscow in 1987, convicted of espionage, and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment at the Perm-35 labor camp. Pardoned five years later, Makarov then lodged a political asylum request with the British embassy and was exfiltrated through the Baltic to England for resettlement in Bournemouth, Dorset. Dissatisfied with his pension, Makarov launched a public campaign to complain about his experience and brought a legal action, which was settled by the Treasury Solicitor for £65,000.

In January 2004 Makarov was reported to be living on modest welfare benefits in a tiny house on the outskirts of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in northern England. “I risked my life to communicate vitally important information to them, and may well have got killed by KGB men for my activity,” he alleged. He also expressed concern about his fiancée, Olga Bireva, an interpreter who had first made contact with the Secret Intelligence Service on his behalf but subsequently disappeared.

MALAYA EMERGENCY. A Chinese insurgency in Malaya between 1948 and 1957 that was to have a profound impact on the British Intelligence organization and its personnel. The Federation of Malaya, newly created in 1948, inherited a conventional security structure of a police Special Branch; a small Security Service, headed by Colonel John Dalley; and army military intelligence units led by the local director of military intelligence, Colonel Paul Gleadell. The Secret Intelligence Service’s regional headquarters, Combined Intelligence Far East (CIFE), was located in Singapore and headed by Dick Ellis. However, there was a lack of interagency cooperation because of a legacy of bitterness over the wartime activities of Force 136 personnel who disobeyed orders in 1941 to surrender to the Japanese and fought a guerrilla war in the jungle while others endured capture.

MI5’s E Branch (Colonial Affairs) was represented in Kuala Lumpur by the security liaison officer (SLO), Arthur Martin, and in Singapore by Courtney Young and then Jack Morton. The appointment of Sir William Jenkin as security adviser was intended to coordinate CIFE, Special Branch, and the Security Service, but it was the arrival in 1950 of Sir Robert Thompson as director of operations that transformed the situation. In 1952, upon the resignation of the police commissioner, Colonel Nicol Gray, General Sir Gerald Templer took over as high commissioner and began to isolate the Malay Communist Party (MCP) by recruiting a large Home Guard and armed police militia. Under Templer, MI5 provided Arthur Martin and Alec MacDonald to run the Special Branch in Kuala Lumpur, with Keith Wey as SLO and Guy Madoc running the Security Service. The application of orthodox counterintelligence techniques to counter the terrorists resulted in the penetration of the terrorist organizations and the recruitment of the MCP’s charismatic leader, Chen Ping, by his former Force 136 commander, John Davis.

Those British intelligence officers who served together during the Emergency became known as the Malay Mafia and afterwards exercised considerable influence over security and intelligence policy and operations in London. See also MALAYAN SECTION.

MALAYAN SECTION. The Malayan Section of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) operated under Inter-Services Liaison Department (ISLD) cover and recruited from the Malay Communist Party (MCP) to deploy an impressive number of mainly Chinese agents very quickly. John Davis and Richard Broome alone supervised the insertion of 163 MCP members into Japanese-held territory before the final British collapse. Most perished, and 11 SIS agents were captured and executed after one engagement at Kuala Pilah. A team led by an agent named Cole disappeared entirely, and Major Cauvin’s mission of Sergeants Meldrum and Regan ended in September 1942 when Regan, the wireless operator, died in the jungle of an infection and Cauvin himself committed suicide.

For a while following the chaos in Singapore, the one remaining link with the outside world was Captain McMillan, who had run a radio interception unit at Kranji. He was moved to Java, where he maintained a link with some SIS noncommissioned officers, organized by Major James Barry, a former counterespionage expert from the Malayan-Siamese border who himself survived for two years behind enemy lines with some evaders, Privates Brian O. Smith and Jim Wright. Barry eventually went mad and slashed his wrists in July 1944, and most of his companions succumbed to illness and festering wounds.

Perhaps the best-known ISLD agent among them was Sergeant John Cross, who subsequently spent just over three harrowing years in the jungle, together with Lance Corporal Fred Wagstaff and Signalman Douglas Morter. Cross had been recruited from the Royal Signals by ISLD’s Major Rosher and had undergone the STS 101 treatment with a team of Chinese nominated by the MCP. By the time Cross and his party were in position, Rosher had abandoned Kuala Lumpur and only his second in command, Captain Knott, remained. Their wireless contact was with McMillan in Java, and they stayed in the rain forest under the protection of the MCP continuously, suffering appalling weather, health, and food.

MALLY, THEODORE. The NKVD illegal rezident in London in 1936 and 1937, Theodore Mally was a former officer in the Austro-Hungarian army who had been captured by the Russians in July 1916. In 1918 he volunteered to fight for the Red Army, and in 1921 joined the Cheka. Later he was based in Paris and supervised operations in Holland. Twice in 1935, in May and November, he was sent to London to run John King, operating under the cover of a trader in old clothes, and in April 1936 he was appointed rezident in place of Alexander Orlov, who had fled to Moscow to run Donald Maclean and Percy Glading’s spy ring at the Woolwich Arsenal. Mally also handled Kim Philby and Guy Burgess. When Mally returned to London from leave in January 1937 he met Anthony Blunt and Michael Straight, and the leader of the Oxford ring, a mole codenamed SCOTT. Mally left England in June 1937 but was arrested in Moscow the following September and executed in Stalin’s purge of the NKVD.

Mally’s file in the KGB archives reveals that, as the illegal resident, he had described briefly the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB)’s status in Oxford and Cambridge:

In the course of the last five years, about 250 Party members have left Oxford and Cambridge Universities and a considerable number of them are now employed in the Civil Service. Where exactly they are and what they are doing, nobody knows. At present there are about 200 Party members in those universities of whom about 70 will leave this year. Apart from this, there are about 1,300 students who are members of the Left Wing clubs (which have the same platform as we).

Upon receipt of Mally’s letter, Moscow Center became worried about the London rezidentura’s activities, and warned it to be more cautious:

We are very worried about [SCOTT’s] activity. All this is too much based on the COMPATRIOTS [the CPGB]. The practice of previous years has shown that this is fraught with great danger. The danger of failure is especially great when we are dealing with groups and not with individuals. Usually, groups of such people discuss all questions amongst themselves, in spite of all prohibitions, and you, thinking you are dealing with one man only, have all his friends on your hands.... You should explain this to SCOTT.... There should be no mass recruitment on any account. From among the many and promising candidates, select the most valuable. Check ten times, do not be in a hurry and recruit only when you have sufficient data. BUNNY’S recruitment, for instance, was much too hurried. Bear in mind that all this is not unsubstantiated caution on our part, but that you are running a most valuable network, the preservation of which is a task of the highest importance. We were very interested in the number of students, established by you, who are sympathetic to our cause. This material should certainly be collected and it would not be a bad thing to keep a regular account so as to know where these people end up and, in certain cases direct them to institutions, which are of interest to us. We think that this should be done in such a way that not every one of them would know beforehand what we want of him. In any case, whenever this is possible, we should cover up our ultimate aim to the last moment. Such a way of proceeding will enable us to build up a reserve of ready leads, which can be developed, as the need arises, into trustworthy and active agents.

In response to the Center’s wish to “keep a regular account,” Mally entrusted the task to SCOTT.

MALONE, CECIL L’ESTRANGE. The Communist MP for East Leyton from 1918 to 1922, and then the Labour MP for Northampton from 1928 to 1931, Colonel Cecil Malone pioneered flying seaplanes off warships and in 1918 was appointed the first air attaché to Paris. He was also a committed revolutionary and was arrested in October 1920 as a Finnish Comintern agent, Eriski Weltheim, left his home. Malone was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment.

MALTA. Between 1929 and 1936, Malta was the subject of attempts by the Italian intelligence services to undermine the pro-British administration and seize the island. MI5’s deputy director-general, Sir Eric Holt-Wilson, played a significant but secret role in preventing the spread of Maltese influence.

MALTA MISSION. Special Operations Executive’s mission to Malta was established in 1941 to act as a forward base for operations into Italy and Yugoslavia, but then concentrated on operations in Vichy-administered Tunisia until BRANDON was dispatched in October 1942. In March 1943 control over Malta was switched from Cairo to MASSINGHAM.

MANN, WILFRID. In October 1948, Dr. Mann, a scientist working at the Chalk River atomic establishment in Canada who had been educated at St. Paul’s and Imperial College and studied in Copenhagen under Niels Bohr, was appointed the British scientific intelligence liaison officer with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with the rank of scientific attaché at the British embassy. Before his appointment he was briefed by Eric Welsh in London, the security liaison officer in Washington, D.C., Geoffrey Paterson, and the Secret Intelligence Service station commander, Peter Dwyer. When Dwyer was replaced by Kim Philby in 1949, Mann became friendly with him and occupied an office in the embassy in the same corridor. In 1951 Mann, who had served on the Maud Committee in 1941, accepted a new job, as head of the Radioactivity Section of the National Bureau of Standards, where he remained until his retirement in 1980, having become a naturalized citizen.

In 1961 Mann was approached socially by a Soviet diplomat, and his subsequent meetings with him were reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and monitored by them. According to Mann’s 1980 autobiography Was There a Fifth Man? this contact was fully authorized, but it was evidently misinterpreted by journalist Andrew Boyle, who asserted in Climate of Treason in 1979 that Mann had been a Soviet mole. According to Boyle, the physicist had been a spy and a. friend and coconspirator of Anthony Blunt, but had been “turned” and run as a double agent by the CIA’s James Angleton. In reality, while Mann had known both Philby and Guy Burgess, he had met neither Donald Maclean nor Blunt. Having successfully repudiated the allegations, Mann retired to Chevy Chase, Maryland, and later moved to Baltimore, where he died in March 2001. In 2003 documents retrieved from the KGB archives suggested that Mann may in fact have been a Soviet spy codenamed MALLONE.

MANNINGHAM-BULLER, ELIZA. Appointed director-general of the Security Service in 1999, Eliza Manningham-Buller is the daughter of Lord Dilhorne, a former attorney-general and lord chancellor. She joined the Security Service in the 1970s after Oxford and served as security liaison officer in Washington, D.C. While working in K Branch in 1983, she was responsible for conducting the investigation that identified a colleague, Michael Bettaney, as the source of a leak to the KGB’s London rezident, Arkadi Gouk.

MARKOV, GEORGI. The son of an officer in the Bulgarian army and born in 1929 in Sofia, Georgi Markov was a successful novelist and playwright in his own country before he defected to Italy in June 1969 and took up residence in London in 1971. As a student studying chemical engineering, he had been a dissident, but after an arrest he had joined the Communist party. His first novel, Men (1962), made him a successful member of the Bulgarian regime’s governing elite. During the following seven years, his novels and plays were received with official approval, but after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, Markov’s attitude changed and he was summoned by the party’s Cultural Committee to explain his new satirical play, The Man Who Was Me. Instead of attending the meeting, Markov fled to Bologna, where his brother Nikola had also defected in 1974; Nikola still lives there, as a stamp dealer.

Using the pseudonym David St. George, together with coauthor David Phillips, Markov wrote a political satire, The Right Honorable Chimpanzee (1978). He also made broadcasts on the BBC World Service and Radio Free Europe in Munich, which were considered sufficiently damaging by Bulgarian dictator Todor Zhivkov for him to personally order the DS’s chief of foreign counterintelligence, General Vlado Todorov, to arrange the author’s assassination. As he crossed Waterloo Bridge walking to work at the BBC in September 1978, Markov was stabbed in the leg by a pellet gun concealed inside an umbrella. A tiny pellet, visible only under a powerful microscope and made of a rare platinum and iridium alloy containing traces of ricin, was later recovered from a wound, but Markov died in the hospital four days later, prompting a lengthy investigation conducted by the Metropolitan Police and MI5.

According to Colonel Stefan Svreddlev, a DS officer who defected in 1971, the agency compiled lists of 17 different categories of suspect Bulgarians, and Markov’s death conformed to the pattern of executions carried out by the DS’s hit men:

From my own experience I know of cases of kidnapping and murder of Bulgarian exiles abroad by the state security. The organization that killed Georgi Markov was the Bulgarian state security. And, from my experience, the assassin would have been someone sent from Bulgaria. In that way it’s much easier to conceal all the clues in the crime.

Late in 1989 Zhivkov was arrested, and a lengthy investigation into Markov’s death was launched by Leonid Katzamunski, the head of the new government’s investigation department. In October 1993 General Oleg D. Kalugin, a former KGB expert in counterintelligence who had boasted of having supervised the DIE operation, was briefly detained in London and interrogated about his knowledge of the murder. As yet, no one has been charged with Markov’s murder. Markov’s autobiography, The Truth That Killed, was completed after his death by his widow Annabel.

MARLBOROUGH, DUKE OF. In 1701 the Duke of Marlborough appointed an Irishman, William Cadogan, as his chief of intelligence for the Wars of the Spanish Succession. He also relied on his private secretary, Adam de Cardonne, to recruit agents for him. One such source, named Robethon, who worked for the elector of Brunswick, sold Marlborough the French plans and their complete order of battle. Later, when charged with corruption, Marlborough claimed that “the contingencies of the army, of which that of Secret Service is the principal, was £50,000 per annum” and that his allowance for this had proved insufficient, so he had made up the difference by charging a commission to the army’s food contractors. The House of Commons was unimpressed by the argument and when the attorney-general had announced his intention to prosecute Marlborough, he and Cadogan left the country for Europe.

MARLOWE, CHRISTOPHER. The son of a cobbler, Christopher Marlowe was educated at Cambridge and in 1587, at the age of 23, visited a Jesuit seminary in Rheims, France, pretending to be a Catholic sympathizer in order to penetrate a plot against Queen Elizabeth. Already established as a successful playwright and poet, Marlowe undertook the mission for Sir Francis Walsingham, but was stabbed to death, apparently in a drunken brawl in a tavern, in May 1593.

MARRIOTT, JOHN. Educated at Uppingham and King’s College, Cambridge, John Marriott was admitted a solicitor in 1934 at the age of 25 and joined the Honourable Artillery Company in 1939, transferring to MI5 the following year. He was secretary of the Twenty Committee throughout the war and until his retirement was director, B Branch, in charge of personnel.

MARR-JOHNSON, PATRICK. Head of the Wireless Experimental Station (WES) at Delhi, India, during World War II—the GCHQ regional headquarters after the Far East Combined Bureau had been withdrawn from Singapore—Colonel Marr-Johnson commanded about 1,000 personnel. He directed operations at the WES satellite stations—the Western Wireless Sub-Centre at Bangalore and the Eastern Wireless Sub-Centre at Barrackpore near Calcutta—as well as Intelligence School C in Calcutta and the Wireless Experimental Depot at Abbottabad near Rawalpindi. Marr-Johnson spoke fluent Japanese and his command of the language was so good that he could pass as a native speaker, although he acknowledged a real Japanese would trip him up on nursery rhymes and childhood memories. After the war he was posted to Washington, D.C., to liaise on VENONA and later retired to Jamaica.

MARSHALL, WILLIAM. Formerly a Royal Signals soldier with service in Palestine and Egypt, Marshall joined the Diplomatic Wireless Service (DWS) in 1948 and was posted to Moscow. At the end of April 1952 he was spotted by an off-duty MI5 watcher meeting Pavel Kuznetsov, a suspected KGB officer in London under diplomatic cover, and became the target for an investigation. Further meetings were monitored, and both men were arrested by police in Wandsworth. A search produced a scrap of paper with information about the DWS’s headquarters at Hanslope Park, and Marshall was tried at the Old Bailey and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for breaches of the Official Secrets Act.

MARSHALL-CORNWALL, SIR JAMES. A professional soldier who rarely experienced command of troops in the field, James Marshall-Cornwall was drafted into the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) with the rank of deputy director in the spring of 1943. The intention was to silence criticism from SIS’s military clients that the organization’s information was inadequate to their needs. Marshall-Cornwall learned his trade from Sir Claude Dansey, and upon the latter’s retirement the following year took over his post.

Born James Cornwall, he changed his name in 1927 so as to inherit his maternal uncle’s estate in Scotland. By that time he had acquired a reputation as one of the most gifted linguists of his generation and had been highly decorated in World War I when he had spent two years as an intelligence officer at GHQ in France. In January 1918 he had been appointed to head MI3, a section of military intelligence at the War Office, and then went to the Paris Peace Conference to represent the General Staff.

Between the wars he headed the military mission to Egypt and in 1938 was placed in charge of Britain’s air defense. In 1940 he helped evacuate Allied troops from Cherbourg, and in November 1941 he took over Western Command. This posting ended in his dismissal, having incurred the wrath of the War Office over his deployment of troops to guard Liverpool docks. Just when his career appeared to be heading into the doldrums, he was offered the opportunity to join Special Operations Executive (SOE). His task was to reduce the interdepartmental conflict between SOE and SIS, and in March 1943, after five months at Baker Street, he switched to SIS.

After the war Marshall-Cornwall retired from the army at age 58 and became editor-in-chief of captured German archives. He later became involved in some arms trading and wrote military histories. He died in December 1985 at his daughter’s home in Yorkshire. In his memoirs, published a year before his death, Marshall-Cornwall recalled the many overseas inspection tours he undertook during 1944 as SIS faced reorganization in anticipation of peace, but was characteristically discreet about the rest of his work.

MARTIN, ARTHUR. Arthur S. Martin dedicated much of his life to preserving the integrity of Britain’s security apparatus without compromising the quality of its judgment. Martin’s first involvement with the secret world occurred during the war when he was a transferred from the Royal Signals to the 53rd Special Wireless Group (SWG), a radio interception organization in the Middle East that routinely monitored the enemy’s transmissions so the cryptographers could analyze the raw material and maybe acquire some useful information from it. The cipher experts at Bletchley Park and elsewhere were unable to perform unless there was an accurate record of an enemy signal, and it was the task of the various SWGs posted in various theaters of battle to obtain the necessary intercepts.

Although Martin did not prove an exceptional wireless operator, he did sufficiently well in the SWG to be offered a permanent position with GCHQ at the end of the war, and in 1949 he was assigned to London as a liaison officer with the Security Service. He played a key role in preparing the cryptographic evidence that was to form the basis of the identification and subsequent interrogation of the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs, and soon afterward he joined MI5 to work on the investigation of wartime leaks from the British embassy in Washington, D.C.—an inquiry that was to prove the catalyst for the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in May 1951.

It was Martin that Sir Percy Sillitoe selected to accompany him to Washington in June 1951 when he tried to explain to the U.S. authorities how Burgess and Maclean had managed to elude MIS. Later Martin was to participate in the cross-examination of Kim Philby, who was sacked from the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) because of his suspected involvement with the two traitors. Soon after this episode, Martin was sent to Singapore to report on conflicts that had emerged within the Malayan security structure during the Malaya Emergency, and he remained there for two years as director of intelligence in Kuala Lumpur.

Upon his return to London in January 1961 as D1, Martin concentrated on counterespionage cases, but it was not until the defection of Anatoli Golitsyn in December 1961 that MI5 and the Central Intelligence Agency suddenly acquired an unprecedented KGB source. Golitsyn defected in Helsinki and was promptly flown to the United States, where Martin debriefed him. In Washington Martin was met by the local SIS head of station, Stephen de Mowbray, who introduced him to the defector. Not only did Golitsyn provide sufficient new clues to Martin for him to conclude some old cases, but he also promised a new insight into the KGB’s operations in England and, in particular, details of Soviet penetration of the British security apparatus. Once Martin and de Mowbray had listened to Golitsyn, they were convinced that he represented a genuine opportunity to combat the KGB. Both reported to London that Golitsyn’s allegations of hostile penetration should be taken seriously and thereafter both men became involved in the lengthy mole hunts that purged their respective services of suspected Soviet spies. Both were to play vital roles in the FLUENCY Committee investigations of Sir Roger Hollis and other possible moles, including Donald Prater, but their careers were not advanced by their new preoccupation. Martin was transferred from MI5 to SIS, where he was appointed to the largely administrative function of head of Registry, while de Mowbray was transferred to South America.

After his retirement from SIS, Martin went to the House of Commons as a clerk, but he retained his interest in discovering whether the Security Service had been penetrated by the KGB. At the height of the Hollis affair in July 1984, soon after Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had cleared him of treachery and Peter Wright had declared himself to be “99.9 percent certain of his guilt,” Martin wrote to the Times to insist that there were still many unanswered questions relating to the issue of moles in MI5.

Martin’s role as an MI5 mole hunter was first disclosed by Philby, who referred to him briefly in My Silent War as “a quiet young man.” Thereafter Martin avoided the limelight but his determination to learn the extent to which the KGB had gained access to MI5’s secrets gave him a notoriety that he and his wife Joan, who had been secretary to the deputy director-general of the Security Service, Guy Liddell, both abhorred. In 1984, at the conclusion of his postretirement job as a Commons clerk, Martin joined forces with his SIS colleague de Mowbray to find a publisher for New Lies for Old, Golitsyn’s analysis the Kremlin’s Machiavellian plotting. This was eventually released in 1984, with Martin and de Mowbray collaborating with two senior CIA officers, Scott Miler and Vasia Gmirkin, to write an “editor’s foreword.” Curiously, although Gmirkin signed the foreword and had spent three years as Golitsyn’s CIA case officer, he never subscribed to the defector’s labyrinthine theories.

Martin, who married twice and had two sons, died in January 1996, aged 81.

MARYLAND. Special Operations Executive (SOE) code name for the regional headquarters at Monopoli on the Adriatic, established in 1943 while SOE Cairo was placed under overall command of General W. A. Stawell. Both Monopoli and Bari, just down the coast, played an important part in the liberation of German-occupied Italy, and in Northern and Eastern Europe as well. Polish and Czech operations were conducted from Monopoli by Henry Threlfall’s Force 139, which established an operational base at Latiano and a training school at Ostuni. Also at Monopoli was No. 1 Special Force, commanded by Gerald Holdsworth, which was later to move north to Siena. Logistics were handled by Brigadier Miles’s Force 333, another offshoot of SOE Cairo, now renamed Force 133. Located at Torre di Mare, it was conveniently close to the Royal Air Force airfields at Apulia and Brindisi, which were also used as supply routes to Albania, Yugoslavia, and points east.

The small harbor at Monopoli also accommodated the Adriatic flotilla of SOE’s private navy, under the command of Morgan Morgan-Giles, which was later to operate from Naples as well. Previously, Eastern Mediterranean naval operations had been centered at Haifa, the headquarters of the innocent-sounding Levant Fishing Patrol. As well as a fleet of inshore fishing vessels, SOE also had the use of fast motor torpedo boats that could race across to the Albanian coast to collect agents. It was on this route that (Sir) Anthony Quayle, an actor in later life, distinguished himself. He recalled that “no-one at HQ could tell us much about Albania—chiefly because no-one at HQ knew much about the situation themselves.”

Initially MARYLAND consisted of a single liaison with the resistance in Rome, codenamed RUDDER. By November 1943 this had been transformed into six separate missions, and within a year No. 1 Special Force had dispatched 37 British officers and 17 J Section missions behind enemy lines in northern half of the country.

In addition to the above, X’s Austrian subsection, run by Miss Graham-Stamper, operated from Italy under cover of “No. 6 Special Force” and Force 266 concealed the activities of SOE Cairo’s Albanian subsection at Bari, then headed by Captain Watrous and John Eyre.

MASK. Government Code and Cipher School code name for decrypted Comintern wireless traffic exchanged between Moscow and numerous Communist parties around the world, including the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). MASK was read successfully by John Tiltman between 1935 and 1937 and provided MI5 with access to the party’s most secret communications, including the messages sent by Bob Stewart, the London representative of the NKVD. The two main CPGB radio operators, Stephen Wheeton and William Morrison, were placed under surveillance.

MASON, A. E. W. Fifty years old when war broke out and having lost his Coventry constituency in 1910, A. E. W. Mason lost no time in volunteering for military service, and he joined up with the Manchester regiment. However, after training at Aldershot and Morecombe, he was invited to an interview in London, which he described with a degree of circumspection in The Summons when Martin Hillyard is taken to a dingy house in a back street near Charing Cross to meet Commander Graham, the head of the Secret Service whose office is at the top of “many little flights of stairs.”

Following his recruitment, Mason, who had been educated at Dulwich College and Trinity College, Oxford, transferred to the Royal Marine Light Infantry and thence undertook his first secret mission, to Spain. Unlike the conventional intelligence officer posted under some semitransparent diplomatic cover to an embassy abroad, Mason adopted the lifestyle of a wealthy expatriate, cruising the Mediterranean in an impressive motor yacht. Exactly what occurred during this period, when Mason sailed between Spain, Morocco, Gibraltar, and the Balearics, is unknown, but there are some clues to be found in two of his subsequent publications. In One of Them, which has a definitely autobiographical flavor, Anthony Strange consulted Major Slingsby of the British Secret Service about neutral ships, that were loading large quantities of a cargo that purported to be bicarbonate of soda. Working together, Slingsby and Strange established that the suspect barrels contained fuel for enemy U-boats and a trap was laid for a submarine attending an illicit rendezvous in a secluded bay in supposedly neutral waters. Strange had fitted his yacht with a gun disguised as a capstan, and when the German vessel approached to refuel, it was sunk by Strange’s accurate shelling. This tale bore a strong resemblance to an incident in Cartagena where Mason had photographed a U-boat refueling and had circulated the pictures as postcards, much to the embarrassment of the Spanish authorities.

In another episode, recounted in The Four Corners of the Earth, Mason told the story of a German saboteur whom he had first met in Lisbon. At a second meeting, in Alicante, “Peiffer” offered to defect and sought permission to enter Gibraltar. Peiffer was later arrested as he tried to leave the Rock and was interned, the suspicions of Slingsby and Strange having been justified. The German was indeed a dangerous spy, trained in Hamburg, and had planned with a Spanish accomplice to mount a surprise aerial attack on the undefended part of Gibraltar under cover of an air race.

In October 1916 Mason returned to London via Paris, where he was a witness at the execution of Mata Hari. His second assignment took him back to the Mediterranean on Lord Abinger’s yacht, the St. George, together with a group of guests that included Professor W. E. Dixon, the noted pharmacologist upon whom the character of Bendish is based in The Summons. Bendish was described as an expert on the detection of secret ink and the opening of suspect mail without leaving a trace.

In January 1917 Mason was recalled to London, where he received a promotion to the rank of major but succumbed to bronchitis. The remainder of his military service was spent in convalescence and the preparation of The Four Corners of the Earth. After the war, Mason continued to write his series of highly successful detective mysteries based on Inspector Hainaud. He never married and is believed to have declined the offer of a knighthood. He died in London in November 1948.

MASSINGHAM. Special Operations Executive (SOE) code name for the North African headquarters based in Algiers. It was established in October 1942 to run operations into southern France, Corsica, Italy, Sardinia, Sicily, and Spain under the leadership of Douglas Dodds-Parker.

After the invasion of Italy, MASSINGHAM established a forward base at Monopoli, codenamed MARYLAND. MASSINGHAM closed down in October 1944, having inserted 55 wireless stations, 22 Allied missions, and 11 other SOE personnel into France.

MASTERMAN, SIR JOHN. Through sheer ill fortune, John Masterman found himself in Freiburg when World War I started in August 1914. Instead of being repatriated, as he had expected, he interned at Ruhleben, a camp set up on Berlin’s racetrack. There, despite one unsuccessful escape attempt, he was to spend the next four years. After his release in November 1918 Masterman was invited to Whitehall Court to dine with Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming, the Secret Intelligence Service’s first chief. “C” had been anxious to hear news of Kurt Hahn, the educationalist who had helped Masterman avoid being sent to a prison camp after his abortive escape.

Masterman’s transformation from a Christ Church don to an intelligence officer in World War II was brief. In March 1940 he was called up and given a commission in the Intelligence Corps. Fluent in German, he attended the interrogation course at Swanage and was then posted to the War Office as secretary to the committee that had been set up to investigate the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk. Once the Howard Committee had completed its report, Masterman was transferred to the Security Service, where he worked in the counterespionage division, first at Blenheim Palace and later at Wormwood Scrubs. There he reestablished contact with several of his former students, including William Younger.

In December 1941 Masterman was assigned the task of debriefing Dusko Popov, recently arrived from Lisbon, and it was this remarkable encounter between one of the Abwehr’s star agents and his MI5 handler that led to the creation of the Twenty Committee, the interdepartmental body created to supervise the conduct of double agent operations and liaise with all the appropriate services. Masterman was to chair a total of 226 weekly meetings of the Double Cross Committee, as it became known, before he was invited to write an account of its activities at the conclusion of the war. Masterman returned to Oxford in September 1945, having completed his task in an astonishing two months. However, it was to be 27 years before he revealed to his former employers that he had retained a copy of his manuscript, and that he intended to publish it in America as The Double Cross System in the War of 1939 to 1945 (1972). In 1975 Masterman released his autobiography, and he died in Oxford in June 1977.

MATA HARI. The exotic dancer Margaretha MacLeod was detained in Falmouth in December 1916, while en route from Vigo to Rotterdam, when she was mistaken for a notorious German spy. She was escorted to Holloway Prison, but protested her detention to the Dutch minister in London, who raised her case with Basil Thomson. When she was interviewed by Thomson, with the help of an interpreter, the issue of her identity was clarified, but she was not released immediately because of her extraordinary claim to be working against the Germans for the French Deuxième Bureau. According to her version of events, she had been directed to extract information from two German attaches in Madrid, Major Kalle and Lieutenant Commander Hans von Krohn. However, instead of returning her to prison, Thomson gave her a room at the Savoy Hotel. Meanwhile his request to Paris for verification was answered with the advice that MacLeod should be returned to Spain, and the appropriate arrangements were made.

Once back in Spain, MacLeod installed herself in the Ritz Hotel and made plans to reach Holland overland, via Paris. She applied for, and was granted, a French visa but when she eventually reached Paris, in February 1917, she was arrested and charged with espionage. At her trial, held in camera before a military tribunal in July 1917, the prosecution alleged that a German signal from Madrid requesting funds for “Agent H-21” had been intercepted by a radio station on the Eiffel Tower and decrypted, and after a day and a half she was convicted and condemned to death. Three months later, in October 1917, she was executed by a firing squad, with her Deu-xíème Bureau contact, Captain George Ladoux, present as a witness.

Although Mata Hari’s stage name, which means “Eye of the Morning” in Hindi, has become synonymous with glamorous espionage, she was never a professional spy and her appearance certainly did not impress Thomson, who remarked that “time had a little dimmed the charms of which we had heard so much.”

MATRIX CHURCHILL. An engineering company based in the English Midlands, Matrix Churchill was the subject of a Customs arid Excise investigation in 1992 that resulted in an inquiry conducted by Lord Justice Scott. A director of the company, and an SIS asset of long standing, Paul Henderson, was charged by Customs with breaches of the UN embargo on the export of weapons to Iraq. The prime interest of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) had been in nuclear nonproliferation, and Henderson had been one of a stable of British businessmen in contact with the regime who had volunteered information about Saddam Hussein’s illicit procurement program.

The fiasco occurred soon after the abortive prosecution of a Midlands steel firm, Sheffield Forgemasters, for manufacturing high-tensile tubes to an unusually demanding specification for clients in Baghdad. Ostensibly for use in the oil industry, the company had suspected they were for a military application, and in fact they were components of a long-range “supergun” with a barrel 500 feet long, designed by a visionary Canadian scientist, Gerald Bull.

British Customs officers raided Sheffield Forgemasters and another Midlands company, Walter Somers, and seized eight crates containing smoothbore pipes marked for delivery to a petrochemical scheme in Baghdad. However, when it emerged that the directors of both companies had been in touch with SIS since 1988, when the original Iraqi contracts had been signed, and they had expressed concern about the military application of the orders, all charges against them were dropped. SIS had been fully aware of the Iraqi plans and had been monitoring Hussein’s illicit procurement program, using sources in both companies to supply information, although the precise date when SIS first heard of it remained a matter of considerable debate.

Having failed to prosecute the steel fabricators, four months later Customs raided Matrix Churchill, a company employing 600 and based in Coventry, which was also engaged in exporting to Iraq. The directors were charged with supplying Baghdad with dual-use machine tools, including several consignments of sophisticated computer-controlled lathes that could have a military application. When Henderson, one of the three directors, protested that all his activities had been supervised by SIS, he was served with a Public Interest Immunity Certificate (PIIC), a legal maneuver to prevent him from disclosing his previous contacts, dating back over 20 years, with SIS and MI5.

Henderson originally had been recruited by MI5 in 1970 when he had been traveling across Eastern Europe as an export sales manager and had acted as a source supplying information about Soviet Bloc personalities visiting Britain. In April 1989 he was contacted by an SIS officer interested in the Middle East, and as the controlling interest in Matrix Churchill was owned by Iraqis, Henderson willingly cooperated. Known to him only as “John Balsom,” Henderson’s case officer held frequent meetings with him and debriefed him on his return from eight visits to Baghdad, but when he learned that Customs had arrested his agent, Balsom disconnected him, avoiding all further contact.

When Henderson disclosed to his defense lawyers that for years he had been an agent for MI5 and SIS—and his evidence was supported by another colleague, the former Matrix Churchill export manager Mark Gutteridge, who also had been recruited by MI5 and then passed to “Ian Eacott” of SIS—Balsom was offered to the prosecution as a witness. Balsom declared that he had not known of Henderson’s previous contracts with Baghdad, nor of the potential dual use of his exports. Usefully, Balsom testified to Henderson’s great personal courage and his willingness to risk his life by visiting Iraq a month after Hussein had executed an Iranian-born British journalist, Farzad Bazoft. “He was a very, very brave man who, on top of all the other pressures on top of him, took these extra risks.”

This dramatic evidence had an electric effect in court, to the degree that the prosecuting counsel, Alan Moses, QC, wrote privately about “the propriety of continuing the prosecution against a man who, on the evidence before the court, had rendered great service to the country” to Sir Brian Unwin, chairman of the Customs Board. Obviously infuriated, Unwin protested to Sir Colin McColl about Balsom’s testimony, which had shown the defendant in the dock to be a hero, not a scoundrel, but McColl responded robustly that his officer had spoken “sincerely and impartially” in his evidence. Henderson, said McColl, had shown “considerable bravery ... whilst knowing of the Iraqi ruthlessness in dealing with spies” and would accept no criticism of his subordinate. Clearly Unwin had been irritated by Balsom’s helpful evidence to Henderson, but when challenged on this point later, he claimed that he had merely protested that SIS had failed to inform Customs of the full extent of its relationship with the defendant. In reality, SIS had told Customs of Henderson’s role in October 1990 and given a very full picture to Customs a month later at a meeting called to discuss the issue.

Henderson’s trial at the Old Bailey subsequently collapsed when the judge inspected the government documents covered by numerous PIICs, which proved Henderson’s role with SIS, and ruled that they were highly relevant to the defense. A judicial inquiry was established under Lord Justice Scott to investigate the circumstances of the prosecution, and after hearings over two years concluded that, astonishingly, the attorney-general, Sir Nicholas Lyell, had never been told that Henderson worked for SIS. The Scott Inquiry Report, released in February 1996, strongly criticized ministers for having been so willing to sign PIICs, thereby denying the Matrix Churchill defendants their proper defense and leaving the public with the impression that innocent men might have been imprisoned to keep them silent about SIS’s operations.

The impact of the Matrix Churchill affair on SIS was to be long-term because, despite the favorable evidence given at the trial by Henderson’s handler, the service was perceived to have gladly encouraged its agent but then abandoned him when Customs had moved in. The fact that Balsom had then praised his agent at the trial as a man of tremendous courage only served to compound the offense, both inside and outside Whitehall.

MAUD COMMITTEE. In 1939 (Sir) George Thomson, Imperial College’s professor of physics since 1930, was engaged in military applications of science, having served in the Royal Flying Corps during World War I and later worked on aerodynamics at the Cavendish Laboratory. He was commissioned by (Sir) Henry Tizard, formerly the Royal Air Force’s assistant controller of experiment and research and an expert on radar, to study the Frisch-Peierls report on the possibility of developing an atomic bomb. Thomson’s verdict, which he came to regret, was that the possibility “seemed likely, though not certain” using heavy water, which was unavailable in any large amounts, and that the military value of such a weapon “seemed too remote to justify further work in wartime,” offering odds of 100,000 to 1 against success. As he later remarked, “If this conclusion now seems disgraceful blindness I can only plead that to the end of the war the most distinguished physicists in Germany thought the same.” Indeed, he was convinced that the prospects of a superbomb were so poor that he recommended to Tizard that “we should let it be known to the enemy by various means that we had, in fact, got encouraging results; that the experiments were progressing favorably, and that great things were expected of them.”

In the absence of any other suitable body in Whitehall to consider such matters, Tizard gathered together a committee of scientists to examine the claims made by Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, and it met in the main committee room on the ground floor of the Royal Society, at Burlington House, in April 1940. Among those present was John Cockcroft, as assistant director of research at the Ministry of Supply; Professor Alexander Hill, secretary of the Royal Society; James Chadwick; and Thomson, who acted as secretary.

By the time the Thomson Committee met for a second time a fortnight later, on 24 April, the attitude of mild skepticism had been transformed, not least by the sheepish admission made by Chadwick, who reported that he had started experimenting with fast-neutron fission with his new cyclotron in Liverpool and had reached the identical conclusions as Frisch and Peierls, but had been reluctant to say so until he had conducted further research, having originally believed that it would take 30 or 40 tons of uranium to achieve critical mass. Accordingly, the committee “generally was electrified by the possibility” that a uranium bomb was a truly practical proposition after all.

Although Winston Churchill’s scientific adviser, Professor Lindemann, was yet to be convinced, the Thomson committee received some disturbing news from Copenhagen, where Lise Meitner had been visiting as the Nazis had invaded. Viennese-born, beautiful, and Jewish, Meitner was Frisch’s aunt, and a former X-ray technician during World War I, who had headed the physics department at Otto Hahn’s laboratory in Dahlem until July 1938 when, in fear of persecution, she had moved to Stockholm—covertly via Holland, having been denied an exit visa by the Nazis. Her escape was engineered with Hahn’s knowledge and the help of Paul Rosbaud, the scientific editor of the publishers Springer Verlag. With the minimal protection of her Austrian passport, she had promptly returned to Sweden whence, on 9 April, she sent a telegram to a friend in England, apparently containing a hidden meaning:

MET NIELS AND MARGARETHE RECENTLY BOTH WELL BUT UNHAPPY ABOUT EVENTS PLEASE INFORM COCKROFT AND MAUD RAY KENT

The message was relayed to Cockcroft at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, who understandably placed the worst possible interpretation upon it. He read it to mean that Niels Bohr was anxious about the work being undertaken by the Nazis, and he believed a clue was contained in the inexplicable reference to “MAUD RAY KENT.” This, Cockcroft realized, was almost an anagram for “radium taken” and took it to be a characteristically ingenious warning intended to alert him to the fact that the Germans were collecting radium to assist in a bomb development project. Chadwick agreed with the anagram theory, which coincided with other reports that the Nazis were gathering physicists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in Berlin, and concluded that the enemy had begun a race to build an atomic bomb. As a consequence, the Thomson Committee renamed itself the Maud Committee and prepared a detailed report for the War Cabinet recommending further research.

In fact, Meitner had not concealed any sinister message in her telegram. She merely had wanted to inform Cockcroft that the Bohrs were still in Copenhagen and to have the news passed to the English governess, Maud Ray, who had taught the Bohrs’ boys English and was presently living in Kent. That particular mystery remained unsolved until Bohr escaped to England in October 1943 and could explain it for himself.

In the meantime, the Maud Committee submitted a lengthy report to the War Cabinet, and it was received in October 1940 by the Minister without Portfolio Lord Hankey, whose private secretary was a brilliant young Scot on secondment from the Foreign Office, John Cairncross. The Maud Committee supervised research work across the country, coordinating the activities of a handful of physicists in just three centers, at Liverpool, Oxford, and Birmingham.

This first Maud Report was studied by Professor Lindemann, who was persuaded to change his views, and on 27 August he wrote to Churchill about the “super-explosive,” explaining:

A great deal of work has been done here and in America, and probably in Germany, and it looks as if bombs might be produced and brought into use within, say, two years. The odds are ten to one on success within two years. I would not bet more than two to one against, or even money. But I am quite clear we must go forward. It would be unforgivable if we let the Germans develop a process ahead of us by means of which they could defeat us or reverse the verdict after they had been defeated.

On 16 September 1940 the Maud Committee outlined what was required to develop a working device within three years. Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) would have to make the project a priority, and “the representative of Woolwich Arsenal, Ferguson, stated that the bomb fuse could be constructed in a matter of months.” On 20 September the British chiefs of staff gave their formal approval to the plan recommended by the Maud Committee and to the decision to build a plant to manufacture the bomb in England.

The other result of the Maud Report, which was submitted to Colonel John Moore-Brabazon, MP, the minister for aircraft production, was the creation of the Directorate of Tube Alloys. This organization was headed by (Sir) Wallace Akers, the research director of ICI, and his deputy, chemist Michael Perrin, who were released from the company on 18 October for the duration of the war and installed in an office at 16 Old Queen Street, only a matter of yards from the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service in Queen Anne’s Gate. The cabinet minister with overall responsibility for the project was Sir John Anderson, until recently the home secretary and now lord president of the council, who was himself a physical chemist whose PhD thesis at Leipzig University, coincidentally, had been on the chemistry of uranium. A technical subcommittee, consisting of Peierls, Chadwick, Simon, and von Halban, was created to take the research into the development stage and met for the first time on 6 November 1941.

By this time ICI and Metropolitan-Vickers had taken the Tube Alloys project from the realm of the theoretical into practical, industrial application. The problem of isotope separation was being addressed at ICI’s Metals Division at Witton, just outside Birmingham, where the Research Manager, S. S. Smith, was engaged on the manufacture of membranes that would be components of the equipment being constructed by Metropolitan-Vickers in Manchester and ICI at Billingham. The company’s General Chemicals Division built a uranium refinery at Widnes, and its production of 200-pound ingots of the pure metal were delivered to Witton for final fabrication. At Oxford, Franz Simon’s small research team grew to almost 40 and occupied much of the Clarendon Laboratory as well as Jesus College’s chemistry laboratory, with additional work on isotope separation being undertaken by Dr. Arms in the Physics Laboratory at Birmingham. The membranes themselves, developed at Lund Humphries in Bradford, were put into production at Sun Engraving in Watford, and the entire enterprise was focused at Rhydymwyn, near Mold in North Wales, where the various components were assembled.

MAUDE, JOHN. An Old Bailey judge, John Maude joined MI5 in 1939, having been called to the bar in 1925 following Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. In 1940 he was responsible for the investigation that resulted in the arrest of Admiral Emile Muselier. After the war he was elected the Conservative MP for Exeter, a seat he retained until 1951.

MAUGHAM, W. SOMERSET. Somerset Maugham was already a well-known and successful writer when, in September 1915, he was approached by Sir John Wallinger with the suggestion that, with his knowledge of German and French, his occupation would provide useful cover for an intelligence officer operating in a neutral country. Would he be willing to travel to one on behalf of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS)? At that time Wallinger, who was never directly identified by Maugham in any of his books, was in charge of SIS’s operations in Southern Europe. He had previously served in the Indian Police and, like his one-legged brother Ernest, for whom Sigismund Best worked, was a senior figure in SIS. Aged 41, Maugham was too old for military service, having already served on the Western Front in a Red Cross ambulance unit, and was anxious to leave London, where his mistress’s impending divorce from her husband on the grounds of her adultery was set to create a scandal.

It was agreed with Wallinger that Maugham would go to Switzerland, ostensibly to complete his play Caroline but actually to reestablish contact with some of SIS’s agents. However his first assignment was to watch an Englishman with a German wife who was living in Lucerne. He took a room in the Hotel Beau Rivage in Geneva and filed his weekly reports by taking the ferry across the lake to the French side. Maugham was back in London early in the New Year to see Caroline open in the West End, and then in March he resumed his duties in Switzerland, accompanied by his newly divorced mistress, Syrie Wellcome. They stayed in Switzerland until June, when they moved to the French spa of Brides-les-Bains for a brief holiday, and then returned to London, where Maugham asked Wallinger to release him from SIS. In his place, SIS assigned another playwright, Edward Knoblock.

Maugham did not write about his melancholy experiences in Switzerland until 1928 when he released Ashenden, which unfortunately coincided with the publication of his friend Compton Mackenzie’s spy novel, Extremes Meet, also based wartime service in SIS. In The Traitor, Ashenden travels to Lucerne to investigate an English expatriate married to a suspected enemy agent and he lures him onto French territory so he can be arrested, a tale that is very close to the first assignment Maugham undertook in Switzerland for SIS. Maugham conceded that his stories were “on the whole a very truthful account of my experiences,” but not all the episodes in Ashenden are directly attributable to Maugham’s own adventures. Three, for example, originated with another close friend, Irish painter Gerald Kelly, who had operated for SIS in Spain. The Hairless Mexican and The Dark Woman describe how a Mexican general is hired to assassinate an enemy agent but mistakenly kills the wrong person, an incident that the Old Etonian Kelly later acknowledged had been close to something that had happened to him.

The Ashenden stories were sufficiently authentic to alarm Winston Churchill, who declared that they were a breach of the Official Secrets Act. Accordingly Maugham burned 14 of the remaining unpublished Ashenden manuscripts. The others tell of an encounter with one of Ashenden’s sources who was also selling information to the Germans. Another agent threatens to denounce Ashenden to the Swiss police when he is refused an increase in pay, and a suspected Indian agitator who has been spreading anti-British dissention commits suicide before he can be intercepted. All were based on fact, although in his preface Maugham claimed, “This book is a work of fiction, though I should say not much more so than several of the books on the same subject that have appeared during the last few years and that purport to be truthful memoirs.”

In August 1916, almost as soon as he returned to London, Maugham set off on a long voyage to the Pacific, but as he made his way back through New York in June 1917 he received another request from SIS, this time through Sir William Wiseman, SIS’s representative in the United States. Wiseman’s proposal was that Maugham should travel to Petrograd and deliver a large sum of cash to the Mensheviks in the hope of keeping Russia in the war. Reluctantly, Maugham agreed to the mission and in July arrived in Vladivostok by steamer from Tokyo and embarked on the Trans-Siberian Express bound for the Russian capital. Once again his cover was that of a writer, which proved convenient as Maugham spent much of the day learning Russian and most of the night enciphering reports to London. In his coded messages Maugham referred to himself as “Somerville,” the name adopted by Ashenden while in Switzerland.

In October 1917 Maugham was invited to meet the prime minister, Alexander Kerensky, who asked him to travel immediately to Lloyd George in London with a secret plea for political support and, more importantly, weapons and ammunition. Maugham promptly left for Oslo, where he was met by a destroyer that took him to Scotland. The following day he was in Downing Street, but the prime minister was unwilling to help Kerensky. As Maugham contemplated how he should break the news to Kerensky, the Bolsheviks seized power and the issue became academic. SIS asked Maugham to go to Romania instead, but he declined, pleading poor health.

Having recovered from his tuberculosis, Maugham continued his literary success and scoured the world for tales to entertain. His Ashenden stories, which also included some based on Maugham’s work in Petrograd, certainly influenced many later spy writers, including David Cornwell and Ian Fleming. Cornwell (known by his pen name John Le Carré) was later to agree that Maugham “was the first person to write about espionage in a mood of disenchantment and almost prosaic reality.”

Soon after the outbreak of the World War II, Maugham, aged nearly 70, returned to London from his home on the French Riviera and volunteered his services to an intelligence contact, Ian Hay, in the hope of working for SIS again. Maugham’s offer was politely declined but he did travel to the United States at the request of the Ministry of Information to improve Britain’s propaganda. After the war he returned to his home in Cap Ferrat, where he died in December 1965.

MAW, BERTIE. A career Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer, Bertie Maw played a key role in the Zinoviev Letter affair, acting as the representative of his chief, Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair. He was later to be appointed one of two G officers responsible for supervising all of SIS’s European stations.

MAX. GCHQ code name during World War II for intercepted wireless traffic that originated from areas along the line from Leningrad to Rostov and Kerch through the Caucasus from the North, from Novosibirsk to Batumi from Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, from Iran, Baghdad, and Basra as well as Kuibyshev, Astrakhan and from the western side of the Caspian Sea.

MAXWELL FYFE DIRECTIVE. In September 1952 the home secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, set out the terms of the appointment of Dick White as Sir Percy Sillitoe’s successor as director-general of the Security Service. In six short paragraphs he described how the director-general would be answerable to him—but with direct access to the prime minister when appropriate, should keep his organization “absolutely free from any political bias or influence,” and must limit his investigations of espionage, sabotage, and subversion to those that have “an important public interest bearing on the Defence of the Realm.” The Maxwell Fyfe Directive was made public by Lord Denning in 1963 and remained in force until the 1989 Security Service Act, which extended MI5’s remit to counterterrorism and the protection of the country’s “economic well-being.”

MAY, ALLAN NUNN. A Cambridge-educated nuclear physicist and Communist Party of Great Britain member, Dr. Allan Nunn May was identified by GRU defector Igor Gouzenko as a Soviet spy run during World War II in Canada. Codenamed ALEK, May was the subject of intensive MI5 surveillance upon his return to London, and at one point Iona von Ustinov prepared to masquerade as a false-flag Soviet contact in the hope of entrapping him. May was finally arrested in London in March 1946 and was sentenced two months later to 10 years’ imprisonment. After his release from prison, Dr. May returned to Cambridge, where he died in 2003, never having disclosed who recruited him or when. According to the KGB archives, May was recruited by Jan Chernyak, codenamed JAN, who had worked at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge before the war.

MAYER, HANS. The anonymous author of the secret document known to British Intelligence as “the Oslo Report,” Professor Hans Mayer had spent his professional life working for the German electronics firm Siemens, but in 1940 he traveled to Oslo on business and sent a letter to the British embassy describing in detail various German technical developments, including the proximity fuse and the flying bomb. In August 1943 Mayer was arrested by the Gestapo for listening to a BBC broadcast, and he was imprisoned at Dachau before being moved to Sachsenhausen, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen, and finally Buchenwald, the concentration camp where he was liberated in May 1945. After the war Mayer worked for the U.S. Air Force at Wright Field, near Dayton, Ohio, and in 1947 accepted a professorship at Cornell University to study radio astronomy. Although there was considerable speculation over the years about the real identity of the author of the Oslo Report, it was Professor R. V. Jones, the Secret Intelligence Service’s wartime scientific adviser, who revealed Mayer’s name in 1989.

MAYHEW, CHRISTOPHER. Born in June 1915 and educated at Haileybury and Christ Church, Oxford, Christopher Mayhew visited Moscow in 1935 with Anthony Blunt. He went to France as a gunner with the Surrey Yeomanry in September 1939 and was evacuated in May 1940. Mayhew was invited by Hugh Dalton, an old friend, to join Special Operations Executive (SOE) as his staff officer, but when Dalton was moved to the Board of Trade in February 1942 Mayhew obtained a transfer to Phantom’s J Squadron and was posted to the Mediterranean. He landed in Normandy two days after D-Day, attached to Special Forces Headquarters to act as a liaison officer with SOE.

In 1945 Mayhew was elected the Labour MP for south Norfolk. As minister of state in the Foreign Office in Clement Attlee’s administration, Mayhew promoted, and in February 1948 gained approval for, the creation of the Information Research Department. He also appointed Guy Burgess to it, but then had him sacked, observing that he was “dirty, drunken and idle.”

In 1974 Mayhew resigned from the Labour party but failed to be reelected to the Commons as a Liberal. He was elevated to the House of Lords in 1981. His memoirs, Time to Explain, were published in 1987.

MAZZINI, GUISEPPE. In 1854 the home secretary, Sir James Graham, authorized the interception of mail to Italy from Guiseppe Mazzini, a known political extremist. Altogether, between 70 and 80 letters were read and translated and the contents shared with the Austrian embassy in London. When Mazzini became aware that he was the target of interception, he persuaded the radical MP Thomas Duncombe to raise the issue in the Commons, and as a consequence a committee of inquiry was formed, which recommended in 1846 the closure of the Secret Office that hitherto had been responsible for the interception and decryption of suspect correspondence.

MEAL TICKET. An expression common in the intelligence community for the valuable information supplied by a defector in return for resettlement.

MEERUT CONSPIRACY. In March 1929, 32 Communists were arrested in Bombay and charged with conspiracy to deprive the king-emperor of India, after the party had been penetrated by the Indian Political Intelligence Bureau, then led by Sir Horace Williamson. After a trial lasting three years, and a judgment of 700 pages, all but four of the defendants were convicted and the Communist party of India all but collapsed.

MEINERTZHAGEN, RICHARD. In October 1917 Richard Meinertzhagen, a staff officer working for General Sir Edmund Allenby during the Palestine Campaign, perpetrated an ingenious deception scheme to persuade the Turks that an imminent offensive was to be concentrated on the town of Gaza. The true objective of the attack was Beersheba, which was seized easily because Gaza had been reinforced, leaving the outpost vulnerable. Meinertzhagen’s plan was to plant a briefcase containing secret documents on an unsuspecting enemy, and this he achieved during an encounter with a Turkish patrol, leaving the bloodstained briefcase as though the owner had been wounded. The documents, supporting by a collection of other plausible correspondence and personal effects, suggested that Allenby would be on leave at the end of October, but upon his return the following month he would launch a frontal attack on Gaza. The ruse proved highly effective and the capture of Beersheba opened the route to Jerusalem, 60 miles away, and broke a stalemate in the Negev Desert that had lasted for six months.

Born in 1878, Meinertzhagen was one of the most remarkable polymaths of his era, distinguishing himself as a soldier, scientist, explorer, spy, and ornithologist. His bloodthirsty experiences in East Africa, as an officer in the King’s African Rifles and a big game hunter, were documented in his diaries, while his Birds of Arabia remains a standard textbook on that subject. He also battered a man to death with a polo stick for maltreating a pony and killed a German with a knobkerry that is still preserved in the Tower of London. After his death in June 1967, some doubts were expressed about the authenticity of some of the specimens in the ornithological collection he had donated to the Natural History Museum, suggesting that he had perpetrated a gigantic hoax by fabricating some of them.

MELVILLE, WILLIAM. In January 1892 Detective Inspector William Melville of Special Branch led a raid on the Walsall bomb factory that resulted in the arrest of five anarchists, all members of the Autonomy Club in Windmill Street, London, which Melville had penetrated. All five defendants were convicted, and four received 10 years’ imprisonment.

When Melville retired in November 1903 he had served in the Metropolitan Police for 32 years and acted as bodyguard for Queen Victoria and for several visiting heads of state, among them the kaiser and the president of France. At the time, the total strength of the Special Branch was 15 detectives.

In January 1911 Melville joined Vernon Kell at MI5, which consisted only of Kell, a secretary, and a clerk. By the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 the organization had expanded to nine officers, three civilians, four women clerks, and three detectives, including Melville. In 1916 Melville was transferred to the Ministry of Munitions to run a Labour Intelligence branch, but the organization was dissolved in 1917 when its tactics, of employing agents provocateurs, was raised in Parliament.

MENEZES, ROGEIRIO DE. A young clerk employed by the Portuguese embassy in London during World War II, Rogeirio de Menezes was a Sicherheitsdienst (SD) spy who was arrested by MI5. A former law student, he arrived in London in July 1942, trained in secret writing techniques. However, he had been identified from ISOS as an SD agent before he ever landed. Menezes was the subject of surveillance and MI5 even planted some girls on him, but he made no admissions. The evidence against him was obtained through TRIPLEX, in letters addressed to his sister but containing information for the enemy, but the example presented to the Portuguese ambassador, containing details of antiaircraft batteries in Hyde Park and a report on public morale, was removed from Menezes before it could be placed in the diplomatic bag. Presented with the irrefutable proof, Ambassador Monteiro stripped Menezes of his diplomatic immunity, thereby allowing him to be arrested as he left the building in February 1943.

At a preliminary interrogation conducted by Edward Hinchley-Cooke, Menezes made a partial, written confession, admitting that he had been paid £25 a month by the Germans, and also worked for the Italians, paid on results. He then succumbed completely later the same evening at Camp 020. In his confession, Menezes named all his contacts in Portugal, leading to 17 arrests by PIDE, the Portuguese secret police. He was convicted under the Treachery Act in April 1943, sentenced to death, but reprieved the following month when the Portuguese ambassador demonstrated the enthusiasm with which PIDE had pursued the leads supplied by MI5.

MENZIES, SIR STEWART. Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) from 1939 to 1953, Stewart Menzies was the son of Lady Holford and was brought up by the man who became her second husband, Colonel Sir George Holford. Menzies’s friends sometimes thought that he promoted the idea that he was Edward VII’s illegitimate son, a rumor often in circulation in polite society, fueled by his refusal ever to mention his father, Jack Menzies, in his Who’s Who entry. A regular officer in the Grenadiers, Menzies subsequently transferred to his stepfather’s regiment, the Life Guards. During World War I, Menzies fought in France at Ypres and won the DSO and the Military Cross, but he was not to return to regimental duties for the remainder of the conflict, during which he was engaged on “secret service and security” under Colonel (Sir) Walter Kirke. His first experience of what had been termed MI1 (c) was when he was posted to Sir John Haig’s headquarters staff at Montreuil in December 1915.

In November 1918 Menzies married Lady Alice Sackville, the daughter of the 8th Earl de la Warr but 13 years later they were divorced so she could wed Colonel Fitzroy Spicer of the 16th Lancers. The following year Menzies married Pamela Beckett, one of the four daughters of the Honourable Rupert Beckett, an immensely wealthy Old Etonian who was chairman of the Westminster Bank and proprietor of the Yorkshire Post. Later Menzies was to have a string of mistresses, including Freda Portarlington, wife of the 6th Earl of Portarlington; the wife of a near neighbor at his country home in Wiltshire at Bridges Court, Luckington; and, it was rumored, his secretary Evelyn Jones.

When Menzies effectively accepted the mantle of SIS chief from the ailing Admiral Hugh Sinclair in November 1938, he was head of Section II, SIS’s army section, although in reality he had always acted as C’s deputy. Menzies spoke good French and German; was widely admired as a horseman, hunting with the Beaufort; had an eye for a pretty pair of legs; and, aged 49, either knew or had been at Eton with most of the Cabinet. However, almost as soon as his appointment had been confirmed, SIS was engulfed by the Venlo disaster, the abduction of two SIS officers Sigismund Best and Richard Stevens.

The SIS inherited by Menzies was virtually in a state of collapse, yet thanks to some cryptographic breakthroughs achieved on the Abwehr’s hand ciphers and a few Enigma keys, there was a chance that “C” would not be entirely blind. By the end of 1940 the Government Code and Cipher School had exploited the early achievements of the codebreakers at Bletchley Park.

In November 1951 Menzies sacked Kim Philby, and this may have had a bearing on Menzies’s decision to retire in July 1952, at the age of 62, two and a half years after the mandatory retirement for his staff. His wife Pamela, who had been in poor health for years, had died in March the previous year, and his relationship with the Honourable Audrey Chaplin, the daughter of Sir Thomas Latham, the chairman of Courtauld’s, resulted in their marriage in December 1952, a few days after the death of his older brother Keith. Two years later Menzies attended the marriage of his only child, his daughter Fiona, and then returned home to Bridges Court to a life of retirement spent hunting and racing until his death at King Edward VII’s Hospital for Officers of pneumonia at the end of May 1968. Two days later, his obituary in the Times broke with tradition and announced the death of the “former Head of the Secret Intelligence Service.”

METEOROLOGICAL OFFICE. The Meteorological Office, an ostensibly harmless branch of the Ministry of Defence, provided civilian cover from June 1958 to May 1960 for Royal Air Force personnel flying U-2 reconnaissance aircraft from Incirlik in Turkey over the Soviet Union, Egypt, Syria, and Israel. The aircrew, who were trained at Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas, participated in the overflights until the loss of Francis Gary Powers prevented further U-2 incursions into Soviet airspace.

METROPOLITAN POLICE. In addition to SO12 formerly known as Special Branch, the Metropolitan Police (also known as Scotland Yard or New Scotland Yard) has several intelligence-oriented units in the Special Operations Directorate of the Criminal Investigation Division:

SO10, Covert Operations, provides criminal intelligence support through three teams: the Intelligence Evidence Unit, which uses video and still photography to gather evidence against target criminals; the Facial Identification Unit, which exploits technology to identify suspects; and the Telephone Subscribers Unit, which liaises with landline and cell phone providers

SO11, Criminal Intelligence, collects, collates, and analyzes data about target criminals through four units: the Specialist Intelligence Section, which maintains the database; the Financial Intelligence Unit, which coordinates financial investigations and is the designated recipient of information provided under money-laundering legislation; the Strategic Analysis Unit, which evaluates crime, develops patterns, and researches profiling; and the Prison. Liaison Section, which maintains a link with the Prison Service

SO13, which was established as the Bomb Squad following a series of anarchist bombings in London in 1970 by the Angry brigade, and in March 1976 was renamed the Anti-Terrorist Branch, expanded to cope with Provisional Irish Republican Army atrocities in the capital

MI1. The War Office abbreviation for the Directorate of Military Intelligence. The subsections of the Intelligence Branch were:

MI1(b), a cryptanalytical organization developed during World War I, located at Cork Street, Mayfair, and staffed by Intelligence Corps personnel; later responsible for censorship, publicity, and propaganda policy

MI1 (c), the original War Office military intelligence designation for the Secret Intelligence Service, referred to in official handbooks as “special duties”

MI1(d), the clerical division responsible for the distribution of papers and the allocation of travel grants

MI1 (e), a cipher bureau based at Le Touquet during World War I for the study of German codes; later responsible for artillery, small arms, explosives, and mechanization intelligence

MI2. The military intelligence designation in the War Office for the section responsible during World War II for the analysis of information derived from Scandinavia about Germany, including:

MI2(a), responsible for military intelligence in Egypt and the Middle East

MI2(b), responsible for military intelligence in the Soviet Union, Poland, and the Baltic States

MI2(c), responsible for military intelligence in the Far East

MI3. The military intelligence designation in the War Office for the section responsible for the analysis of information about Western Europe, dedicated to Germany during World War II. Its subsections included:

MI3(a), responsible for military intelligence in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain, Tangier, and Portugal

MI3(b), responsible for military intelligence in Germany, Holland, Austria, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark; this was later redesignated MI14

MI3(c), responsible for military intelligence in Italy, Albania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey

MI3(d), responsible for military intelligence in the United States and Central and South America

MI4. The military intelligence designation in the War Office for the section responsible for the preparation of maps, including:

MI4(a), responsible for administration, geographical surveys, and stores

MI4(b), responsible for maps and photographs of the Middle East and liaison with the Royal Air Force

MI4(c), responsible for maps of Asia, Australasia, and Oceania

MI4(d), responsible for maps of Europe and Asia west of 90 degrees east longitude

MI4(e), responsible for maps of Africa, North and South America, and the Caribbean MI4(f), responsible for geodesy of the world and liaison with the Air Survey Committee and the colonial Survey Committee

MI4(g), responsible for collection and indexing of all topographical information

MI5. The military intelligence designation of the Security Service. In January 1916, the General Staff was reorganized, including the establishment of a new Military Intelligence Directorate. MO5 subsections (a) through (d) became MI6, and (e) through (h) became subsections of MI5. MI5, under the command of Vernon Kell, was charged with coordinating counterintelligence measures and dealing with counterespionage throughout the British Empire. During World War I, MI5 had three main branches:

MI5(f) (Preventive), headed by Eric Holt-Wilson

MI5(g) (Investigation)

MI5(h) (Secretariat, administration, and records)

Other branches included MI5(d), responsible for Imperial, Oriental, and Near East affairs; MI5(c), responsible for port control; and MI5(e), responsible for military policy on the control of civilian traffic. On 23 April 1917 the Parliamentary Military Secretary Department Section 2 (PMS2)—a section of the Ministry of Munitions originally formed from MI5(f) on 19 February 1916 to deal with matters relating to aliens and others working in munitions plants and auxiliary military establishments—rejoined MI5 as MI5(a). On 1 September 1917 MI5(b) was merged with MI5(d).

On 1 August 1919, after the Armistice, military control of home ports ceased and overseas stations were put under MI1(c). On 1 September 1919 MI5(a) merged with MI5(f). On 31 March 1920 MI5 was reorganized again and MI5(f) became MI5(a), MI5(g) became MI5(b), and MI5(h) became MI5(o). MI5(p) was the military intelligence designation for the War Department Constabulary before World War II.

MI6. The military intelligence designation of the Secret Intelligence Service.

MI7. The military intelligence designation in the War Office for the section responsible for press liaison.

MI8. The military intelligence designation of the Radio Security Service during World War II. During World War I MI8 consisted of:

MI8(a), the War Office section dealing with signals intelligence policy and wireless

MI8(b), the section dealing with the General Post Office and the interception of commercial cable traffic

MI8(c), the section responsible for the distribution of intelligence acquired from censorship

MI8(g), the section responsible for liaison with private cable carriers

MI9. MI9(a) was the military intelligence designation during World War II assigned to the section responsible for the interrogation of enemy prisoners of war, headed by Colonel Norman Crockatt (DDMI P/W) and assisted by Major A. P. Rawlinson. The unit was later transformed into the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre, in November 1941 redesignated MI19. Other MI9 subsections during World War II included:

MI9(b), the Escape and Evasion Service, headed by Colonel J. M. Langley

MI9(b), for liaison with the services and debriefing of escaped Allied PoWs at the Great Central Hotel at Marylebone Station

MI9(d), for training, mainly at Military Intelligence School 9 at Highgate

MI9(x), for planning escapes

MI9(y), for code systems

MI9(z), for clandestine escape tools

MI10. The military intelligence designation of the section collating artillery and gas intelligence.

MI11. The military intelligence designation of the Field Security Police.

MI12. The military intelligence designation in the War Office for the section responsible for liaising with the wartime censorship authorities.

MI14. The War Office section during World War II responsible for compiling the German order of battle, formerly MI3(b).

MI15. The military intelligence designation in the War Office for the section responsible for photographic intelligence.

MI19. The military intelligence designation of the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre.

MIDDLE EAST INTELLIGENCE CENTRE (MEIC). Headed by Brigadier Walter Cawthorn, the MEIC coordinated subversion, censorship, propaganda, and military intelligence from September 1939 until July 1943. When Cawthorn was posted to India as director of military intelligence in 1941 he was succeeded by his deputy, Colonel Sir Iltyd Clayton. The MEIC then became the Middle East Political Intelligence Centre.

MIDDLE EAST MISSION. Special Operations Executive’s regional headquarters in Cairo supervised representatives in Beirut, Tehran, Jerusalem, Istanbul, and Baghdad and ran operations into Crete, Cyprus, North Africa, and the Near and Middle East, having absorbed the local assets of two earlier clandestine organizations, Section D and G(R). The first heads of mission were Arthur Goodwill of Section D (May-September 1940) and Sir George Pollock (September 1940–August 1941). Pollock’s replacement, Brigadier Taverner, was captured after his seaplane was shot down in the Bay of Biscay, so Terence Maxwell was appointed instead (August 1941–August 1942). He was followed by Lord Glenconner (September 1942–October 1943); W. A. Stawell (1943–45); and Henry Benson (1945–46).

MIHAILOVIC, DRAZA. A rival to Tito, General Draza Mihailovic and his Cetniks provided the first organized resistance to the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia, and the controversial decision by Special Operations Executive (SOE) to abandon them in favor of Tito’s Partisans led to almost total Communist domination of the anti-Axis guerrilla forces. The very last British presence in Yugoslavia, Brigadier Armstrong’s mission, was finally extracted in May 1944 by 267 Squadron, leaving liaison with the Cetniks entirely in the hands of a small American Office of Strategic Services team, which was itself withdrawn in October 1944.

Of the SOE personnel sent to help the anti-Communist Cetniks, relatively few were around to catch the flight to Italy because of the extraordinarily high attrition rate. The first mission to arrive, DISCLAIM, led by Major Kavan Elliott and dropped “blind” from Malta in February 1942, was surrounded by the pro-Axis Croatian Ustase immediately upon arrival and handed over to the Germans. Captain Morgan’s mission, also dropped blind in April 1943, suffered a similar fate, being captured by Bulgarian troops as soon as it had landed; none of its members were ever heard of again. A monocled New Zealander, Lieutenant Micky Hargreaves, and his Polish companion Captain “Nash” also came to grief; the Pole was killed instantly by a hand grenade, but Hargreaves was to survive the Gestapo’s brutality after his capture and was liberated from Oflag 4C by the Americans in April 1945. Captain Hawksworth, who landed in May 1943, and his entire mission of five British personnel was wiped out by Bulgarians. Terence Atherton, the leader of HYDRA, was murdered for his gold bullion in April 1942. Paul Pavlic was killed in a German ambush, and Major Neil Selby was captured and then shot attempting to escape. Bill Stuart, the Secret Intelligence Service representative on TYPICAL, died in the air raid that wounded William Deakin and Tito. In addition, several wireless operators died, including Sergeant Blackmore, Lieutenant Smith, and Leading Aircraftman Thompson from FUGUE. Captain Vercoe, who was seriously injured in a bad parachute landing in September 1943, was captured the following March and was still on crutches when repatriated in January 1945. Three other prisoners survived the war: Captain Watts of the Royal Tank Corps and his two sergeants, Cornwall and Robinson, who were caught by Bulgarian troops as they landed; they received harsh treatment from the Gestapo but emerged alive. Thus, in comparison to the missions sent to Tito’s partisans, very few SOE liaison officers lived to commend Mihailovic.

MILLAR, GEORGE. An old Daily Express hand, George Millar was a member of the Paris office working alongside Geoffrey Cox and Sefton Delmer in the days before the French collapse. A Scot, educated at Loreto and St. John’s College, Cambridge, Millar joined the Rifle Brigade after his evacuation from Paris, but in October 1941 he was captured in North Africa and transferred to a prison camp in Italy. He succeeded in escaping from a prison train near Munich and made his way to Strasbourg and across France to Madrid, where arrangements were made for him to be flown from Gibraltar to England. After his arrival, Millar’s bona fides were confirmed by Delmer, and he was invited to volunteer for F Section of Special Operations Executive (SOE). He underwent the agents’ training course at Wanborough Manor and the parachute practice at RAF Ringway. Finally, four days before D-Day, he was dropped north of Besançon to organize the CHANCELLOR réseau; using the code name ÉMILE, he remained in the area until it was liberated by the Americans in October.

Upon his return to London, Millar dined with Lord Beaverbrook, who offered him his job back at the Express. However, Millar opted to write Maquis, a heavily censored account of his work with the resistance, and then Horned Pigeon, the story of his escape. In neither did he mention his many decorations for gallantry, among them the DSO and Military Cross. Later he spent much of his time cruising his yacht in the Mediterranean and farming in Dorset.

MILLER, JOAN. Joan Miller was the maiden name of Mrs. Joanna Phipps, who was recruited into the Security Service in 1939 by MI5’s legendary agent-runner, Max Knight. When she reported to work at MI5’s wartime headquarters at Wormwood Scrubs, she had little idea that she would soon to be deployed against Anna Wolkoff, a leading member of the anti-Semitic Right Club and a suspected Nazi spy. Miller’s task was to penetrate this group of pro-Fascist activists and collect evidence against Wolkoff and the Unionist MP for Peebles, Captain Archibald Ramsay. Miller befriended Ramsay’s wife and was later to provide crucial testimony for the prosecution of Wolkoff and her contact in the U.S. embassy in London, Tyler Kent. Both Wolkoff and Kent were convicted at the Old Bailey and imprisoned. Their trial was attended by Malcolm Muggeridge, who was present as an observer for the Intelligence Corps.

While still working for MI5, Miller married Tom Tinloch-Jones, but her marriage failed and in 1973 she married Julian Phipps, the Daily Mail cartoonist who happened to be a close friend of Derek Tangye, the MI5 officer and author of The Way to Minack. Miller’s memoirs, entitled One Girl’s War, were ghosted by Pat Craig, an Ulster journalist who relied on notes that she wrote during her declining years in Malta. The book was originally intended to be published in London by Lord Weidenfeld, but in November 1986 the attorney-general, Sir Michael Havers, obtained an injunction to prevent its distribution in England. Miller died in June 1985 but her daughter Jonquil arranged for One Girl’s War to be released in Ireland by a small publishing house, Brandon Books, based in Dingle, County Kerry. The attorney-general then made an unsuccessful attempt in Dublin to obtain an injunction but the Irish High Court ruled that a ban would be a breach of Eire’s constitution. It was not until March 1992 that the ban in England was lifted.

MILLS, CYRIL. The Bertram Mills Circus was a thoroughly British institution of world renown. What was less well known was the intelligence role of the founder’s son, Cyril Mills, who as an amateur aviator in the early 1930s regularly flew around the Continent—ostensibly in search of venue for his big top or an appointment with an auditioning performer, but actually to collect intelligence and take aerial photographs of sensitive military airfields. At sites where British air attaches were unwelcome, Mills often succeeded in obtaining permission to land his private plane, and in August 1936 he successfully completed his most difficult mission, an aerial survey of the Messerschmitt factory at Ravensburg.

Following this introduction to the profession of intelligence, Mills was recruited by the Security Service in 1940 and spent the first part of his clandestine career in B Division, the counterespionage branch, where he came into contact with German double agents for the first time. One of the agents he handled, using the cover name “Mr. Grey,” was Juan Pujol, whom he codenamed GARBO in April 1942. Mills was the subject of a ban issued by Camp 020 following the assault on a prisoner, the only incident of its kind during the war. Soon afterward, Mills was transferred to Canada as the security liaison officer responsible for maintaining contact between the embryonic Special Branch of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and MI5’s headquarters in London. His specific task was the interrogation, recruitment, and handling of WATCHDOG, a German double agent in Montreal who succeeded in duping his Abwehr controllers into believing he was still at liberty even after a year of captivity. The case continued until Cliff Harvison escorted WATCHDOG to London, where he was placed in MI5’s custody, and Mills continued to monitor the activities of two other double agents (one of them the nominal agent moonbeam) who were sent to replace WATCHDOG. In September 1945 Mills returned to London to take charge of his family business, his secret wartime role undisclosed.

The person to compromise Mills’s postwar role was Peter Wright, who revealed in SpyCatcher that, far from retiring in 1945, Mills had continued to assist MI5 and, in particular, had allowed his house in Kensington Palace Gardens, which conveniently neighbored the Soviet embassy, to be a listening and observation post. Indeed, at the height of the Cold War, a tunnel was dug from his basement, under the garden, and up to the embassy’s exterior wall so surveillance equipment could be inserted into the building.

MILNE BROTHERS. Tim and Tony Milne, sons of author A. A. Milne, joined the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) at the outbreak of war, and both remained in the organization until the defection of their old school friend from Westminster, Kim Philby, in January 1963. At that point, Tim Milne was head of station in Tokyo and Tony was in Rio de Janeiro. Falsely named by Philby as a fellow conspirator, Tim Milne resigned and subsequently worked as a clerk in the House of Commons.

A journalist before the war, and associated with Valentine Vivian for 20 years, Tony Milne joined the Intelligence Corps in 1940 and was posted to Cairo, where he became involved in intelligence and was transferred to the Ministry of Economic Warfare to run the propaganda side throughout the Libyan campaign. Accepted into SIS’s Section IX in May 1944, he was responsible for the Middle East, dealing with ISK and all intelligence relating to the NKVD and the (supposedly dissolved) Comintern.

MINCEMEAT. MI5 code name for a deception operation dreamed up by Charles Cholmondeley intended to persuade the enemy that the Allies intended to attack Sardinia and not Sicily in 1943. Initially dubbed PLAN TROJAN, the proposal was based on the scheme executed by Richard Meinertzhagen at Beersheba in October 1917 to plant a “lost” briefcase containing secret documents on an unsuspecting enemy. In Cholmondeley’s version, a dead body, supposedly that of a military courier, was to be floated ashore where the enemy would be bound to find it and examine the contents of the briefcase. A suitable cadaver was supplied by the West London coroner and taken to the Spanish coast off Huelva by a submarine, HMS Seraph, in April 1942. When the body of “Major William Martin” was soon turned over to Captain Alan Hillgarth, the British naval attaché in Madrid, he was convinced the documents in the briefcase had been copied by the Spanish authorities and passed to the Germans. This proved to be true, and the ruse succeeded in its objective. After the war, Duff Cooper wrote a controversial, fictional account of the operation, Operation Heartbreak, prompting an authentic version to be released by Ewen Montagu, called The Man Who Never Was.

MINISTERIAL COMMITTEE ON THE INTELLIGENCE SERVICES (MCIS). Chaired by the prime minister, the MCIS consists of the home, defense, and foreign secretaries, the chancellor of the exchequer, and the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Its purpose is to review policy, but in practice rarely, if ever, meets.

MINISTRY OF ECONOMIC WARFARE. A government department that existed only during World War II, the Ministry of Economic Warfare comprised two intelligence divisions: Blockade Intelligence and Economic Warfare Intelligence.

MINISTRY OF MUNITIONS (MMLI). In May 1917 William Melville of MI5 was seconded to the Ministry of Munitions to supervise a Labour Intelligence unit (later renamed Parliamentary Military Secretary 2) that monitored unrest, sabotage, and subversion in strategically sensitive industries. The existence of the organization and its fortnightly, and then weekly, reports became part of the prosecution of Alice Wheeldon in March 1917 on a charge of plotting to assassinate Lloyd George. Evidence against Wheeldon was provided by an MMLI agent provocateur, William Rickard. At the conclusion of the case, the MMLI was absorbed into MI5.

MI(R). The military intelligence section designated MI(R) or MI(Research) was created in 1938 as a War Office unit dedicated to the study of unorthodox or irregular tactics, headed by Colonel Joe Holland, with a headquarters at Station XII, Aston House, near Knebworth in Hertfordshire.

MI(R)’s first attempt to run a clandestine operation into enemy-occupied territory in 1940 ended in disaster. Led by Alan Warren of the Royal Marines, it consisted of three French-speaking officer cadets from Woolwich and was intended to make contact and organize the remnants of the British Expeditionary Force that were believed to be wandering aimlessly in the French hinterland. Warren and his team spent three weeks on enemy-occupied territory but failed to find a single straggler. Their main preoccupation was avoiding the many German patrols and trying to find, after the failure of their wireless, a way back across the Channel. Eventually they commandeered a rowboat and set off toward England. They were eventually rescued, exhausted and demoralized, by the Dungeness Lightship. This humiliating episode was a matter of acute embarrassment to MI(R), and virtually no records of the debacle exist, apart from Warren’s own candid account of it. He was subsequently transferred to the Auxiliary Units, and thereafter to the Special Operations Executive (SOE) headquarters in Singapore.

MITCHELL, GRAHAM. Although crippled by polio as a child, Graham Mitchell excelled at sports and played tennis to competition standards and was a fine yachtsman. In 1930 he won the Queen’s Club men’s doubles lawn tennis championship. Educated at Winchester, where he won an exhibition, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, Mitchell had a sharp mind that manifested itself in his game of chess. He specialized in correspondence chess, in which he once ranked fifth in the world and represented his country.

After coming down from university, Mitchell joined the Illustrated London News and was employed by the Research Department of Conservative Central Office. His politics at this time appear to have been to the right, for he was close to Sir Joseph Ball, the Tory politician and former World War I MI5 officer who was appointed to the Security Executive in 1940. By then Mitchell had been recruited into MI5 where, from November 1939, he worked for Roger Hollis in the F3 section of the antisubversion F Division, concentrating on the surveillance of suspected fascist sympathizers. At the end of the war, he succeeded Hollis as director, F Division.

Mitchell’s career in the Security Service continued into the postwar period and in 1952 he was promoted to head the counterespionage branch in succession to Dick White, who had been appointed deputy director-general following the resignation of Guy Liddell. During the four years Mitchell held the post, until his move to the deputy director-general’s post in 1956, he was responsible for drafting the notorious 1955 White Paper on the defections of Donald Maclean and his old friend Guy Burgess. This extraordinary document remains to this day a lasting testament to the perfidy and incompetence of the Security Service’s counterespionage branch under Mitchell’s stewardship. Not only did the White Paper contain numerous of errors of fact, but it deliberately set out to mislead Parliament and the public over the sequence of events that led up to the defections. Far from not realizing that Maclean had disappeared until Monday, 28 May 1951, as claimed by Mitchell, MI5 knew of his escape to France when it took place the previous Friday evening. No explanation for the many more preposterous assertions contained in the White Paper has ever been forthcoming, although this omission may be explained by the embarrassing fact that Mitchell himself was to be investigated as a possible Soviet spy. In May 1963 Mitchell fell under suspicion during a mole hunt conducted to identify a Soviet spy inside the Security Service, but he opted for early retirement in September, after an inconclusive inquiry codenamed PETERS that lasted only four months. Mitchell died in November 1984, shortly after the revelation that he had been the subject of an investigation.

MITCHELL, LESLIE. Head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) Norwegian Section during World War II, designated P13, Leslie Mitchell took over Flemington, a farm north of Lerwick, to run the Shetland Bus, a shuttle service to Norway operated jointly with David Howarth of Special Operations Executive. After the war Mitchell opened the SIS station in Copenhagen. He was then appointed to Washington, D.C., for three years, and was later head of station in Bern.

MITROKHIN, VASILI. A KGB retiree, Major Vasili Mitrokhin traveled by train from Moscow to Riga in March 1992 to offer the Secret Intelligence Service an extraordinary meal ticket, a huge cache of documents he had painstakingly copied from the First Chief Directorate archive during the 12 years prior to his retirement in 1984. Later in the year Sir Colin McColl authorized Mitrokhin’s exfiltration to England, accompanied by his family, and seven years later he produced The Mitrokhin Archive, edited by professor Christopher Andrew. It was to be followed in 2002 by the KGB Lexicon: The Soviet Intelligence Officer’s Handbook.

The Mitrokhin Archive, drawn mainly from the KGB’s Illegals Directorate, revealed the identity of two British spies, Melita Norwood and John Symonds. However, as neither had been convicted of espionage, the disclosure of their names led to an inquiry conducted by the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, which took evidence from Mitrokhin and issued a critical report in June 2000.

An almost identical edition of The Mitrokhin Archive was published in the United States in September 1999, and a further volume, dealing with Soviet espionage in Europe, is scheduled for publication. Mitrokhin, who joined the KGB in 1948 and attended the Olympic Games in Australia in 1956 in an undercover capacity, later was posted to Tel Aviv and died in January 2004. See also KGB ARCHIVES.

MO5. The Directorate of Military Operations (MO) designation for its intelligence branch that developed into MI5. In October 1909 the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) resolved that an investigation of German espionage in the United Kingdom was needed and appointed Captain Vernon Kell to lead it. Kell was given three officers, transferred to the reserve for this purpose, and a small team of office staff to assist him. The organization, given the designation MO5(g), operated in secret but reported to the colonel in charge of MO5, who acted as its paymaster, military superior, and head.

When Britain entered World War I on 4 August 1914, MO5(g)’s staff comprised nine officers, five civilians, four female office staff, and three police officers. With the outbreak of war, the rules worked out principally by the CID Sub-Committee (one of whose members had been the colonel in charge of MO5) came into force, wherever possible in the form of Orders in Council. The Home Section of the Secret Service Bureau was given responsibility for counterespionage , aliens, and the control of civilian traffic overseas. MO5(g)’s duties were defined as military policy in relation to the civil population, including aliens, and ensuring compliance with Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) regulations insofar as they concerned the MO Directorate.

Before the war, all aliens living in the United Kingdom had been registered, with the exception of the East End of London, and lists of those who were suspected German spies had been drawn up and passed to the chief constables. Upon the declaration of war, these individuals were arrested and the German intelligence system in Britain was totally disrupted.

The war necessitated a major increase in staff. On 1 October 1914 MO5(g) was divided into three subsections: MO5(g)A, responsible for the investigation of espionage and of persons suspected of espionage; MO5(g)B, responsible for coordination of overall policy of government departments in relation to aliens and issues relating to DORA on the Aliens Restrictions Order; and MO5(g)C, responsible for the Registry, personnel, administration, and port control. The section was not housed in the War Office, where it retained only a single room as a postal department.

An April 1915 War Office reorganization created a Directorate of Special Intelligence under Brigadier Sir George Cockerill, with MO5 forming part of it. On 11 August 1915, MO5(g) was reorganized, adding a new subsection. MO5(g)A became MO5(g), MO5(g)B became MO5(f), and MO5(g)C became MO5(h). The new subsection was designed MO5(e) and dealt with issues of military policy in connection with the control of civilian passenger movement from the United Kingdom and, within that, matters of port intelligence and the issue of military permits. MO5(e) would later supervise the creation of Military Permit Offices in London, Paris, Rome, New York, and Brussels, with MO5(h) handling the administration.

In December 1915, the War Office established a new Military Intelligence Directorate, which took control over Kell’s group. Soon after, MO5 was redesignated MI5.

MOBILE RECONNAISSANCE FORCE (MRF). Created in 1971 by Brigadier Frank Kitson, then commanding 39 Brigade in Belfast, Northern Ireland, following his experiences in the emergencies in Kenya, Malaya, and Cyprus, the Mobile Reconnaissance Force was staffed by 40 volunteer soldiers who operated in plain clothes and collected intelligence about local paramilitaries. Their activities were supported by “Freds”—defectors from the Provisional Irish Republican Army whose knowledge was harnessed to mount sophisticated surveillance operations intended to identify their adversaries and interdict terrorism. They were provided with secure accommodation in the married quarters in Palace Barracks, Holywood, and were deployed in much the same way as the “counter-gangs” had been during the Mau Mau campaign.

MRF personnel undertook covert surveys of neighborhoods by deploying women soldiers who sold cosmetics door to door, and the Four Square Laundry offered a cut-price delivery service that enabled linen and clothes to be submitted for forensic examination. The MRF also ran a massage parlor in Belfast.

The MRF was replaced by the 14 Intelligence Company in 1973 when its operations were penetrated and compromised. An undercover soldier was ambushed while on patrol in the notoriously republican Tweinbrook estate, and the codriver of his laundry van, a woman soldier seconded from the Royal Military Police, narrowly escaped with her life (and subsequently was decorated). Details of the MRF’s methodology emerged during the trial in June 1973 of Sergeant Clive Wright, who was acquitted of attempted murder, leading to the decision to disband the unit.

MODIN, YURI. A member of the NKVD’s London rezidentura, Yuri Modin arrived in Britain from Paris in June 1947, having briefly visited at the end of the war as part of a Soviet delegation to a youth congress. He had joined the NKVD from the naval academy in Leningrad, and as a cadet had participated in the defense of that city. In December 1943, at the age of 21, he had been assigned to the English (Third) Department as a translator, one of only seven survivors of the section that was then headed by Lvovich Koghen. Modin excelled as a desk officer, processing a mountain of documents from the Cambridge Five, and in his spare time was also the NKVD’s skating and ski champion.

Modin’s first assignment to London lasted until May 1953, by which time Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had defected to Moscow, and John Cairncross had moved to Italy after falling under suspicion. One of Modin’s tasks was to reestablish contact with Melinda Maclean and assist her wish to join her husband.

In 1956 Modin was sent back to London to make contact with Anthony Blunt and offer some financial support to Kim Philby, but he fell out with his rezident, Nikolai Rodin, alias Korovin, and resigned in 1958 while on leave in Moscow. Later he would serve in the New Delhi rezidentura. In 1994 Modin collaborated with a French journalist to write his memoirs, My Five Cambridge Friends. Modin was identified to MI5 as the NKVD handler for Burgess and Maclean by Blunt in 1964, who knew him only as PETER.

MOE, JOHN. When, as a young man in Oslo, John Moe was offered the chance of leaving German-occupied Norway, he seized the opportunity, even though it meant going to Britain under the Abwehr’s sponsorship as a spy.

Moe’s mother was English and he had worked in the film industry at Denham Studios before the war as a make-up artist. His command of the language was fluent and to the Germans he was an ideal candidate for an espionage mission. His partner was to be Tor Glad, an old friend who shared his ambition to escape from the occupation. Together they were flown across the North Sea in a Luftwaffe amphibious aircraft and then left to row ashore in an inflatable boat. On 7 April 1941 the pair landed on the Banffshire coast but soon afterward they were arrested by the local police. Once the pair had persuaded MI5 of their bona fides, they were enrolled as double agents with the code names MUTT and JEFF. Radio contact was established with the Abwehr, and this link was maintained until February 1944.

The deception was not achieved without mishap, however. After four months of successful cooperation, Glad tired of the restrictions imposed on him by the security-conscious MI5 and broke curfew. Glad was immediately summoned to MI5’s headquarters and told he was to be interned for the duration of hostilities. Despite his protests, Glad was escorted to the Isle of Man and detained as an enemy alien. Moe pleaded for his friend’s freedom but to no avail. An MI5 wireless expert stood in for JEFF when his notional messages were due for transmission and MUTT continued to help his MI5 case officers perpetuate the deception.

MUTT and JEFF were used as conduits for some of the most important strategic deceptions of the war, in one instance persuading the enemy that Allied troops were concentrating on Scotland’s east coast in preparation of amphibious landings in Norway, a ploy designed to divert attention away from the English Channel. MUTT also participated in OATMEAL, a plan to persuade the Abwehr to drop him supplies in February 1943. A Luftwaffe plane dropped him sabotage matériel, a new wireless transmitter, and £400, but then bombed Fraserburgh on the flight back across the North Sea, killing a boy.

At the end of the war, Moe, who had joined up with the Norwegian army in exile, returned home a hero, although he was reticent about his activities as a double agent. Glad was not so lucky and was escorted to Oslo under police guard. After his arrival, he was arrested and charged with collaborating with the enemy, only being released after late intervention by MI5. Glad never forgave his treatment in England, but in 1980 he was reunited with Moe and agreed to discuss his experience publicly for the first time. An employee of Norwegian Television, Glad’s postwar career was handicapped by the suspicion of his colleagues that he had worked for the Germans during the war. His decision to reveal the truth gave him some comfort before his death. Encouraged by the favorable reaction of his friends in Sweden, where he was then living, to the news that he had been a double agent, Moe started work on his autobiography, John Moe: Double Agent, cowritten with a journalist, Jan Moen.

MOLE. Modern usage of a term now applied an espionage agent recruited in his or her youth with the intention of being infiltrated into an organization targeted for penetration. This technique was most famously adopted by Soviet illegals during the 1930s, resulting in the establishment of networks of students cultivated while still at Oxford and Cambridge universities, such as the Cambridge Five and the Oxford Ring. The concept of the “mole,” as a spy burrowing deep into a host society to inflict maximum damage, was referred to by Sir Francis Bacon in 1682 in his Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh. The leading British exponent of developing moles was MI5’s Max Knight, who inserted his agents Olga Gray and Tom Driberg, respectively, into the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1932 and the Young Communist League in 1934.

MONKHOUSE, ALLAN. Allan Monkhouse lived in the Soviet Union for nine years and devoted more than 22 years of his life to developing trade between London and Moscow. All his efforts were nullified when he was arrested in March 1933 and accused of being part of a massive conspiracy to undermine Communism and sabotage Stalin’s plans for economic reform and recovery. Monkhouse’s arrest by the notorious OGPU, together with that of 42 others, among them six British engineers, did not come as a complete surprise. Monkhouse’s Russian secretary had been detained briefly that January, and a strong protest had been registered by her employer, Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Company, which was supervising heavy engineering contracts for the installation of electricity-generating plants in various Soviet power stations. After some hours of interrogation at the Lubyanka Prison, during which he was accused of espionage on behalf of the British Secret Service, sabotage, and bribery, Monkhouse and a colleague, Charles Nordwall, were released on the condition they would not leave Moscow.

The eventual indictment handed to the defendants on 9 April, which ran to 85 pages, revealed that Monkhouse’s secretary had made an incriminating statement to the OGPU about the activities of Monkhouse’s chief engineer, Leslie C. Thornton. At the subsequent trial of 17 defendants, Monkhouse’s lawyer pleaded his client guilty to a charge of bribery. Thornton made what was purported to be a signed confession in which he admitted having worked for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), naming Monkhouse as the organizer of a network of 26 engineers, all his agents.

All our spying operations on USSR territory are directed by the British Intelligence Service, through their agent, C. S. Richards, who occupied the position of Managing Director of the Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Export Company Limited. Spying operations on USSR territory were directed by myself and Monkhouse, representatives of the above-mentioned firm, who are contractors, by official agreement, to the Soviet Government, for the supply of turbines and electrical equipment and the furnishing of technical aid agreements. On the instructions of C. S. Richards given to me to this end, British personnel were gradually drawn into the spying organization after their arrival on USSR territory and instructed as to the information required. During the whole period of our presence on USSR territory, from the total of British staff employed, 27 men were engaged in spying operations. Of the above, fifteen men which included Monkhouse were engaged in economic and political spying, also in the investigation of the defense and offense possibilities of the Soviet Union. The remaining 12 were engaged in political and economic spying.

A construction engineer, William MacDonald, similarly agreed that he had been collecting and reporting information from the Zlatoust Armament Works for SIS.

Monkhouse, the senior Vickers representative, was identified as the ringleader, but he pleaded innocent to all the remaining charges and protested that the bribery incident merely concerned a loan that had been written off as a bad debt. Nevertheless, under interrogation he also made a deposition regarding his predecessor, Anton Simon, who had worked for Metropolitan-Vickers until his death in 1928:

I knew that Simon had a special fund which he used for bribes. I firmly believe that he was interested in certain counter-revolutionary movements, but I did not enjoy his confidence. He did not trust me for certain personal and political reasons. I cannot give exact information about his activity in this direction. Upon Simon’s death I was, immediately afterwards, appointed Metto-Vickers’ manager in the USSR.

The trial was brief and was reported by a large press corps that included Ian Fleming, then a young reporter working for Reuter’s News Agency on his first foreign assignment. In April, Monkhouse was acquitted on the charge of espionage but was convicted of having known of Thornton’s sabotage and of complicity in bribery. Thornton was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, MacDonald to two years. Only William Gregory was acquitted on all charges. Together with his South African-born engineer John Cushny and his colleague Nordwall, Monkhouse was deported to London. Upon his return Monkhouse was invited to Buckingham Palace to give the king an account of his experiences, and among the many journalists covering the story was a young Sunday Dispatch reporter named John Bingham .

The British government expressed indignation at the treatment of the six prisoners from the moment of their arrest, but Monkhouse’s account of the episode, Moscow, 1911–1933, was not entirely candid. He omitted mention of his experience as an intelligence officer in Russia during the 1918 Allied intervention in Archangel, service that he had shared with Richards, the export manager of Metropolitan-Vickers. At the trial, the Soviet prosecutor had emphasized Monkhouse’s intelligence connections but in his own version Monkhouse ignored the issue entirely.

MONTAGU, EWEN. Lord Swaythling’s eldest son, the Honourable Ewen Montagu worked in the Naval Intelligence Division during World War II. A barrister by trade, he represented the Admiralty on the Twenty Committee, which supervised MI5’s double agent operations. In 1953 he wrote The Man Who Never Was, an account of the celebrated strategic deception scheme codenamed MINCEMEAT, involving planting a corpse on the Spanish coast intended to mislead the Germans. See also MONTAGU, IVOR.

MONTAGU, IVOR. The Honourable Ivor Montagu was a GRU spy codenamed NOBILITY who appeared in VENONA messages sent from London in 1940. Born in 1904, Montagu was the third son of the immensely rich Lord Swaythling and brother of Ewen Montagu. He was also an ardent Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) member and later its president. Six VENONA texts refer to Montagu and confirm his importance to the GRU. The London rezident, Simon Kremer, used him as a conduit to the X Group, apparently because, as he reported on 6 September 1940, “INTELLIGENSIA lives in the provinces and it is difficult to contact him.” Montagu was also trusted sufficiently to handle other agents, as is suggested by Colonel Sklyarov’s fragmented signal of 12 August 1941 in which he stated that NOBILITY was undergoing training “so that he can organize BARON ’s very onerous task.”

Educated at Westminster and King’s College, Cambridge, Montagu studied zoology at the Royal College of Science and was well known in artistic circles, being a friend of Sergei Eisenstein and particularly interested in the cinema as an editor, writer, director, producer, and critic. One of Montagu’s great successes was the screenplay, coauthored with Walter Meade, of Scott of the Antarctic, starring John Mills, which was released in 1948. Montagu was extraordinarily wealthy, having a huge inheritance from his great-grandfather, the first Baron Swaythling, who was one of the founders of Shell Oil. He was also a leading exponent of table tennis.

Montagu eventually settled on the island of Rousay in the Orkneys, where he died in November 1984. He was the author of The Traitor Class (1940), wrote many political pamphlets, and was on the editorial board of Labour Monthly, with Rojani Palme Dutt and another leading figure in the CPGB, Robin Page Arnot. After the war, he headed a Soviet front organization, the World Council of Peace. Montagu made no reference to his clandestine role in his autobiography, The Youngest Son (1970), which was intended to be the first of several volumes, giving an account of his life only until 1927; it includes a description of his visits to Leningrad, Moscow, and Tbilisi in 1925 that had a profound impact on his political consciousness.

MONTGOMERY, BRIAN. The youngest brother of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, Brian Montgomery was one of nine children born to the bishop of Tasmania. After Sandhurst he was commissioned into the Royal Warwickshire regiment and later served in East Africa with the King’s African Rifles before transferring to the Indian Army.

During World War II Montgomery worked on Field Marshal Slim’s staff and participated in the retreat from Burma. After the war, as a lieutenant colonel, he commanded the 4th Battalion Baluch regiment and upon the partition of India was recruited into the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). He eventually retired in 1970 and was elected a councilor in the royal borough of Kensington and Chelsea. With the publication of A Field Marshal in the Family Montgomery established himself as a biographer. Shenton of Singapore followed in 1984. Neither volume betrays any detail of Montgomery’s quarter-century career in SIS. Nor indeed does he refer to SIS’s role in the loss of Singapore, the military catastrophe for which Sir Shenton Thomas was made a scapegoat. Although Montgomery was entirely sympathetic to his subject, who died in 1978 aged 94, his account of the last hectic weeks before the surrender omits details of the governor’s controversial refusal to allow Special Operations Executive (SOE) to arm and train Chinese Communists as guerrillas to fight the Japanese. Thomas had turned SOE’s proposal down partly because he considered it defeatist, but mainly because he thought the Chinese in Malaya would turn against the British, as they eventually did. In his autobiography, Montgomery, who died in May 1989, revealed his distant kinship with Kim Philby and the embarrassment this caused him when Harold Wilson’s security adviser, George Wigg, started to investigate how many of Philby’s relatives were still on SIS’s payroll.

MONTGOMERY, WILLIAM. A graduate of the Westminster Presbyterian College, Cambridge, the Reverend William Montgomery, at age 43, translated Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus. In World War I he was recruited into Room 40A, the Diplomatic Section of the Admiralty’s cryptographic unit. Working under George Young, Montgomery collaborated with Nigel de Grey to solve the German Foreign Ministry cipher used in January 1917 to encode the text of the notorious Zimmermann Telegram. After the war, Montgomery remained in the Government Code and Cipher School.

MOON SQUADRONS. The Royal Air Force Special Duties units that conducted clandestine operations during World War II on behalf of the Secret Intelligence Service and Special Operations Executive were known as “moon squadrons” because their flights were largely restricted to periods of the full moon. The original moon squadron was 419 Flight based at North Weald, equipped with four Lysanders. In October 1940 419 Flight was transferred to RAF Strad-ishall in Suffolk. Later 138 (Special Duties) Squadron combined with the King’s Flight to form 161 (Special Duties) Squadron, flying Whitley bombers for parachute drops and based at Tempsford in Bedfordshire.

MOOREHEAD, ALAN. A distinguished Australian war correspondent, Alan Moorehead was the author of The Traitors, an account of the cases of Klaus Fuchs, Allan Nunn May, and Bruno Pontecorvo. Unusually, Moorehead was given considerable assistance by MI5, and Jim Skardon was instructed by the director-general, Sir Percy Sillitoe, to show him extracts from MI5’s files. Moorehead accepted the documents he was shown uncritically and relied upon them for his book, which completely misrepresented MI5’s handling of the Fuchs case. The result was a highly inaccurate version of the investigation into Fuchs that concealed the embarrassing fact that the physicist had been recommended for close scrutiny upon his return to England in 1945 and that his personal file had been endorsed with the comment that he was definitely a covert Communist and “probably a Russian spy.”

MORAVEC, FRANTISEK. The head of Czech military intelligence, General Frantisek Moravec was evacuated by air to London in March 1939 by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) head of station in Prague, Harold Gibson, and subsequently allowed his organization to be run as an SIS surrogate during much of World War II. Moravec was accompanied by his deputy, Major Emil Strankmueller, and 10 other senior staff. While based in London Moravec was accommodated by SIS in Rosendale Road, West Dulwich, an office in Porchester Gate, and provided with a radio station in Woldingham.

The Czechs’ principal asset was Paul Thümmel, codenamed A-54, who was an Abwehr officer and long-serving member of the Nazi party who had volunteered to work for Moravec. When Gibson was transferred to Istanbul, another senior SIS officer, Rex Howard, took over as the liaison officer, and A-54 continued to supply information until his arrest in February 1942.

Long after the war, Moravec wrote his memoirs, Master of Spies, and a later study of VENONA texts suggested that he had become too close to the NKVD rezident in London, Ivan Chichayev.

MORGAN-GILES, SIR MORGAN. Educated at Clifton College, Morgan Morgan-Giles joined the Royal Navy in 1932 and served on the China Station in destroyers. During World War II, he sailed with the Atlantic convoys and in 1941 participated in the defense of Tobruk. In 1943 Morgan-Giles was appointed the senior naval officer at Vis, Croatia, responsible for supervising the transfer of supplies across the Adriatic for Tito’s partisans. After the war, he remained in the navy and in 1953 became chief of naval intelligence, Far East. Upon his retirement in 1964, Rear Admiral Morgan-Giles was elected the Conservative MP for Winchester, succeeding Sir Peter Smithers.

MORRISON, WILLIAM. In April 1935 Stephen Wheeton handed over the task of communicating with Moscow to William Morrison, a fellow Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) member operating a transmitter from his home at 215 Earlsfield Road, SW18. His broadcasts were monitored by Government Code and Cipher School and circulated as MASK. Morrison’s MI5 personal file reveals that after World War II he supplied the Security Service with some very valuable intelligence and disclosed that Morrison also had transmitted from a site at Hersham, near Walton-on-Thames in Surrey, and then from Buckhurst Hill in Essex where one of his former pupils at the Lenin School in Moscow, Sally Friedman, had run the station.

Morrison never read any of the traffic, which was handed to him encrypted in five-figure groups by Alice Holland, but his story, as recounted to MI5’s Max Knight at the end of August 1939, was remarkable. Something of an adventurer, Morrison explained that he had joined the Royal Navy at the age of 16 at Chatham and was trained as a telegrapher, but, under somewhat of a cloud after being disciplined for drunkenness, he had deserted from the light cruiser HMS Constance in Mobile, Alabama, in 1926. Thereafter he became involved in smuggling bootleg Canadian whiskey into California but was arrested and deported in early 1928. After a further spell in Hong Kong and Australia as a seaman on a Swedish ship, the S.S. Heron, he returned to Edinburgh. Failing to find any work, in 1931 he settled in North Shields and was recruited into the CPGB by a well-known activist, William Spence, and was then persuaded by Alec Robson to participate in the Seaman’s Minority Movement. As secretary of the party’s local branch in Tyneside, Morrison was introduced to George Aitken and took over responsibility for the party’s antimilitarist campaign in the north of England. It was in that role that he had distributed seditious literature at Catterick Camp, an act that resulted in the prosecution of a soldier there who was found in possession of it.

Early in 1932 Morrison was invited to London, where he was interviewed by a senior CPGB figure, Bob Stewart, who was in charge of the party’s clandestine activities. Stewart invited him to undertake a secret mission to Moscow, instructing Morrison to travel first to Berlin. He was to go to a back-street tobacconist, who would exchange his own passport for one identifying him as an Australian named Ernest Bell. Morrison went to Moscow, where for the next three years he worked under the alias “Walter Campbell” as a radio instructor at two special schools, one in the suburb of Metischev, the other, opened in 1926 and known as the Wilson School, located at Podlipki. Altogether while in Moscow, Morrison trained more than 50 British and American operators—and later identified several of them by their true names to MI5. Even though all worked under party aliases as a security precaution, many of the volunteers lived together at the Hotel Lux and found it hard to conceal their true names and backgrounds. MI5 later estimated that between 1927 and 1933, the CPGB had sent 167 operators to Moscow for training.

Upon Morrison’s return to England via Stockholm in May 1935, he took over the Wimbledon transmitter from Wheeton, who then had traveled to the Soviet Union for treatment for his chronic tuberculosis, an illness that ultimately proved terminal. Meanwhile Morrison married Mia Exell, a Lyons waitress who lived in Earlsfield, and continued to work as the CPGB’s principal operator—using Treasure Island as a codebook—until October 1937 when he was asked to join the 15th International Brigade fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and the MASK traffic appeared to come to an end.

Under instructions, and accompanied by five other volunteers, Morrison went to Paris and then made his way to Figueres, where he was assigned to Teruel as a wireless operator. After just six months in Spain, Morrison deserted from the 2nd British Battalion and returned to Gravesend on 23 April 1938. There he was interviewed by an inquisitive Special Branch detective, Sergeant J. Blomfield, who passed his report on to MI5. Under Blomfield’s questioning, Morrison admitted that, disenchanted with the disorganization, muddle, and petty jealousies, he had deserted on the Aragon-Belchite front and had made for Barcelona, where he had stowed away aboard the Canford Chine, a British freighter bound for Algiers and Rotterdam, and then joined the Batavier 111 to complete his voyage to England. It was at this point that Morrison abandoned the CPGB, although his wife continued to draw her separation allowance, the grant given to the party’s volunteers in Spain. He found a job as a radio tester at Peto-Scott Limited, a firm manufacturing equipment for the Air Ministry, and also enrolled in the Civilian Wireless Reserve—developments that were recorded in his MI5 file and brought him to the attention of Knight.

MORTON, SIR DESMOND. One of the most influential figures in British Intelligence, Desmond Morton was a Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer who headed the Industrial Intelligence Centre from 1930 until the outbreak of World War II, helped create the Ministry of Economic Warfare, and then was appointed personal assistant to the prime minister with special responsibility for security and intelligence. Educated at Eton and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, Morton fought with the Royal Field Artillery during World War I and joined SIS in 1919. He was knighted in 1945 and retired in 1953.

MOSCOW CENTER. Within the KGB, and its predecessor the NKVD, the organization’s headquarters at 2 Dzerzhinsky Square has always been known as “Moscow Center” or, more simply, “the Center.” The term remained the same when the First Chief Directorate moved to its new compound at Yasenevo.

MOSS, W. STANLEY. Born in Japan, Billy Moss lived in Latvia, spoke Russian, and sailed to England from Stockholm in 1939 to join the Coldstream Guards. When posted to the Western Desert, he volunteered for Special Operations Executive and was selected to participate in an operation in Crete with Patrick Leigh Fermor to abduct a senior German officer, General Karl-Heinrich Kreipe. As his friend Sir Ian Moncreiffe commented wryly, “It was natural that he should have been chosen to go there for he spoke little Greek and no German.” His version of events, as recounted in January 1950 in Ill Met by Moonlight, was based on his wartime diaries but was banned when he first tried to publish the book in 1945. The version that was eventually published was some 60 pages shorter. Moss was decorated with the Military Cross for what the Foreign Office described as “a magnificent exploit.”

MOYZISCH, LUDWIG. The Sicherheitsdienst representative in Ankara during World War II, Ludwig Moyzisch recruited Elyesa Bazna, the British ambassador’s valet, as a source codenamed CICERO and ran him between October 1943 and March 1944. In 1950 he revealed his role in his autobiography, Operation Cicero, although he did not disclose the true identity of his spy. In April 1944 Moyzisch’s secretary, Cornelia Kapp, defected to the Allies, bringing the case to a conclusion. Moyzisch had paid CICERO £300,000, mainly in counterfeit Bank of England notes, and was satisfied by the authenticity of the documents his spy had removed and copied from the ambassador’s safe. When the war ended, Moyzisch was on a neutral ship returning home. He was interrogated in England and again in Germany and released. He is now an export manager in a textile business near Innsbruck.

MP. Special Operations Executive (SOE) symbol for the Polish country section headed by Harold Perkins. Originally founded in late 1940 by Bickham Sweet-Escott, the Poles were well organized and had established networks in Polish communities across Europe, which led to a separate SOE section for Polish minorities, designated EU/P, to liaise with them. By January 1944, direct contact with Poland had been made from Brindisi, where 1586 Flight was based, with another forward position at TORMENT in Latiano, a component of Henry Threlfall’s Force 139.

MUGGERIDGE, MALCOLM. Always a controversial figure who responded to any challenge, Malcolm Muggeridge volunteered for military service after an officer accused one of his more satirical articles in the Daily Telegraph of being a bluff. Muggeridge soon found himself assigned to the Field Security Police wing of the Corps of Military Police at Mytchett, near Aldershot, on the basis of his rather rudimentary grasp of the French language. Although his knowledge of French was slim, he did have wide overseas experience, having taught in India and Egypt and spent a year as the Manchester Guardian ’s Moscow correspondent. Muggeridge’s Field Security Section was attached to GHQ Home Forces, where to his embarrassment he was given the task of monitoring the movements of the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Edmund Ironside, whom the journalist judged to be a Fascist sympathizer. He was also required to attend the Old Bailey trial of Anna Wolkoff and Tyler Kent, the two suspected enemy agents who had been trapped by MI5’s Joan Miller.

Muggeridge’s duties in London during the Blitz were not wholly onerous, and his social life revolved around his wife’s cousin, Andreas Mayor, whose sister Tess was later to marry Lord Rothschild, and his close friend Graham Greene, whose sister Elizabeth was already working for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Through her intervention, both Muggeridge and Greene obtained transfers into SIS. For Muggeridge this involved a preliminary interview with the thriller writer Valentine Williams at his London club, the Savage. Once accepted into the Secret Service, Muggeridge found himself assigned to Section V, where he met a fellow journalist, Kim Philby, with whom he was to work closely.

In March 1942 Muggeridge was posted by Leslie Nicholson to the East African port of Lorenço Marques, where he remained under consular cover for nearly 18 months before he was recalled to London and sent to the SIS station in Algiers to liaise with General de Gaulle’s intelligence service. His period in Mozambique was a melancholy one, and his depression reached such depths that at one point he attempted suicide by trying to drown himself in the Indian Ocean; at the last minute, he had a change of heart and swam for the shore.

Upon his return to London from North Africa, Muggeridge was assigned to Paris, where his formal employment by SIS ended. He went back to journalism, for the Daily Telegraph, but continued to undertake special assignments for SIS and was invited to lecture at SIS’s training weekends, routinely held at Worcester College, Oxford.

Muggeridge was to publish not only two volumes of his autobiography Chronicles of a Wasted Time, in which he discussed his work for SIS, but also a diary he had kept during the war—which was strictly against SIS’s rules. Like It Was, a collection of his diaries, was published in 1981 and contains a daily account of his activities from his arrival in Lisbon in 1942 en route to Mozambique. Among those mentioned in the Portuguese section of the diaries is Rita Winsor, a key figure in the local SIS station and formerly a member of the prewar SIS station in Zurich. Other SIS personalities included in the diaries were Liza Greene and two postwar SIS Chiefs, General Sir John Sinclair and his successor, Dick White.

MUHIE, GENERAL A. J. M. A senior Iraqi trained at Camberley Staff College, General Muhie was dismissed by Saddam Hussein after DESERT STORM in 1991 and became a supporter of the Iraqi National Accord, an opposition group based in Wimbledon, South London. During 2002 he acted as an intermediary, supplying information to London and the Secret Intelligence Service from his brother-in-law, Colonel al-Dabbagh, who had commanded one of four air defense units in the desert west of Baghdad.

MULLETT. MI5 code name for a senior British insurance executive named Thornton, who in 1941 was in contact in Lisbon with Dr. Koestler, later codenamed HAMLET. Born in Belgium to a British father and Belgian mother, MULLETT spent most of his life in Belgium, but after being cultivated by Koestler in Portugal, reportedly was asked to take jewelry to his two children in England and establish a channel for peace negotiations. MULLETT returned to Lisbon in August 1942 under MI5’s instructions and later formed part of a network with an additional member, PUPPET, who was also a British businessman with interests in Belgium. In 1944 MULLETT was used as a conduit for a deception plan codenamed PREMIUM that suggested MULLETT had been asked by the British government for commercial information about industrial sites in the Pas-de-Calais region, thus reinforcing the idea that the Allies intended to land in the area on D-Day.

MURDOCH, IRIS. A former member of an underground Communist Party of Great Britain cell at Oxford, novelist Iris Murdoch was suspected by MI5 of having been a member of the Oxford Ring, a spy ring recruited at the university. Educated at Somerville College, Murdoch worked in the Treasury from 1938 to 1944, when she joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency to assist refugees in Belgium and Austria. A prolific writer, she was elected a fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford, in 1948 and remained friends with Jenifer Hart.

MUSELIER, EMILE. Commandant of the Free French navy and Charles de Gaulle’s deputy, Vice Admiral Muselier was arrested in January 1941 and imprisoned in Pentonville and then Brixton for a week. MI5’s Kenneth Younger and his assistants (Sir) Peter Ramsbotham and John Maude suspected that Muselier was at the heart of a plot to depose de Gaulle and reach an accommodation with the Vichy regime, but the evidence upon which they had relied, four incriminating letters purporting to have come from General Rozoy’s Vichy consulate, turned out to be forgeries and Muselier was released, together with two French security officers, Collin and Howard, who had been detained as fellow conspirators, with a personal apology from Winston Churchill.

Although Muselier was wrongly suspected of having betrayed the disastrous Anglo-French attack on Dakar to Rozoy, he was closely associated with André Labarthe, a fiercely republican political intriguer, a lifelong Communist and, as VENONA later proved, an active Soviet spy in London in 1941.

MUTT AND JEFF. See MOE, JOHN.

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NATIONAL COUNTERTERRORISM SECURITY OFFICE (NCTSO). This liaison unit, staffed by Special Branch officers, provides the link between MI5 headquarters in London and the counterterrorist security advisers in each Special Branch.

NATIONAL CRIMINAL INTELLIGENCE SERVICE (NCIS). Created in April 1992 to coordinate criminal intelligence collection and distribution nationally across the 52 provincial police forces in Great Britain, NCIS was initially chaired by a former Northern Ireland security minister, Sir John Wheeler; in 2002, he was replaced by a failed Labour party parliamentary candidate and barrister, Neil Bailey. Staffed by personnel seconded from the police, MI5, the Secret Intelligence Service, Customs and Excise, and the Immigration Service, NCIS accommodates the representatives of Europol and Interpol and initiates investigations for the National Crime Squad, has a remit that covers organized crime, drug trafficking, and people smuggling and is based in an anonymous building on an industrial estate behind the Albert Embankment. In 2004 NCIS was absorbed into the Serious and Organised Crime Agency.

NATIONAL PORTS OFFICE (NPO). This coordinating body based at the Special Branch headquarters at New Scotland Yard operates 24 hours a day to supervise the work of the Port Units run by individual Special Branches and maintains a link with Customs and Excise and the Immigration Service. As well as dealing with terrorist and intelligence targets, the NPO distributes warnings on criminals and child abductions.

NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY (NSA). The National Security Agency, the signals intelligence organization of the United States, was created in 1952. NSA and its predecessors, the Army Security Agency from February 1943 and then the Armed Forces Security Agency from May 1949, have enjoyed the closest relationship with their British counterpart, GCHQ. The cooperation between the two sigint organizations was formalized in the BRUSA and UKUSA accords, which allow for the exchange of permanent liaison personnel and participation in joint projects such as ECHELON and VENONA. Since World War II NSA has maintained bases in the United Kingdom at Chicksands Priory; RAF Menwith Hill; RAF Alconbury; RAF Croughton; RAF Mildenhall; RAF Sculthorpe; Edzell and Kirknewton, Scotland; and Brawdy, Wales.

NAVAL INTELLIGENCE DIVISION (NID). The intelligence branch of the Royal Navy, headed at the Admiralty by the director of naval intelligence, NID is the oldest component of British Intelligence. NID was subdivided into numbered sections, each with specific responsibilities:

NID 1, the geographic section, responsible for handling all intelligence about Germany

NID 3, the Mediterranean

NID 4, the Far East

NID 5, handbooks

NID 6, topographical studies

NID 7, engineering and technical intelligence

NID 8(g), traffic analysis at the Operational Intelligence Centre

NID 9, signals interception

NID 10, distribution of codes and ciphers

NID 11, PoW intelligence

NID 12, liaison with the Naval Section at Bletchley Park

NID 17, created early in 1940, liaison with other intelligence agencies

NID 18, liaison with the Americans in Washington, D.C.

NEAVE, AIREY. When he was wounded and captured during the bitter fighting for Calais in 1940, Lieutenant Airey Neave of the Royal Artillery was taken to a hospital in Lille as a prisoner of war. After an unsuccessful escape bid, Neave was transferred to Oflag IXa, a camp at Spangenburg near Kassel. From there he was moved to a camp at Thorn in Poland where he succeeded in escaping, but was caught by the Gestapo after four days.

In May 1941, following a period of detention, Neave was sent to Oflag IVc, a special camp for persistent escapers better known as Colditz Castle. From here, on his second try, he made it to the Swiss frontier in just four days. Early in January 1942 he was received in Switzerland by British diplomats but he was obliged to wait for a further three months before he was sent down an escape route through Vichy France to Spain, dispatched by the British military attaché in Bern. Neave was unimpressed by the arrangements.

It was all very well to have read Phillips Oppenheim. This was the real thing, and it seemed dangerously amateur. I had read Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden, the master British spy in Switzerland during the First World War. Surely he had been more professional?

Neave reached Gibraltar in April, where he was welcomed by Donald Darling, who arranged for a troopship to take him to Glasgow. When he finally reached London, he was invited to join MI9, the War Office organization created to brief soldiers on what to expect as prisoners of war. Through his own experience, Neave knew that in addition to MI9, which also interrogated returning escapees, there was a separate organization run by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) that managed the escape lines, but in his memoirs he implies that Darling, who was an SIS officer, was actually MI9.

After the war Neave joined the prosecution staff at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, and in 1953 was elected the Conservative MP for Abingdon. He attained ministerial office in the Air Ministry, but was assassinated by an Irish Nationalist terrorist group as he emerged from the Palace of Westminster underground car park in 1979, shortly before Margaret Thatcher’s first general election victory. Neave had been a close confidant of the Conservative leader and had been tipped to become her secretary of state for Northern Ireland.

NELSON, SIR FRANK. Educated at Neuenheim College, Heidelberg, Frank Nelson fought with the Bombay Light Horse during World War I and was elected the Conservative MP for Stroud in 1924. He retired from politics in 1931 and joined the Secret Intelligence Service to work under consular cover in Switzerland. He was appointed the first director of Special Operations Executive in 1940, with the designation “CD,” and was knighted in 1942. The following year he was posted to Washington, D.C., to represent Air Intelligence, and he later headed Air Intelligence at Detmold until he was demobilized in 1946.

NETHERLANDS. British Intelligence has enjoyed the closest of relations with its Dutch counterparts since World War I when Holland was a major center of espionage and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) ran a large station, headed by Richard Tinsley in Rotterdam.

When the Dutch government was forced to take refuge in London, SIS accommodated the director of military intelligence, Major General J. W. van Oorschot, who remained on good terms with head of the SIS country section, designated P8, Colonel Euan Rabagliati.

After the war Anglo-Dutch relations were strained by the severe losses sustained by Special Operations Executive, but SIS’s postwar head of station in The Hague was a long-term resident, Richard Laming, who had served in the Netherlands Section from November 1943 but had the advantage of having been in Beirut during the period of the worst enemy penetration.

During the Cold War, SIS maintained the closest links with the BVD (Binnenlandse Veiligheidsdienst) security service, modeled on MI5, and the IDB (Inlichtingendienst Buitenlandse), which sponsored SAZ, a stay-behind network named after its headquarters, the Villa Maarheeze, but disbanded in 1994. The Dutch signals intelligence organization, the Technical Information Processing Centre, a component of the Naval Intelligence Division, liaises with GCHQ.

The IDB’s relationship with SIS was sufficiently close for a well-placed spy in Jakarta, codenamed VIRGIL, to be run jointly during the period Indonesia posed a threat to British and Dutch interests in the region.

NETHERLANDS SECTION. Designated N Section, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) branch running agents into the Netherlands was headed by Richard V. Laming, who had run a shipping company on the Rhine but was compromised as a Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) source by the Venlo incident. His deputy was Lionel Loewe, formerly the SIS deputy head of station in The Hague in 1939. N Section’s first agent was parachuted home in August 1940 but was captured within six weeks. The real disaster took place in March 1942 when another agent, Huub Lawers, was persuaded by the Abwehr to report his safe arrival over his radio; Lawers deliberately omitted his security check as a warning, but the omission was ignored in London. The resulting deception, codenamed NORDPOL by the Germans, resulted in more than 50 SOE agents perishing before SIS learned of the penetration in May 1943 and warned SOE, which was reluctant to believe it. Laming was replaced by Charles Blizard in February 1942, but he was moved a year later to SOE’s J Section to run operations in Italy and was succeeded by his ineffectual deputy, Seymour Bingham. The SIS investigation of the fiasco, conducted by Colonel Jack Cordeaux, has never been declassified and released.

NICHOLSON, LESLIE. Leslie Nicholson was well liked by his colleagues and known as a raconteur of entertaining and irreverent anecdotes about his experiences as a Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer in prewar Czechoslovakia and Estonia. He had been posted to Prague in 1930 and spent the next 20 years in SIS. However, when his wife fell ill, he asked “C,” Sir Stewart Menzies, for a loan. Unwisely, Menzies refused, offering instead to commute what pension Nicholson was due. When his wife died, Nicholson moved to the United States and wreaked his revenge on SIS in 1967 by publishing Secret Agent, an amusing account of his prewar career.

Nicholson wrote about being recruited by SIS in London in 1929 and persuaded to resign his army commission. His first assignment was to Vienna, where he was briefed by the local head of station in Vienna, Thomas Kendrick, although Nicholson discreetly omitted his name from the text. Then he moved on to Czechoslovakia and remained there until February 1934, when he was transferred to Latvia. His eventual withdrawal to London in 1940 followed the Soviet occupation of Riga. His lengthy journey home took him via Moscow, Vladivostok, Japan, and Canada. For much of the rest of the war, he remained at Broadway, until he was sent to Bucharest to open up a new station in 1945. Although Nicholson tactfully concluded his story at that sensitive point, SIS was outraged, all the more so because another wartime colleague, Captain Henry Kerby, who had operated in Sweden in 1940 and was then the Conservative MP for West Sussex, had contributed a short foreword. In addition, Malcolm Muggeridge had given his endorsement to the book in an introduction.

The British edition of Nicholson’s memoirs was censored heavily and he was dissuaded from writing a sequel. Instead he volunteered a mass of information to Ladislas Farago, an American journalist of Hungarian origin, who wrote Game of the Foxes, arguably the most detailed account of wartime intelligence operations yet published. Unfortunately Farago was later discredited because of his more sensational newspaper stories, not the least of which was the revelation that he had found Martin Bormann alive in Argentina. Desperately disappointed, Nicholson died in New York, penniless, in 1973.

NIVEN, DAVID. Hollywood star David Niven returned to England in 1939 to rejoin the army and commanded A Squadron of Phantom before being posted to General Dwight Eisenhower’s staff at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. He played a peripheral role in COPPERHEAD, acting as a cover for Gilbert Lennox of MI5 to interview Lieutenant Clifton James of the Pay Corps in 1944 to audition him for the role of General Bernard Montgomery.

NKVD. Created in 1934 as the successor to the OGPU, the NKVD (Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennykh Del, or People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) was the principal Soviet foreign intelligence service and adversary of British Intelligence. Run from Moscow Center, the Foreign Intelligence Directorate was an elite organization that deployed its personnel overseas as members of either “legal” rezidenturas attached to diplomatic missions or “illegal” networks headed by a local illegal rezident. MI5 relied upon surveillance and information from defectors to reconstruct the order of battle of the London rezidentura, although it was not able to do so with any accuracy until Oleg Gordievsky was debriefed at length in 1985.

During World War II Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the Secret Intelligence Service established formal liaison arrangements with the NKVD, with George Hill dispatched to represent British Intelligence in Moscow, followed in April 1945 by Major J. E. Benham. Reciprocating in London was Colonel Ivan Chichaev, who worked closely with D/P, established in 1942 and headed by Major A. D. Seddon. SOE’s Russian operations consisted of PICKAXES, which was the dropping of agents into Western Europe for the NKVD, and MAMBA, the recruitment of Russian PoWs who had been captured while serving in the Wehrmacht.

At the end of World War II the NKVD continued to engage in espionage. After the liquidation of Lavrenti Beria in 1954, following the death of Stalin, the organization was renamed the Committee for State Security (KGB).

NOMINAL AGENTS. Fictitious sources invented by agents or their case officers are known as nominal or notional agents. Although their use can be a high-risk strategy, they have played an important role in deception and double agent operations, particularly during World War II. The master of the notional agent was GARBO, who ran an entirely imaginary network of 26 spies operating across the globe, from a Wren in Ceylon to MOONBEAM, supposedly a Venezuelan in Canada.

NORDPOL. The Abwehr code name for a classic deception operation undertaken in Holland in 1942 and known as Englandspiel in which Special Operations Executive’s Netherlands Section was persuaded that their networks in Holland were at liberty, whereas all had fallen under the enemy’s control and perished at Mauthausen concentration camp. The disaster resulted in a postwar parliamentary inquiry in the Netherlands in which the British declined to participate.

NORWAY. Following the relationships forged during World War II with the Norwegian Section of Special Operations Executive (SOE), the Shetland Bus, and the hugely successful network of 147 radio transmitters run by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), Norway’s postwar intelligence agencies have enjoyed the closest liaison with their British counterparts. Asbjorn Bryhn, head of the Security Police from 1947 to 1962, had been the security chief in London of the Norwegian resistance organization Milorg during the war. Similarly, Roscher Lund and his successor as chief of the Norwegian Intelligence Service (NIS) in 1946, Vilhelm Evang (who remained in the post for 20 years), both worked for the wartime resistance in London.

SIS played an active role in the development of the stay-behind network codenamed SATURN, which was intended to form the basis of a sabotage and resistance group of well-trained guerrillas if the Soviets occupied the country. In 1955 the U.S. National Security Agency reached an agreement with the NIS to share signals intelligence collected at a string of intercept sites monitoring Soviet wireless traffic, and GCHQ followed soon afterward to negotiate a similar arrangement with Major Knut Haugland of the Royal Norwegian Air Force, who had operated for SOE during the war.

The links between NIS and SIS were so close that from 1954 joint cross-border operations, codenamed LOG CABIN, were mounted to tap Soviet communication lines. Similarly, the Royal Air Force flew electronic intelligence missions from Norwegian bases. Later in the Cold War, SIS and NIS cooperated to handle Soviet defectors such as Oleg Bitov in 1983.

The NIS was dissolved in 1990, leaving SIS to liaise with the Police Security Service (Politiets Overvakingstjeneste, POT), the Joint Defense Security Service (Forsvarets Sikkerhetsjeneste, FO/S), and the Joint Defense Intelligence Service (Forsvarets Etteretningstjeneste, FO/E).

NORWEGIAN SECTION. The original Norwegian subsection of the Scandinavian Section of Special Operations Executive (SOE) was headed by James Chaworth-Musters, the owner of a farm in southern Norway who had been attached to the British consulate in Bergen during the German invasion. Its principal preoccupation, in the absence of any radio equipment, was preparing for Operation CLARIBEL, a somewhat optimistic scheme intended to harass German units while they embarked on barges in anticipation of an invasion of England. Surprisingly, this ambitious contingency plan, which was intended to incorporate similar arrangements in Sweden and Denmark, was not shelved until 1942. Chaworth-Musters’s section was expanded in November 1940 to encompass a Scandinavian Section under the leadership of Harry Sporborg, with Charles Hambro acting as regional controller.

In January 1942 a separate Norwegian Section, designated SN Section, was created under Colonel John Wilson, formerly of the Boy Scout movement. SOE was only able to operate in Norway with the sponsorship of the resistance organization Milorg, which proved very demanding despite regular liaison meetings held at Chiltern House, the Norwegian Section’s headquarters in Baker Street. Altogether 230 agents and 1,047 tons of stores were dropped in 689 successful sorties. Among the best-known operations was GUNNERSIDE, the sabotage of the hydroelectric installation at Vermork in 1943.

NORWOOD, MELITA. A lifelong Communist and spy codenamed HOLA and TINA by the KGB, Melita Norwood was exposed publicly by Vasili Mitrokhin in September 1999 as having been in contact with the illegal rezident in England until 1961. Born in London in 1912 of an immigrant Latvian bookbinder named Sirnis, Norwood had been a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and was linked to Percy Glading in 1938 when the former CPGB national organizer was imprisoned for espionage. Her name and her family’s address in Hampstead were found in a notebook owned by Glading at the time of his arrest, when he was charged with stealing secrets from the Woolwich Arsenal, but MI5 did not pursue the clue. Later she had joined the headquarters of the British Non-Ferrous Metals Association in Euston as a typist for one of its directors, G. J. Bailey, and this gave her access to nuclear secrets, as the organization was a component of the Anglo-American project to develop an atomic bomb, which the NKVD had dubbed Operation ENORMOZ.

In 1964 Norwood was tentatively identified as the spy TINA who had been mentioned in a single VENONA message from Moscow dated 16 September 1945. According to the text transmitted to the rezident in London, “Her documentary material on ENORMOZ is of great interest and represents a valuable contribution to the development of the work in this field.” However, the addressee, Konstantin Kukin, had been directed to “instruct her not to discuss her work with us with her husband and not to say anything to him about the nature of the documentary material which is being obtained by her.” Thus MI5 established in 1964, when the text was finally decrypted, that Norwood had been an active spy in September 1945 and had been ordered not to confide in her husband, a Communist schoolteacher, about her espionage. Surprisingly, despite this evidence that she had engaged in betraying atomic secrets, MI5 chose not to take any action and did not even bother to interview her, on the grounds that she had remained a hardened CPGB member and therefore was unlikely to cooperate with any interrogation. A subsequent inquiry conducted by the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee criticized MI5 for failing to talk to her.

NOVEMBER 17. The Greek terrorist organization November 17 or N-17 was named after the date in 1973 when the Greek military junta’s tanks entered the Athens University campus to suppress a student demonstration. The group peddled a strange Marxist nationalist message and has claimed responsibility for the deaths of 20 people, including the assassination of the local Central Intelligence Agency chief of station, Dick Welch, in December 1975. It was placed on the Home Office’s proscribed list under the Terrorism Act (2000). In June 2000 the British defense attaché, Brigadier Stephen Saunders, was shot dead as he drove himself to the embassy, resulting in offers of assistance from MI5 and Scotland Yard’s Anti-Terrorist Branch. No progress was made in the murder investigation until 2002, when Kostas Telios was injured as a bomb he was carrying in Piraeus detonated prematurely. Under interrogation in hospital, Telios identified the whole of N-17’s membership, mainly his family and close friends, who were promptly arrested. The leader was an academic, Alexandros Glotopoulos, and the group’s principal gunman was Dmitris Koufodinas; both received multiple life sentences.

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OAKLEY-HILL, DAYRELL. Recruited into Section D in 1939, Dayrell Oakley-Hill had commanded King Zog’s gendarmerie in Albania since 1929. In 1940 he joined Special Operations Executive and served as DH/61 in the Romania, Greece, Crete, and Albania Section before switching to the Secret Intelligence Service in 1945 and returning to Tirana as a member of the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Agency mission. In 1949 he ran the Athens end of VALUABLE, and he later became chairman of the Anglo-Albanian Society in London. Oakley-Hill died in November 1985.

OATLEY, MICHAEL. Born in 1936 and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, Michael Oatley joined the Secret Intelligence Service in 1959 after two years in the Royal Navy. He served in Kampala, Lomé, and Accra. In 1973 Oatley was posted to Belfast, Northern Ireland, where he established contact with the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) and maintained the link for the next 20 years, acting as an unofficial conduit. When dealing with the PIRA, he was known to them by the code name MOUNTAIN CLIMBER. In 1975 Oatley was appointed head of station in Hong Kong and his last overseas posting before his retirement to join a private security firm was Harare.

OATMEAL. MI5 code name for one of the most unusual double agent operations of World War II. OATMEAL involved two Norwegians, John Moe and Tor Glad, who had been flown to Scotland in a Luftwaffe seaplane and paddled ashore near Crovie on the Moray Firth in April 1941. They quickly surrendered to the police and then, codenamed MUTT and JEFF, cooperated with MI5 to establish contact with their German controllers. The deception worked until February 1943, when a consignment of money and explosives was to be parachuted to the spies. MUTT prepared a suitable dropping zone near Aberdeen and MI5 instructed the Royal Air Force not to intercept any enemy intruders on the appointed night. The Luftwaffe plane flew to the appointed spot and dropped a new wireless, £400, and a quantity of sabotage matériel. Unfortunately, on the way back across the North Sea, the pilot took the opportunity to bomb the undefended town of Fraserburgh, killing a single 11-year-old boy. MUTT felt personally responsible for his death, wrote an anonymous letter of condolence to the mayor, and 40 years later made a journey from Norway to visit his grave.

OATSHEAF. MI5 code name in 1967 for derogatory information about Prime Minister Harold Wilson offered by James Angleton, then chief of Counterintelligence Staff at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Angleton offered to tell MIS’s director-general, Sir Martin Furnival Jones, the details on the condition that the CIA could control whatever action MI5 decided to take. Furnival Jones refused those terms, so the substance of the allegations remained unknown until 1974 when a further investigation, codenamed WORTHINGTON, was conducted, based on claims made by a KGB defector, Anatoli Golitsyn, and subsequently disclosed by Peter Wright.

O’BRIEN-FFRENCH, CONRAD. At the age of 17, Conrad O’Brien-Ffrench, an Irishman born in London, set off for Canada to become a Mountie. Shortly before the outbreak of the World War I, he returned to England and was sent to France with the Royal Irish Regiment. Wounded at Mons in August 1914, he spent the next three years of the conflict in a German prisoner of war camp near the Baltic where, through the use of secret writing, he established contact with British Intelligence. His contact was Cathleen Mann and, using potassium iodide purloined from the Augustabad camp hospital, he kept up an illicit correspondence with Mann, who happened to work for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) as one of the Chief’s secretaries.

O’Brien-Ffrench continued to use the secret writing even after he had been transferred to an internment camp in Holland. Both belligerents had agreed that after three years of captivity, PoWs could be moved to a neutral territory and kept there for the duration. For O’Brien-Ffrench, this meant staying at Scheveningen and undertaking voluntary work for the Italian Legation in The Hague, where the minister had responsibility for looking after the interests of Italian PoWs in Germany. Naturally this provided plenty of useful intelligence and once again brought the Irishman into contact with the local SIS station.

At the end of the war he was invited to meet Stewart Menzies, who offered him the post of assistant military attaché at the British Legation in Helsinki. This, however, was to be his cover, and he was actually to work for Major Dymoke Scale, SIS’s representative in Sweden. O’Brien-Ffrench arrived at his new job in January 1919 and was introduced to Augustus Agar and Arthur Ransome. In the autumn of the following year O’Brien-Ffrench was transferred to Stockholm, and he remained there until May 1921 when his tour ended and he returned to his regiment, which had been posted to India. While there he acted as ADC to the Prince of Wales, but he was bored by the dull routine of soldiering and resigned his commission in 1923.

Having abandoned regimental life, O’Brien-Ffrench became something of Bohemian and studied at the Slade School of Art, and later in Paris, to be a painter. He acquired a reputation as a playboy and spent the next few years traveling across Europe. Among his acquaintances in the art world during this period was Tomás Harris, the Goya expert who was later to join MI5. In July 1935 O’Brien-Ffrench was skiing in Lapland when he discovered by accident that large reserves of Swedish iron ore had been reserved for the German steel industry. This he reported to Menzies, and he was soon back on SIS’s books, ostensibly running a tour company in Vienna but actually undertaking reconnaissance missions from the ski resort of Kitz-buhel. Among his clients who took advantage of the low-cost ski holidays offered by his Tyrolese Tours were Peter Fleming and Ian Fleming. His principal case officer was Claude Dansey, whom he disliked. “Times had changed. British Intelligence was now run on a shoe-string budget and on my first day Claude Dansey, as new chief, had insulted me by slipping me a fiver as if he were hooking a common informer.”

At the outbreak of World War II O’Brien-Ffrench was in Canada, having resigned from SIS because his cover had been compromised by the Gestapo but he returned to London in the summer of 1940 and was appointed a censor in Scotland. Later he was to do the same work in Trinidad, and ended the war in poor health in Oxford. Soon after the conclusion of hostilities O’Brien-Ffrench married and moved back to Canada, where he bought a ranch and taught at the Banff School of Fine Arts. His autobiography, Delicate Mission, was published in 1979 when O’Brien-Ffrench was 85.

O‘BRYAN TEAR, HUBERT. Educated at St. Paul’s and Cambridge, where he read modern languages, Terry O’Bryan Tear worked for Special Operations Executive’s RF Section during World War II and later joined the Secret Intelligence Service. In August 1944 he parachuted into France as leader of the JEDBURGH team codenamed BENJAMIN. After the war, O’Bryan returned to Cambridge to study Russian and then was posted to Germany. Later he was head of station in Moscow, Stockholm, Aden, and the Far East before retiring to Switzerland, where he died in November 1993 at age 74.

ODIOUS. Code name for Max Brandli, a double agent active in the Middle East during World War II and run by Security Intelligence Middle East. Brandli was a Swiss watch salesman recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in Istanbul in 1942 after he volunteered the fact that he had been approached by the Abwehr in Vienna to spy in Syria. With SIS’s consent, he returned to Vienna to accept his mission and was back in March 1943. He was allowed to travel to Syria the following month but Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME) interrogated him, aware that he had undergone undisclosed training by the Abwehr in 1940. He was arrested by SIME on a second mission to Syria in October and admitted that he had been spying for the Abwehr in Spain, Tangier, and Vienna since 1941.

OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES (OSS). In 1942 General “Wild Bill” Donovan persuaded President Franklin D. Roosevelt to authorize the establishment of an intelligence agency in the United States. The OSS was divided into two branches, Secret Intelligence and Special Operations, which mirrored the differing responsibilities of the Secret Intelligence Service and Special Operations Executive. Liaison personnel were attached to both British organizations, and a small team of counterintelligence specialists, led by Professor Norman Holmes Pearson, from SI’s X-2 section, was posted to MI5.

The relationships established during World War II between OSS personnel and their British counterparts lasted long after the OSS was disbanded and replaced by the Central Intelligence Group and in 1947 by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Many CIA officers began their intelligence careers liaising with British Intelligence, among them James Angleton, later chief of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff and the founder of CAZAB (Canadian, American, New Zealand, Australian, and British counterintelligence liaison), and Bill Casey, later President Ronald Reagan’s director of central intelligence.

OFFICIAL HISTORIANS. Most of Britain’s clandestine organizations have long had a policy of preparing official histories, not for publication but as internal reference works. GCHQ commissioned a series of 13 histories of individual sections in 1945, which have been declassified and released to the National Archive. MI5’s wartime history, written by Jack Curry, has also been released, and a postwar history of the Security Service is under preparation by the organization’s official historian, Professor Christopher Andrew.

Special Operations Executive’s internal history, written by Professor William Mackenzie, was published in 2000, and the History of the Political Warfare Executive by David Garnett, written in 1946, was published in 2001. Professor M. R. D. Foot was commissioned to write SOE in France in 1962 and Christopher Woods has completed SOE in Italy. SOE in Greece and SOE in Yugoslavia have yet to be finished.

The Secret Intelligence Service commissioned Neil Blair in 1967 to write an official account of that organization’s wartime record but it remains unpublished.

The major official history project British Intelligence in the Second World War was headed by Professor Sir Harry Hinsley with help from SIS’s Charles Ransom. Published in five volumes, the first in 1979, the series’ fourth volume, Security and Counterintelligence, was coauthored by Anthony Simkins, and volume 5, Strategic Deception, was written by Sir Michael Howard.

OFFICIAL SECRETS ACTS. The first Official Secrets Act was passed in 1888 as a result of the acquittal of Charles Marvin, a part-time employee of the Foreign Office charged under the Larceny Act of the theft of a government document, details of which were published in the Globe. The Anglo-Russian Treaty was then highly secret and when the foreign secretary, Lord Salisbury, denounced the newspaper it responded by disclosing all 11 clauses of the agreement. The case against the person responsible for the leak, Marvin, collapsed when he appeared before the Bow Street magistrate and showed that he had stolen nothing, but had memorized the text in its entirety. The Treasury counsel, Sir Harry Poland, acknowledged Marvin’s phenomenal memory and withdrew the prosecution.

The 1888 Act made it an offense to disclose official information without proper authority. It was enhanced in August 1911 by further legislation, passed by both Houses of Parliament in record time, to make espionage an offense.

In 1920, following the success of Room 40 during World War I, another Official Secrets Act was passed, Section 4 of which required all commercial cable companies to supply the government with copies of their traffic, which was routinely studied by the Government Code and Cipher School, although the practice did not receive any publicity until February 1967.

OGPU. The Soviet intelligence service during the 1920s and early 1930s, the OGPU (Obyedinennoye Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravleniye) replaced the Cheka and was in turn replaced by the NKVD in 1934.

OLDFIELD, SIR MAURICE. Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) from 1973 to 1978, Maurice Oldfield had gained a commission in Egypt while serving in Security Intelligence Middle East as a sergeant in the Intelligence Corps during World War II and had been invited by Brigadier Douglas Roberts to transfer to SIS in London at the end of 1946, together with a group of others, among them Alistair Horne, Myles Ponsonby, and Harold Shergold. Having established his reputation as “Brig’s Brains,” Oldfield joined R5, the requirements section dealing with counterintelligence, as Kim Philby’s deputy.

Oldfield spoke fluent French and German, having traveled widely on the Continent before the war, and was well liked. The eldest son of a Derbyshire tenant farming family, with 10 younger brothers and sisters, from the village of Over Haddon, Oldfield had taken a master’s in history at Manchester University on a scholarship and excelled as an organist, specializing in church music. With a first-class honors and elected to a fellowship, he had intended an academic life, but he settled for the world of intelligence.

Oldfield served at Broadway as a counterintelligence specialist until his first overseas posting, to Combined Intelligence Far East in Singapore in 1950 as deputy to James Fulton, a future controller, Far East. In 1953 Oldfield was back in London, but in 1956 he returned to Singapore as station commander, in charge of several others in the region. Between 1960 and 1964 Oldfield undertook his last overseas posting, as SIS’s head of station in Washington, D.C., replacing John Briance. During this crucial period of the Cold War, he handled the RUPEE intelligence from Oleg Penkovsky, which included CHICKADEE, Penkovsky’s subjective reporting on political issues and personalities, and IRONBARK, the missile manuals he copied, so allowing Oldfield a ringside seat during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.

Some of Oldfield’s colleagues, particularly Nigel Clive, later expressed surprise that someone of his undoubted intellect could have been “led up the garden path” by the Machiavellian interpretations placed on the debriefs of successive KGB defectors. His appointment as Chief in 1973 by Prime Minister Ted Heath was uncontroversial as he had served as deputy to both Sir Dick White and Sir John Rennie and, having been passed over once, was the obvious choice. He was also a devout and regular churchgoer, worshipping at St. Matthew’s, Westminster, where he played the organ, and claimed to read St. Augustine’s Confessions every year.

Oldfield’s achievements as Chief were recognized by his award of the KCMG in 1975, which he received at Buckingham Palace, accompanied by two of his sisters, on the same day that Charlie Chaplin was invested, and a GCMG three years later, making him the first and only Chief to have been granted the coveted honor.

After his retirement at the end of March 1978, Oldfield moved into Brentwood House in Iffley and embarked on a research project, initially intended to be on medieval history at All Souls, Oxford, but when he discovered the amount of scholarship that had been undertaken on his chosen subject since he had left Manchester, he decided to study another topic and embarked on a study of the diaries of the first Chief, Mansfield Smith-Cumming. Unfortunately this idea also had to be abandoned, partly because of the apparent disappearance of all but two volumes of the first C’s diary, but mainly because, in September 1979, he was asked by the new prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, to take up the appointment of intelligence and security coordinator, Northern Ireland, where the many overlapping security and intelligence agencies seemed more adept at combating each other than the Provisional Irish Republican Army. MI5, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) Special Branch, and the army all ran competing organizations in the province, and Oldfield’s task was to direct their activities against the common target and resolve the tense relations between the RUC and the army, as personified by the mutual hostility of the police and the army. Despite a complete lack of any formal executive powers, Oldfield’s formidable reputation ensured cooperation, and within six months he was able to transform the intelligence environment, remaining ensconced in his quarters at Stormont Castle for weeks at a time.

During his infrequent visits to London, Oldfield lived at his flat in Marsham Court, which was conveniently located directly above Locket’s Restaurant, and his meals were often sent up to him with a waiter. On one evening, when was waiter was delivering his dinner, an incident occurred that was the subject of a report by Oldfield’s Special Branch personal protection officer. This resulted in an interview in March with the Cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, at which Oldfield was challenged about his homosexuality, and he was forced to acknowledge that over the past two decades he had lied on his positive vetting questionnaire, which specifically requested a declaration of any sexual proclivities that might leave him vulnerable to blackmail. His security clearance was revoked immediately and he resigned his post attached to the Northern Ireland Office in June, to be replaced by Sir Brooks Richards, the intelligence coordinator to the Cabinet since mid-1978.

OLDHAM, ERNEST. In the middle of 1930 Captain Ernest Oldham walked into the Soviet embassy in Paris and, using an alias, offered to sell British Foreign Office documents. Soon afterward, the Soviets were able to confirm his identity when Oldham was seen at the Hotel Beau Rivage in Geneva with the British delegation to the League of Nations conference. Subsequent checks showed that Oldham lived in Pembroke Gardens, West London.

It was not until after Oldham’s suicide in 1933 that the Soviets learned that Oldham was a cipher expert whose service dated back to December 1913 and had been the head of the department responsible for the distribution of diplomatic telegrams since August 1928. According to a report written by his Soviet contact, Dmitri Bystrolyotov, he was given responsibility for the education of Oldham’s son, who had been entrusted to the care of a German family living in a villa on the Rhine near Bonn. This apparently gave Oldham a pretext for traveling abroad and allowed him to deliver packets of documents at frequent intervals. Not all the meetings took place in Germany; some were held in Madrid, Ostend, and a resort in Switzerland.

After treatment for alcoholism, Oldham continued to drink and beat his wife. In May 1933 he traveled to Paris and delivered another batch of Foreign Office documents to Bystrolyotov, claiming that he had no idea of precisely what the sealed package contained, but insisting that he had paid his source for the contents in full. At this meeting Oldham explained that he had offered to buy the Foreign Office codebook known as “Book C” from his source, as well as three cipher charts, for about three times the amount he had paid for similar material a year earlier. In reality Oldham was working alone, and he went undetected until he was named by Walter Krivitsky in February 1940.

ONE-TIME PADS (OTP). A supposedly secure system of enciphering secret messages, an OTP depends on the two correspondents enciphering a text using an unique sequence of randomly generated numbers that are discarded once used, thus ensuring there is no repetition or opportunity for a cryptographer to discern and exploit a pattern. GCHQ cryptanalysts discovered during World War II that the OTPs in use by the German Foreign Ministry were susceptible to attack because the five-figure numbers had been machine-generated and therefore were not strictly random. The resulting traffic, known as FLORADORA, was distributed on a very limited circulation to authorized recipients in Whitehall.

GCHQ capitalized on this work when studying the VENONA traffic, which had been enciphered by Soviet personnel using OTPs in which some of the individual pages had been duplicated. Because GCHQ had access to some of the original plain text and the encrypted messages that had been used for communicating lengthy bills of lading for cargoes exported to the Soviet Union from the United States during World War II, some of the duplicated traffic could be read. The result was 2,900 messages either partially or completely solved covering a period from 1940 to 1948, which were studied from 1944 to 1979.

The precise reason why the Soviets chose to duplicate some of the pages remains a mystery, as does the method they adopted to generate the original numbers, although the GRU code clerk Igor Gouzenko, who defected in Ottawa in September 1945, suggested that an electric pulse device had been the source.

OPERATIONAL INTELLIGENCE CENTRE (OIC). The Admiralty’s war room, located in a blockhouse on the Mall in central London during World War II, the OIC was where enemy air and naval movements across the oceans were monitored and the countermeasures coordinated based upon information from ULTRA, direction finding, and other sources. Manned 24 hours a day throughout the war, the OIC was a direct descendent of Room 40 during World War I and was headed by the deputy director of naval intelligence, Admiral Jock Clayton. Within the OIC were four branches: an Italian and Japanese Section under Commander Barrow-Green; the DF plotters, led by Commander Peter Kemp; the Submarine Tracking Room headed by Captain Thring; and the German Surface Shipping section supervised by Admiral Norman Denning.

ORLOV, ALEXANDER. The most senior Soviet intelligence officer ever to defect, General Alexander Orlov had been the NKVD rezident in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War but fled to the United States in July 1938 with his wife and daughter. Born Leiba Feldbin, Orlov feared liquidation in Stalin’s purges but remained silent until after Stalin’s death, when he sold his story to Life magazine and in 1953 published The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes. Embarrassed to discover that such a senior figure had been living in the United States for 15 years without detection, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) subjected him to a full debriefing, but during the interrogations Orlov neglected to mention that he had been the illegal rezident in London before he was posted to Spain or that he had personally run a British journalist named Kim Philby.

Orlov died in April 1973 in Ohio, apparently on the verge of accepting an invitation from Georgi Feoktistov at the New York rezidentura to return to Moscow. His FBI minder, Edward Gazur, later wrote Secret Assignment, an account of his relationship with the defector, and then, as Orlov’s literary executor, released Orlov’s Secret Diary.

OSHCHENKO, VIKTOR. Colonel Viktor Oshchenko was a KGB First Chief Directorate Line X science and technology officer in Paris who defected to London in July 1992. He had previously served in London between 1983 and 1989 and his value lay in his knowledge of Michael Smith, a spy he had run previously in England. Smith was arrested in August 1992 and convicted of offenses against the Official Secrets Act.

OSLO REPORT. The naval attaché at the British embassy in Oslo in November 1939 received a seven-page typewritten document purporting to detail German scientific advances, written anonymously and accompanied by an electronic valve. Known thereafter as the Oslo Report, it proved to be an entirely accurate account of Nazi research into the Junkers-88 twin-engine bomber; the construction of an aircraft carrier, the Franken, at Kiel; the development of remote-controlled glider bombs and a pilotless aircraft designated FZ; research into rocket-propelled artillery shells; the establishment of a Luftwaffe research facility at Rechlin, north of Berlin; tactics used in Poland to overcome bunkers; the use of antiaircraft radar on the German coast; and the introduction of new, guided torpedoes fitted with magnetic fuses. Upon examination, the electronic valve turned out to be a new fuse for use in free-fall bombs that armed the weapon only after it had been released from the aircraft, thereby allowing bombers to land safely with bombs onboard.

The Oslo Report was studied in London with some skepticism but the information it contained was recognized as genuine by the Secret Intelligence Service’s newly appointed scientific adviser, Dr. R. V. Jones, and was described by Harry Hinsley as “one of the most remarkable intelligence reports of the war.” Despite much speculation, the identity of the author was not disclosed until 1989 when Jones revealed him to be Professor Hans Mayer.

OVERSEAS CONTROL. The unofficial wartime name, introduced in September 1941, for the expanding organization of MI5 representatives overseas known as defence security officers and originally based at Aden, Cairo, Malta, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

OWEN, WILL. The Labour MP for Morpeth since November 1954, Will Owen was a former miner named in 1969 by a Czech defector, Josef Frolik, as one of his assets, codenamed LEE. Owen had been appointed to the House of Commons Defence Estimates Committee in February 1960 and denied the allegation that he had sold information to the Czech Intelligence Service (StB) for £2,300. At his trial in May 1970 he was acquitted on all eight charges. After the trial, he agreed to meet with MI5 with a fellow MP, Leo Abse, present and made a full confession, acknowledging that he had been cultivated by the StB after a visit to Czechoslovakia in 1957.

OXENSTIERNA, JOHAN. The Swedish naval attaché in London during World War II was Count Johan G. Oxenstierna, who was quietly removed from his post at the request of the British government at the end of 1943 and replaced by the Swedish king’s grandson, Prince Bertil. Oxenstierna was suitably indignant about his treatment and the British ambassador in Stockholm, Victor Mallet, pressed his case, as did the British naval attaché, Henry Denham, but the Foreign Office was adamant about his removal and equally insistent that the precise nature of his offense not be disclosed. Oxenstierna had been responsible for the leakage of secret information but was not prepared to be specific beyond a reference to his inquisitiveness about a naval stabilizer recently installed on destroyers. Certainly there was no mention of TRIPLEX, or the illicit copying of the contents of the naval attaché’s dispatches in the Swedish diplomatic bag, and the issue has remained a mystery to this day. The count was from an exceptionally well-connected Swedish family, being a cousin of the Wallenbergs, and his removal, under the threat of being declared persona non grata, continues to be highly controversial.

OXFORD RING. Although less notorious than the Soviet spy ring recruited at Cambridge University, MI5 acquired information that a similar network had been cultivated at Oxford during the 1930s. Among those known to have joined underground cells of the Communist Party of Great Britain at Oxford, and the subject of MI5 mole hunts, are Christopher Hill, Iris Murdoch, Jenifer Hart, Ian Milner, Tom Driberg, Bernard Floud, Phillip Toynbee, and A. J. P. Taylor. The KGB archives declassified in Moscow refer to the Oxford Ring and identify the leader only by his codename, SCOTT. See also CAMBRIDGE FIVE.

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PALESTINE. Security operations in Palestine during the British Mandate fell to Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME) with support from the British-run Palestine Police and an Inter-Services Liaison Department office in Jerusalem during World War II. In addition, Bernard Fergusson ran a military “counter-gang” unit targeted against the Irgun and the Stern Gang. Information about Jewish political extremism was gleaned from an MI5 source, codenamed SNAKE, and from intercepted Zionist wireless traffic circulated under the code name ISPAL.

The Jewish campaign for a homeland in Palestine was suspended during World War II but reinstated in 1945, supported by veterans of the Jewish Brigade, formed in 1944, and members of the Haganah. British Intelligence lost Desmond Doran of the Secret Intelligence Service, killed in a grenade attack on his home in Haifa, and two members of SIME, hanged in retaliation for the execution of Jewish terrorists.

To limit the illegal emigration of Haganah-sponsored refugees from Europe, SIS conducted a sabotage operation against ships in the Adriatic, headed by Harold Perkins and Derek Verschoyle, that succeeded in planting a limpet mine on the S.S. Pan Crescent.

PANAM 103. The sabotage of PanAm flight 103 from London to New York in December 1988 with the loss of 259 lives prompted the largest MI5 investigation ever undertaken. The Boeing 747 was destroyed over Scotland by a bomb, consisting of one pound of plastic explosives concealed inside a cassette recorder that had been placed in a suitcase and detonated over the town of Lockerbie, killing a further 11 residents. The case resulted in the trial of two Libyan intelligence officers at a Scottish court empaneled in Holland. After 84 days and 240 witnesses, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Magrahi was sentenced to life imprisonment. In January 2004, in exchange for a lifting of UN sanctions, Libya admitted responsibility for atrocity and paid compensation to the families of the victims.

Initially MI5 had pursued clues that suggested that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command (PFLP-GC) had been responsible, and there was evidence that Iran had paid millions of dollars to Ahmed Jibril, the leader of the PFLP-GC, to carry out the bombing. At the time Jibril’s headquarters had been in Syria, and he was believed to have used Hafez Kassem Dalkamoni, leader of the PFLP-GC European cell, to set up the bombing team, using a 44-year-old Jordanian terrorist, Marwan Khreesat, to make the bomb, which was smuggled out of a Frankfurt flat by another PFLP-GC terrorist, Ramzi Diab. It was then taken, via Vienna, to Malta, where it was handled by a PFLP-GC cell operating in a bakery there.

The man who traveled to Malta to purchase the clothes that were put in the bomb suitcase was identified as Mohammed Abu Talb, who was later jailed in Sweden for a terrorist bombing. Talb was a known terrorist who was in Malta at the time the bomb was planted on a connecting Air Malta flight to Frankfurt, where the suitcase containing the bomb was transferred to PanAm 103. Surveillance records showed that Talb owned a brown Samsonite suitcase of the same type that contained the bomb. He was probably aided by another PFLP-GC member, Marten Imandi, who not only was in Malta at the same time but also was linked to the houses in Frankfurt where the bomb was thought to have been made. See also COUNTERTERRORISM.

PAN CRESCENT. In 1947 the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) learned that Zeev Shind, a senior Mossad officer, had arranged the purchase in New York of the S.S. Pan Crescent, a 4,500-ton ship, to carry illegal emigrants from Southern Europe to Palestine. The ship had been docked in Venice for repairs and converted to carry 7,000 passengers prior to picking up refugees in Constantia in the Black Sea, but on the day she was scheduled to embark a bomb detonated on the hull.

The sabotage had been authorized in London, planned by Derek Verschoyle at the SIS station in Rome and carried out by Harold Perkins and David Smiley. Two hundred Italian workmen were evacuated and a hold was flooded, but there were no casualties.

When the Pan Crescent, commanded by Dov Bertchick, finally reached Constantia in October 1947, diplomatic representations were made with the Romanian authorities to prevent any illegal emigrants from embarking, so accompanied by the Pan York she sailed to the Bulgarian port of Burgas, where a large number of Jewish refugees had assembled. However, when the U.S. State Department learned that the emigrants were “hand-picked Communists,” an official démarche was issued, prompting a rift between the Jewish Agency and Mossad, but both ships sailed at the end of December, carrying more than 15,000 passengers. The ships were inspected by Turkish authorities in the Bosporus and allowed to continue their voyage, but were intercepted in January 1948 by the cruiser HMS Mauritius and escorted into the Cypriot port of Famagusta, where the refugees were directed to detention camps.

PANDORA. Government Code and Cipher School code name applied to wireless traffic during World War II directed to Dr. Edward Hempel, the German minister at the German Legation in Dublin. Although Dr. Hempel was required to surrender his radio transmitter, he continued to receive instructions from Berlin until the end of hostilities in 1945, and these messages were read at Bletchley Park and given limited distribution to authorized recipients in Whitehall.

PANTCHEFF, THEODORE X. F. During the mid-1950s, at the height of the Cold War, Theodore (“Bunny”) Pantcheff ran agents in West Germany from Munich, operating under British Control Commission for Germany cover. Born in Essex to a Greek who became a naturalized British subject and an English mother, Pantcheff was once described as having “an intellect of steel, the appearance of a country tobacconist, the name of a Soviet spy and a heart of gold.” He took a first in German at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps in 1942.

During the war, Pantcheff worked as a prisoner of war interrogator and was assigned to investigate the attempted breakout by Nazis from a PoW camp at Devizes. Immediately following the surrender of the German occupation forces in the Channel Islands, Pantcheff returned as a war crimes investigator to the island of Alderney, where in 1931 he had visited his uncle, a doctor. Alderney did not fall into British hands until a week after the official German surrender, and soon afterward Pantcheff arrived to conduct his inquiry. He estimated that he interviewed some 3,000 prisoners of war to piece together the appalling story of the Nazi concentration camp known as Sylt that had been built at the southern end of the island.

After the war, Pantcheff was attached to a War Crimes Investigation Unit and collected the evidence against Willy Herold, a Luftwaffe corporal who adopted the identity of an officer during the last days of the war and was responsible for a reign of terror at a labor camp in Emsland, near the Dutch frontier, in which dozens of prisoners were butchered. Herold and five confederates were tried by the Allied military government at Oldenburg and executed by guillotine in November 1946. This extraordinary story is told by Pantcheff in his paperback, The Emsland Executioner, which was published in Holland in 1987.

Pantcheff transferred from the Control Commission’s Intelligence Division to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in 1951 and remained in Germany for a further five years. In 1958, much to his astonishment, he was sent to Lagos, Nigeria, as head of station and three years later served in Léopoldville in the Congo. He returned to London in 1963 as controller, Africa, and then director of counterintelligence, and in 1969 went back to Germany to run MI5’s local security apparatus.

Pantcheff is identified by Peter Wright in SpyCatcher as the counterintelligence expert in SIS who successfully extracted a partial confession of espionage from his Australian-born colleague Dick Ellis. Pantcheff had been assigned to a joint MI5-SIS investigation of Ellis in 1965 and had interrogated the retired SIS officer with Wright. Together the two inquisitors had cornered Ellis, who although supposedly in retirement had been invited back to SIS headquarters to participate in routine weeding of files, the removal and destruction of redundant records. The exposure of Ellis as a prewar traitor working in the German interest opened suspicions that he may have betrayed SIS to the KGB after the war. According to Wright, Pantcheff shared his opinion that Ellis had been skillfully manipulated as a high-level penetration by the KGB but this was an issue that was never fully resolved.

In 1981, four years after his retirement from SIS, Pantcheff published Alderney: Fortress Island, a short account of the German occupation of Alderney, the Channel Island where he eventually settled with his wife and two sons. He also contributed an article on his wartime experience to the London-based magazine World War II Investigator. Pantcheff was appointed the jurat to the Court of Alderney and died of leukemia on the island in November 1989.

PAPERCLIP. Code name for a British Intelligence operation conducted immediately after World War II to identify and detain German scientists who had knowledge of Nazi technical developments in fields of aerospace, jet propulsion, and advanced weaponry. The American equivalent operation was codenamed MATCHBOX.

PARLANTI, CONRAD. Shortly after the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, Conrad Parlanti reported to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in The Hague that he had been in business with Henri Pieck since 1936. Having been introduced to Pieck in 1934 by a British diplomat named Raymond Oake, Parlanti was persuaded to leave his shop-fitting job and rent an architect’s office in Buckingham Gate, London. However, when he learned from Pieck’s wife that her husband had been receiving secret documents from a Foreign Office official and speculating on the information, he closed the business down and returned to Holland. Pieck identified Captain John King as a man he had seen visit the office in Buckingham Gate where Pieck had kept a locked photographic studio. SIS had passed this information on to MI5, which coincidentally had placed King under surveillance following a tip from the GRU defector Walter Krivitsky in the United States. Parlanti subsequently agreed to participate in an MI5 operation to lure Pieck to London to be arrested, but he declined to cooperate, apparently fearing that he had been compromised by Krivitsky.

PARLIAMENTARY INTELLIGENCE AND SECURITY COMMITTEE. Created by the Intelligence Services Act in 1992, the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee consists of six members of Parliament, drawn from both houses and appointed by the prime minister. The committee prepares an annual report, which is then released for debate after any sensitive passages are excised. The first chairman of the committee was Tom (later Lord) King, MP, formerly the secretary of state for Northern Ireland and then secretary of state for defense. Upon King’s retirement from the House of Commons at the 2001 general election, Ann Taylor, MP, a former Labour chief whip, was appointed to the post until she retired in April 2005.

PARROTT, GEORGE. A Royal Navy warrant officer in charge of the rifle range at Sheerness, George Parrott was arrested in Chelsea in November 1912 by Special Branch detectives as he collected his mail from a tobacconist’s shop. Parrott, an expert on naval gunnery, had been identified as a German spy through a mail intercept on Karl Gustav Ernst. Parrott had been under surveillance since June and had been watched as he had traveled to Ostend to met his contact, as he had been instructed to in letters from Berlin containing money and questionnaires. Parrott was charged under the Official Secrets Act and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment.

PASSPORT CONTROL OFFICER (PCO). A convenient but somewhat transparent cover for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) personnel overseas, the PCO operated independently of the local British diplomatic mission between the wars and issued visas to visit Britain and other parts of the empire. The Passport Control Department of the Foreign Office, which supposedly supervised the activities of the PCOs abroad, was run for many tears by Maurice Jeffes, a veteran SIS officer. Difficulties arose when the PCOs began to issue that most valuable of commodities, a visa for Palestine, and a trade developed in them. One casualty was Major Hugh Dalton, the head of station in The Hague who shot himself in September 1936 when an audit of his accounts uncovered illicit sales of visas to desperate German Jews. Dalton was replaced by Monty Chidson, and the Venlo affair of November 1939, in which his successor Major Richard Stevens was abducted, demonstrated that the SIS station in The Hague had been comprehensively penetrated by the Abwehr. Further evidence was supplied by the detention in 1938 of Captain Thomas Kendrick, the PCO in Vienna.

PAT J. The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) code name for Alfred Meiler, a Dutch diamond cutter who had worked for the Germans during World War I and was recruited in 1940 in The Hague for an Abwehr mission to the United States. Meiler surrendered to the Dutch embassy in Madrid in early 1942 and was turned over to SIS, who passed him on to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). When he arrived in New York in July 1942 he was run by the FBI, and his traffic was transmitted from an FBI transmitter on Long Island from 1943 until the end of the war. PAT J’s fictitious network, financed with money supplied by MIKE, included three pro-Nazis, HOLST, HERMAN, and OTTO.

On one occasion, a courier carrying eight rare stamps for PAT J only reached Buenos Aires, where he failed to send them on in the mail to New York and drank himself to death on the proceeds. Another source of funds was a Jewish refugee who passed on $3,000 he had received from a Frenchman in Spain long known to be in the pay of the Abwehr. The Frenchman relieved the Germans of an estimated 80 million French francs during the war but was taken into custody by the French authorities afterward.

PEARSON, ROBIN. A lecturer in economic history at the University of Hull, Dr. Robin Pearson was identified in September 1999 as a former East German agent codenamed ARMIN. He was interviewed by MI5 in 1994 when examination of the archives of the HVA, the East German intelligence service, revealed the identity of 34 British sources recruited while studying in East Germany. According to his HVA file, Pearson had spent a year at Leipzig as an undergraduate at Edinburgh in 1977 and had been recruited as a source to supply information about his fellow students and others likely to be offered jobs in Whitehall or with British Intelligence. Over a period of 12 years, he had held clandestine meetings with his HVA contacts in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Vienna, and Copenhagen, occasionally traveling on an East German passport under the alias Robert Behlert. His handler was identified as Berhart Kartheus. Pearson continued to supply information until the collapse of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

PEASANT. The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) code name for Helmut Siegfried Goldschmidt, a Dutch Jew recruited by the Abwehr, who surrendered to SIS in Lisbon in 1943. He was taken to England and accommodated at Camp 020, although notionally he reached Washington, D.C., where supposedly he was employed by Shell Oil. From 1944 the Federal Bureau of Investigation maintained contact with the enemy on his behalf and recruited a network, including BATES, KLEIN, MANAGER, ROBERTS, SAUNDERS, and WAVE.

PEDANT. “A” Force code name for a German stay-behind agent in Athens who came under control in October 1944 and transmitted for a couple of months to help exaggerate the strength of British troops deployed in Greece.

PEIERLS, SIR RUDOLF. Born in Berlin and naturalized a British citizen in February 1940, Rudolf Peierls was one of the leading atomic physicists of the era. He was well acquainted with Klaus Fuchs, who he said “had been politically active as a member of a socialist student group [which was essentially communist].” Peierls had brought Fuchs into the British research team working on the atomic bomb and had arranged his security clearance in May 1941. Fuchs went to live with the Peierls as a lodger in Birmingham, traveled to America with him on the Andes in November 1943, and even went on a motoring holiday with him to Mexico in December 1945 when the British contingent completed its work at Los Alamos.

Peierls attracted much attention from MI5 and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), not least because he was married to a Russian physicist, Eugenia Kannegiesser, whom he met while on a visit to Odessa in the summer of 1930. They were married in Leningrad in March 1931, and to their surprise no obstacles were placed on her emigration abroad nor on her acquisition of German citizenship. This was unusual, considering the sensitive nature of her work and her family circumstances: her sister Nina was a biologist and her widowed mother had married a writer. Coincidentally, Peierls’s older brother Alfred had also married a Russian, a woman who had been working for the Soviet Trade Delegation in Berlin when they met in a minor road accident. Alfred was an expert on electric condensers and, after he fled Germany in 1935, managed a condenser factory in London until his internment on the Isle of Man, with his wife, as an enemy alien.

Initially Rudolf Peierls, with his strong Russian connections, was considered a likely Soviet spy suspect by MI5 and a candidate for the source in VENONA codenamed CHARLES and REST, especially as he had worked at Kellex upon his arrival in New York, before the British party moved to Los Alamos in August 1944, but the search in England for a leak was abandoned as soon as Fuchs confessed. In America, though, the FBI continued to pursue both Peierls and his wife and developed a large dossier on the couple. In it are reports from the Central Intelligence Agency stating that Peierls had confided to a friend that he had once joined a Communist party front in Switzerland and that his wife had been a member of the KPD. Indeed, scrutiny of the KPD’s records, captured after the war, confirmed a reference to “Comrade Kannegiesser.” The FBI noted that Eugenia had worked as a nurse at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham between 1939 and 1941, and then had joined General Electric as a planning engineer. When in America, she had applied for a job at Los Alamos. However, of greater concern was MI5’s revelation that Peierls had received his original security clearance through the intervention of John Strachey, MP, who was himself an espionage suspect.

The FBI reinvestigated Peierls and his wife in March 1956 when he applied to join the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York. On that occasion it was reported that Eugenia “had admitted to being a Communist and had been publicly opposed to Britain’s participation in World War II until the USSR entered the war.” On that occasion Peierls did not go to Brookhaven, although he did visit in 1966 when his son was on the staff. His attendance at other American conferences was approved by the Atomic Energy Commission, but only on the condition that “he would have no additional access to classified information other than he already had.”

None of this amounted to evidence of espionage on the part of Peierls, but his associations were certainly considered suspicious, despite MI5’s assertion that no “sinister implications” could be drawn from his friendship with Fuchs. Apart from being Fuchs’s confidant and colleague, Peierls also had been close to the American physicist G. E. Brown, who had lived with Peierls in 1950 and 1951, at the beginning of a career at the University of Birmingham that was to last until 1961 when he moved to the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. Originally from South Dakota, Brown had been educated at the University of Wisconsin until 1946 and then had spent four years at Yale, under Gregory Breit, and had established a reputation as a Communist. According to his passport application, Brown had acknowledged having joined the U.S. Communist party at Yale in January 1948, and while in Birmingham had associated with Communist Party of Great Britain members.

The FBI reported that in 1951 Peierls was vice president of the Council of the Association of Atomic Scientists, then considered to be a Communist front (although MI5 denied this), and in August 1947 had petitioned the home secretary for the release of Allan Nunn May. The FBI’s inquiries culminated in a permanent removal of Peierls’s security clearance by MI5 in 1957 and soon afterward Peierls resigned his consultancy post at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, but neither setback prevented him from receiving a knighthood in 1968.

PENINSULA WAR. During his 1808 Peninsula campaign the Duke of Wellington relied heavily upon his Corps of Guides, which fulfilled both intelligence and police functions and liaised with the Spanish irregulars. Headed by Colquohoun Grant of the 11th Foot Regiment, the Guides were skilled linguists and horsemen and rode deep into French-occupied territory to report on the enemy. Grant was later appointed Wellington’s head of intelligence and was the head of his Intelligence Department at Waterloo.

PENKOVSKY, OLEG. Married and with a daughter, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky was a much-decorated, well-connected senior GRU officer, with an apartment overlooking the Moscow River, who was destined for further promotion, but he was constantly troubled by an offense he had committed many years earlier. He had concealed the fact that his father had fought with the White Russians in the civil war, and he was convinced that if his father’s record was ever discovered, his career would be ruined.

Perhaps motivated by this guilty secret, Penkovsky made two direct approaches to Americans in Moscow, and another through a Canadian businessman, which were rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as rather crude provocations orchestrated by the KGB. However, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) proved more receptive and in December 1960 Penkovsky made an offer to Greville Wynne, an SIS asset who frequently visited the Soviet Bloc as an entrepreneur seeking business deals for British engineering companies. Penkovsky’s role as the GRU liaison officer with the State Committee for Scientific Coordination gave him an authentic reason to continue to meet Wynne and to travel abroad. While in London in April 1961, Penkovsky underwent a lengthy debriefing by SIS case officer Harold Shergold, in the presence of two CIA officers dispatched for the purpose, George Kisevalter and Joe Bulik.

Penkovsky made a second trip to London in July 1961 and later in the year flew to Paris, where more sessions were held with his CIA and SIS contacts. Upon his return to Moscow, his communications relied upon supposedly chance encounters in a park with Janet Chisholm, the wife of the local SIS station commander, Riari Chisholm, and then through a complicated system of signals and dead drops. This arrangement appeared to work well until October 1962, when an American diplomat was arrested by the KGB at the site of one of the dead drops in the act of retrieving a message from Penkovsky.

Ten days later, early in November, Wynne was taken into custody by the Hungarian security police while in Budapest and sent to Moscow, where he was charged with espionage and tried in May 1963 alongside Penkovsky. Both men pleaded guilty to treason and the trial lasted four days, at the end of which Penkovsky was sentenced to death by firing squad and Wynne received eight years’ imprisonment in a labor camp. Eleven months later, Wynne was swapped in Berlin for the KGB illegal rezident Konon Molody, alias “Gordon Lonsdale,” who had been in prison in England.

It was only after Wynne was freed that a book purporting to be Penkovsky’s autobiography, The Penkovsky Papers, was released. Edited by defector Piotr Deriabin and Time journalist Frank Gibney, who had previously collaborated on The Secret World (1959), the book struck many intelligence professionals as odd. After all, what spy with any sense of self-preservation would leave reams of incriminating material in his apartment where they might be found at any time, not least by his family who had no knowledge of his duplicity? In fact, Deriabin and Gibney had been directed to reconstruct the autobiography from the transcripts of taped information that Penkovsky had provided over the 18 months he operated as a source. There were some odd passages in the book, including some rather old-fashioned phrases that made it unlikely Penkovsky had written them.

Penkovsky delivered to the West vital technical intelligence and, apart from looting the GRU’s files, he also provided a detailed analysis of the Soviet strategic arsenal at a critical time when Nikita Khrushchev was planning to deploy nuclear weapons in Cuba, providing the documents that enabled the CIA to correctly identify the missile sites while they were under construction.

PERKINS, HAROLD. The manager of a textile mill in Silesia before the war, Harold Perkins had graduated from Prague University with an engineering degree and headed the Polish Section of Special Operations Executive (SOE). He also had responsibility for supervising SOE’s Czech and Hungarian country sections and appointed himself British charge d’affaires in Prague when the Nazis withdrew. After the war Perkins served as Fanny Venden Heuvel’s deputy at the Secret Intelligence Service’s Rome station and ran a sabotage campaign against refugee ships in the Adriatic, including the S.S. Pan Crescent, to stem the flow of illegal emigrants to Palestine.

PERMANENT SECRETARIES’ COMMITTEE ON THE INTELLIGENCE SERVICES (PSIS). Within Whitehall, the permanent secretaries from the Home Office, Foreign Office, Treasury, and Ministry of Defence meet under the chairmanship of the Cabinet secretary to consider the annual budget for MI5, the Secret Intelligence Service, and GCHQ and to consider senior appointments to those organizations.

PERSONALITY PROFILING. The technique of developing personality profiles of political leaders and adversaries, as an aid to understanding and maybe predicting behavior and reactions, was pioneered by British Security Coordination during World War II, and since then considerable research has been undertaken to develop the skill into a science. The Secret Intelligence Service in particular has acquired an impressive reputation for compiling such profiles, using its own personnel or contacting outside experts to gather the material, not all of which comes from classified sources. Occasionally the authors have been allowed to publish sanitized versions of their profiles as biographies, good examples being those of Deng Xiaoping by Richard Evans, Francisco Franco by Brian Crozier, and General Lebed by Harold Elletson.

PETRIE, SIR DAVID. Director-general of the Security Service from 1940 to 1945, Sir David Petrie was a Scot who spent much of his career in the Indian police, which he joined in 1900 at the age of 21. In 1924 he was appointed director of the Indian Political Intelligence Bureau, a post he kept until 1931 when he had been made chairman of the Indian Public Service Commission. After his official retirement, he was sent to Palestine in December 1938 to undertake a review of the security arrangements in the Mandate for the Colonial Office. In 1940 he was asked by Sir Horace Wilson to succeed Jasper Harker, the acting director-general of MI5. In 1945 the new prime minister, Clement Attlee, appointed Sir Percy Sillitoe in his place.

PETROV, VLADIMIR. Both senior NKVD officers, Vladimir Petrov and his wife Evdokia landed in Sydney early in February 1950 from the liner Orcades, where they were greeted on the quay by the embassy’s second secretary and rezident, Valentin Sadovnikov, and TASS correspondent Ivan Pakhomov, who was to succeed him briefly as rezident based in Sydney when he was recalled in April the following year. The Petrovs had already served together abroad, in Stockholm from March 1943 until October 1947. Nine years later, when the HASP material had become available, two 1945 VENONA intercepts from the Stockholm embassy showed that Petrov, then codenamed SEAMAN, had been the personal cipher clerk to two rezidents, first Mrs. Yartseva, then Vasili F. Razin.

An operation codenamed CABIN, launched by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) to cultivate a source in the Soviet embassy in Canberra, lasted from April 1951, four months after the arrival of the Soviet consul, to his defection in April 1954. During that period ASIO placed an agent of long standing, a Polish refugee and physician named Michael Bialoguski, close to Petrov in the hope of persuading him to defect. Petrov, whose real name was Proletarsky, enjoyed life in Australia and when in May 1953 he was recalled to Moscow, Bialoguski arranged to diagnose an eye complaint to give the diplomat an excuse to stay. The last straw proved to be a surprise inspection of Petrov’s office safe, undertaken by the ambassador on 31 March 1954, accompanied by First Secretary Vis-lykh and his aide Christoborodov, who found papers that should have been kept more securely. Thus when Petrov’s replacement, Evgeni Kovalenok, arrived by ship at Sydney early in April, Petrov accepted ASIO’s offer to defect and took a briefcase of documents with him.

Unaware of Bialoguski’s dual role, Petrov confided in him that his strong-willed wife had quarreled with the wife of the new ambassador and that the atmosphere in the embassy was intolerable. He arranged to buy a small farm near Sydney and Bialoguski tape-recorded the conversation in which he declared his intention to complete the sale in April 1954. As well as liking life in Australia and having invested in the farm, Petrov was anxious about the reception he could expect in Moscow—which in recent weeks had seen Lavrenti Beria arrested and executed and a purge of all levels of Moscow Center. The Petrovs had no children, so there was little to return home to, or so ASIO suggested, and Petrov had no doubt that both ambassadors had submitted adverse reports on his performance.

Petrov had not discussed defection with his wife, the rezidentura’s code clerk who was also an NKVD professional with 20 years of experience, so when he disappeared without warning, she was held captive in the embassy until she could be flown back to Moscow. Her Soviet colleagues told her that Petrov was dead, but on the plane home she was told by the crew that her husband was alive and had applied for political asylum. When the aircraft refueled at Darwin, her two escorts were disarmed and she spoke to her husband on the telephone. He had no difficulty in persuading her to stay.

On the strength of documents removed by Petrov from the embassy’s referentura, the Australian government empaneled a royal commission to investigate Soviet espionage. It listened to 104 hours of testimony from the Petrovs. According to Ron Richards, ASIO’s former deputy director, their evidence resulted in the identification of 600 Soviet intelligence officers and their agents around the world. They also disclosed, for the first time, that the missing British diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were ideologically motivated spies who had served the Soviet cause since their days at university and that they were now living in Moscow. According to Petrov, his friend Filip Kislitsyn had worked in the London rezidentura during World War II and had been swamped with documents supplied by the two missing diplomats.

The Petrov defections were a sensation, but while Petrov’s papers were interesting and even embarrassing, they were by themselves inconclusive—and in comparison to the VENONA intercepts, almost irrelevant. However, the secret of VENONA had to be maintained, so the commission was briefed in private session about some of the VENONA material in order to establish a link between some of the principal suspects, such as Jim Hill, Ian Milner, and Wally Clayton, where there was a gap in the evidence. The problem was that the commission could hardly condemn the spies without disclosing the evidence nor admit that Petrov had failed to deliver the proof required to bring criminal charges. Accordingly, unlike its Canadian equivalent, which resulted in no less than 21 prosecutions based on Igor Gouzenko’s evidence, not a single charge was brought in Australia.

The Petrovs adopted the identity of a Greek couple named Cronides and subsequently wrote Empire of Fear. Vladimir suffered from poor health, aggravated by alcoholism, and died in June 1991, aged 84. Evdokia, who survived him, still lives in Australia.

PETTER, ROBERT. A 25-year-old German, Robert Petter arrived in Scotland via an amphibious aircraft in September 1940 with Karl Drücke and Vera Erickson. Petter traveled independently to Edinburgh and was arrested at Waverley Station on the day of his arrival as he attempted to retrieve his suitcase from the left-luggage office. Although he was equipped with a Swiss passport under his alias, Walter Wälti, his identify card bore a number supplied to the Abwehr by SNOW.

Petter was interrogated at Camp 020 and confronted with Drücke, who had confessed to a stool pigeon, but he denied ever having seen Drücke before. Petter was also confronted with a Norwegian, Gunnar Edvardsen, with whom he had trained, and told that his mission had been described in detail by Erickson and Drücke. According to Edvardsen, Wälti’s true name was Robert Petter, and he was an experienced Abwehr agent who had operated in Paris before the fall of France. In January 1941 Petter was transferred briefly to Brixton because of a threat of suicide, but was returned soon afterward, keeping to his story. He was tried in June at the Old Bailey and hanged with Drücke at Wandsworth in August 1941.

When Petter’s recruiter, Major Nikolaus Ritter, was captured and interrogated at Bad Nenndorf at the end of the war, he was asked about Petter, but he could recall very little about him, apart from that he was from Hamburg and his name may have been Keller.

PHANTOM. The commonly known title of GHQ Liaison Regiment, Phantom was a military signals unit with an existence limited to World War II created to provide a parallel source of information to rear-echelon commanders. Phantom consisted of six squadrons, each equipped with mobile patrols that submitted regular reports on the progress of battles and provided an essential link between armor, infantry, and air support. The regiment’s best-known officer was Major David Niven, who commanded A Squadron until he was transferred to the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force for service on General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s staff in 1943.

PHILBY, KIM. Contrary to public perception, Harold Adrian Russell Philby was never tipped to be a future chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). He was a philandering, stammering drunk whose career was destined to be curtailed by the knowledge, acquired secretly by MI5, that he had once been a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. His first wife, Litzi Friedman, was a known Soviet agent and three of his children had been born out of wedlock, which in the 1940s was something of a social stigma. His heavy drinking, together with his crippling stutter, made him an unlikely candidate for SIS’s top post, although that myth continues to be perpetuated even after his death.

Philby joined SIS from Special Operations Executive in September 1941 and was to work closely with Graham Greene in Section V’s Iberian subsection. Philby spent his wartime service with SIS in St. Albans and London, but in 1944 he traveled abroad to Paris, where he spent a memorable evening with Malcolm Muggeridge. In November 1951, after foreign postings as SIS’s representative in Istanbul and Washington, D.C., Philby was cross-examined about his links to Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean and sacked. In the unhappy months that followed, Philby tried to eke out an existence as a journalist, and many of his friends, believing he had been treated unfairly, rallied to his support. He worked temporarily for Jack Ivens, a fruit importer who had worked for Section V in Madrid during the war, and then was commissioned to ghostwrite a history of the publishing firm David Allen. For this task Philby moved to Ireland, abandoning his wife and family at their home in Crowhurst.

Philby eventually defected to Moscow in January 1963, after having been confronted with evidence of his duplicity by his old colleague Nicholas Elliott. There, in the safety of the Soviet Union, he prepared his autobiography, My Silent War, which was published in London in 1968 and was described by Greene as “far more gripping than any novel of espionage I can remember.” Although the British authorities made no attempt to block the book’s publication, the late Mary Reilly did. The wife of Sir Patrick Reilly, who recently had been the British ambassador in Moscow, she took exception to Philby’s barbed remarks about her in the first edition, which was promptly withdrawn and reissued without the offending passage. Even the expurgated version was the subject of considerable criticism, especially by Robert Cecil who had known Philby in Broadway in the war. During his 25 years in exile Philby collected books on intelligence, edited the autobiography of Gordon Lonsdale, and occasionally lectured KGB personnel assigned to posts in the West.

Philby died in Moscow in May 1988 having betrayed his sister Helena, who also worked for SIS, his family, his friends, and his country. He even denounced Tim Milne, one of his closest friends from their school days at Westminster, as a Soviet spy. His legacy was one of lasting bitterness that extended beyond those who knew or worked with him. His illegitimate son Alan Young, the product of Philby’s affair with a senior civil servant in 1940, was abandoned by his parents and brought up in children’s homes. In 1984 Young was sentenced to a term of imprisonment on a charge of blackmail, and the court in London was told that Young’s discovery that his true father had been a notorious traitor had marked a deterioration in his criminal conduct.

Philby’s KGB file, codenamed SONNY, reveals that he was recruited as a spy by Litzi’s friend Edith Tudor Hart, a talented photographer, and that she introduced him to the illegal rezident, in London, Dr. Arnold Deutsch.

PIECK, HENRI. A Dutch artist and Communist, Henri Pieck joined a Soviet intelligence network based in Amsterdam in 1930 and spent the following three years in Geneva, cultivating British diplomats at the League of Nations. In particular, he had become romantically involved with the daughter of the British vice consul, Commander John Harvey, and used her to meet members of the local British expatriate community.

In 1939, following his imprisonment, Captain John King identified Pieck to MI5 as his principal contact, to whom he delivered documents to be copied at an office in Buckingham Gate. Pieck was known to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) through his friendship with a member of the prewar SIS station in The Hague, John Hooper, and after the war was interviewed by MI5’s Tomás Harris. When Pieck was first identified as having acted as King’s contact, MI5 attempted unsuccessfully to lure him back to England so he could be arrested. Both John Hooper and Conrad Parlanti participated in this operation, but it proved unsuccessful

PINTO, ORESTE. A Dutch intelligence officer during World War II, Oreste Pinto was employed at the London Reception Centre (LRC) at the Royal Victoria Patriotic School to screen refugees. After the war he acquired considerable fame as an investigator and interrogator, based on his books Spy-catcher (1952) and Friend or Foe? (1954) and a television series. In fact Pinto’s self-promoted reputation for discerning the flaws in the cover stories of enemy agents was quite unjustified, as the LRC was an MI5 establishment and its director, Ronnie Haylor, was an MI5 officer with access to ISK and ISOS. This invaluable signals intelligence source compromised most of the enemy’s spies and gave the LRC staff a huge advantage, which they exploited to the full. The one German agent Pinto was responsible for having arrested, Johannes Dronkers, was recognized by Pinto’s deputy, Adrianus Vrinten, as a leading Fascist before the war.

POLICE INTERNATIONAL COUNTERTERRORISM UNIT (PICTU). Staffed by Security Service, Anti-Terrorist Branch (SO13), and Special Branch (SO12) officers, PICTU coordinates the international antiterrorist work undertaken by the provincial police forces within the United Kingdom.

POLISH INTELLIGENCE. Before World War II the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) established close links with the Polish Deuxième Bureau and the Polish Cipher Bureau, and after the Nazi occupation both were accommodated in England at Woldingham in Surrey and made an impressive contribution to the Allied victory. After the war, the Poles cooperated with SIS’s Special Liaison section and concentrated on Soviet wireless traffic.

PONTECORVO, BRUNO. A brilliant, dashing, and popular experimental physicist, Italian-born Bruno Pontecorvo was unquestionably a Communist, as was most of his family, his cousin Emilio Sereni being a Communist senator in Rome, his brother a successful movie director, and his brother-in-law Duccio Tabet a member of the Agricultural Staff of the Italian Communist party. Despite this, he had worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II and was authorized to work at the Chalk River atomic plant in 1946. After the defection of Klaus Fuchs, however, Sir John Cockcroft had told him that his security clearance at Harwell, where he had worked since 1948, would be withdrawn and that he ought to take up the post of professor of physics at Liverpool University. Instead, Pontecorvo dramatically demonstrated his political commitment by defecting with his Swedish wife Marianne and three sons to Russia via Finland in September 1950. His route also indicated some use of Soviet tradecraft, for he purchased his airline tickets while on vacation in Rome only at the last moment, using cash, leaving his parents waiting at Chamonix, where he had arranged to join them for a skiing weekend. Instead Pontecorvo and his family flew to Copenhagen, caught a ferry to Stockholm, and then flew to Helsinki, where they were seen being met at the airport by a limousine.

Up until that time, MI5 had had no reason to believe Pontecorvo was a Soviet spy, although he had been a possible candidate for QUANTUM, a physicist in the VENONA traffic who had volunteered to supply information from the Manhattan Project. A text dated 21 June 1943 from the Washington, D.C., rezidentura noticed that on 14 June QUANTUM had visited the Soviet Embassy in Washington, asking to see the ambassador, and had been introduced to Maxim Litvinov’s deputy, Andrei Gromyko, who then held counselor rank; Gromyko had promptly passed him on to EGOR from the rezidentura. QUANTUM’ S purpose was to explain that he had already sold some information to Semyon Semyonov in New York and now wanted to sell some more for $300. There was no proof that Pontecorvo was QUANTUM, however, nor that he had been in contact with the Soviets during the six years he had spent working on the heavy-water pile at Chalk River between 1943 and 1948, nor afterwards at Harwell.

Pontecorvo had trained in Rome under Enrico Fermi, then from 1935 in Paris alongside Hans von Halban and Lev Kowarski at Joliot-Curie’s Radium Institute and later at the College de France. He left France in July 1940. General Pavel Sudoplatov has alleged that Pontecorvo was cultivated in Rome before the war by the illegal rezident, Grigori Kheifets, and then contacted by Lev Vasilevsky, the Mexico City rezident working under diplomatic cover, in January 1943: “At the end of January 1943 we received through Semyonov a full report on the first nuclear chain reaction from Bruno Pontecorvo, describing Enrico Fermi’s experiment in Chicago on December 2, 1942.” Quite how Pontecorvo might have gained access to this highly classified breakthrough is unexplained, for at the time he was working for an oil survey company in Oklahoma, having arrived in New York as a refugee in August 1942 from Lisbon aboard the S.S. Quanza, and he was not invited to join the British contingent to the Manhattan Project in Montreal until after January 1943. Nevertheless, Sudoplatov is emphatic that Vasilevsky “was the first intelligence officer to approach Pontecorvo directly in 1943.”

Pontecorvo made no reference to these events when he held a press conference in Moscow in March 1955, but before he died in 1993, at the Soviet nuclear research center at Dubna outside Moscow, he gave an interview to a Russian journalist in which he acknowledged his wartime espionage and confirmed that he had defected because he feared his arrest was imminent. After his disappearance in 1950, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) conducted an intensive investigation to see if it had overlooked any evidence of his espionage. It found that its original file was very thin, having been originated in November 1942 during a routine random search of Pontecorvo’s apartment in Tulsa on a warrant describing him as a suspected enemy alien. The search showed only a collection of books on Communism and a few dust jackets bearing swastikas, but nothing incriminating. However, by the end of the FBI inquiries in 1950, his dossier had grown to 1,011 pages.

POPOV, DUSKO. When Dusan M. Popov, known to his family and friends as Dusko, arrived in London as a German spy in December 1940, he was not accommodated at MI5’s interrogation center at Camp 020, the usual destination for men suspected of being enemy agents. Instead he was driven straight to the Savoy Hotel, where he was entertained by senior members of both MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). The reason was that although the Abwehr believed both Popov and his brother Ivo to be dedicated to the Nazi cause, they had each been recruited by SIS in Belgrade shortly before the war. Thus when the young playboy from Dubrovnik turned up at the British embassy in Lisbon en route to England, he declared his true purpose and requested an appropriate message be sent to his SIS contact who knew him as SCOUT.

Popov had been educated in Germany and it was one of his fellow students who had approached him with a view to working for the Abwehr. The Popov brothers saw this as an opportunity to escape from the occupation, and both exploited the situation to their advantage. Codenamed DREADNOUGHT by SIS, Ivo pretended to recruit many of his friends for the Abwehr, but each willingly became a double agent. Similarly, after Dusko was installed in a Mayfair apartment by MI5 and supplied with a case officer, he recruited several subagents so as to enhance his status with the Germans.

In September 1941 Popov returned to Lisbon for a meeting with his Abwehr controller to receive details of his new assignment, a mission to the United States. During the course of the year, the Abwehr’s networks in America had suffered a series of setbacks as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested several key German agents. Popov’s task was to complete a questionnaire relating to U.S. military installations and set up a wireless station in Brazil. Having cleared the mission with MI5, which obtained the FBI’s consent, Popov made his way to the United States in June 1941 via Lisbon, where he received $70,000, his instructions, a microdot questionnaire, and cipher instructions. These he handed over to British Security Coordination (BSC) in Bermuda, and for the final leg of his journey in August 1941 he was accompanied by an SIS officer, Hamish Mitchell.

Once in New York, ostensibly under the control of MI6’s Dick Ellis and John Pepper at BSC, Sam Foxworth assigned Special Agent Charles F. Lanman (using the alias Charles Lehman) as Popov’s handler. The FBI was never comfortable about cooperating with a self-confessed enemy agent, however, and was reluctant to lay the foundations of another double agent case on someone whom they regarded as unreliable. Popov’s initial interview was conducted by the “assistant director for major investigations in the field,” Earl J. Connelley, over three hours in New York, during which Popov disclosed 11 of his microdots, and the next day explained to Lanman how to use his codebook, Night and Day. According to Connelley’s report of his meeting, Popov anticipated that within a couple of months he would be contacted by other German agents. In the meantime, he had a single mail drop in Rio de Janeiro, which was promptly checked out by the SIS.

Popov made a very unfavorable impression on the FBI, not least because of his lavish lifestyle shared with his English girlfriend Terry Brown, his new Buick Pantheon convertible, his very public affair with the French actress Simone Simone, his penthouse apartment at 530 Park Avenue staffed by a Chinese manservant, and his inability to identify any other Abwehr agents in the United States. Instead of nurturing Popov in New York and supplying him with the information demanded in his questionnaire and required to maintain the Abwehr’s interest, the FBI virtually disconnected him. Left to his own devices, Popov constructed some very flimsy messages for his mail drop in Lisbon, but by October 1941 the Abwehr had failed to respond. Finally, the FBI took up Popov’s proposal that he use his cover, as an official of the Yugoslav government in exile, to dangle the opportunity of establishing a shortwave radio on the East Coast. As a return visit to Portugal so soon would stretch the Abwehr’s credulity, Popov suggested a trip down to Brazil, where he could receive the technical instructions required to establish a wireless link across the Atlantic from the contact he had been supplied with in Lisbon, who turned out to be Albrecht Engels in Rio de Janeiro.

In mid-November 1941, Popov, known as IVAN to the Abwehr, flew down to Rio from New York to rendezvous with ALFREDO at his AEG offices and held several further meetings with him during the following three weeks. Popov was to establish a radio station in America to communicate with Rio and Lisbon and collect information on war production, the composition and destination of transatlantic convoys, and technical developments in the field of antisubmarine warfare. Popov’s extended contact with the personable Engels provided further evidence against him, not least by having his dwindling funds topped up.

Popov returned by ship to New York triumphant and persuaded a reluctant FBI to provide a transmitter, which the Abwehr was told had been constructed by a disaffected Croat. However, the FBI remained uncooperative in helping him to collect suitable information, to the point that in March 1942 MI6 disclosed that it had learned that the Abwehr was having second thoughts about IVAN’S loyalty, and there was a belief that he had come under the FBI’s control since his arrival in the United States the previous August. This unwelcome development had been revealed in ISOS decrypts that, inexplicably, SIS had refused to share with MI5 until the following May, by which time the situation had deteriorated into a major crisis. Finally SIS revealed an isos text from Berlin to Lisbon, dated 21 March, instructing IVAN’S handler to test him with a question about his salary.

Once again, Popov was running low on funds, had failed to pay several overdue bills, including one on his telephone, and the FBI refused to finance his extravagant partying. He replied to the query from Lisbon entirely unaware that it had been designed to confirm his bona fides and was not told that another isos intercept from Berlin, dated 5 May, advised that the Abwehr’s Luftwaffe branch had concluded IVAN had been “turned.” In August an exasperated FBI asked MI6 to withdraw Popov, and two months later he returned to Portugal, having been warned by BSC that he might receive a less than warm welcome. Ignorant of the full circumstances—or that the Abwehr had become very suspicious of him—Popov put on a bravura performance in Lisbon, complaining that German parsimony had handicapped his ability to fulfill his mission, and was rewarded with a new assignment in London and $20,000. Naturally, these events were monitored through ISOS, although Popov was never indoctrinated into the source used by MI5 to check on his status and integrity.

When Sir John Masterman’s book The Double Cross System in the War of 1939 to 1945 was published in 1972, Popov recognized himself in the role of the double agent codenamed TRICYCLE. This prompted him to publish his own account, in which he changed several names but quickly found himself in trouble with two of his subagents, BALLOON, a former army officer, and GELATINE, his Austrian girlfriend, who both protested about his descriptions of them. Later editions were amended, but the book will be remembered principally because of Popov’s charge that his Abwehr questionnaire, which contained many queries concerning Hawaii and in particular Pearl Harbor, had been overlooked or deliberately ignored by the FBI.

Popov claimed that the FBI had been hostile to his mission and had disapproved of his admitted promiscuity. He also alleged that he had endured an awkward interview with J. Edgar Hoover before he had been sent back, empty-handed, to London. The FBI has challenged Popov’s version and has denied that Hoover ever met the spy, but Popov’s full FBI file, of 19 volumes, has yet to be declassified public scrutiny.

After the war Popov continued to maintain contact with SIS and was in touch with Nicholas Elliott when the latter was SIS’s representative in Bern. He was imprisoned briefly in Marseilles when one of his commercial ventures fell foul of the law, but retired to a beautiful house in Opio in the south of France after a successful commercial career in Germany and South Africa. He died in August 1981, still locked in conflict with the FBI. See also BOND, JAMES; JOHNS, PHILIP.

PORTLAND SPY RING. See HOUGHTON, HARRY

PORTON DOWN. The Ministry of Defence’s Chemical Defence Establishment, near Salisbury in Wiltshire, was founded in 1916 and covers 7,200 acres. Initially the site employed a thousand people and investigated countermeasures for German mustard gas. In 1940 a secret biological warfare laboratory was built, and some experiments were conducted on behalf of Special Operations Executive to develop a tear-gas weapon and a toxic but nonlethal jelly for offensive operations. Porton Down has frequently undertaken classified projects for the security and intelligence services and has been identified as a target of Soviet espionage, although no case of hostile penetration has been discovered.

PORTUGAL. Although ostensibly neutral during World War II, Antonio Salazar’s regime was considered pro-German and his feared security apparatus, PIDE, was closely associated with the Axis. As well as tolerating large-scale German espionage in Lisbon, the Portuguese embassy in London harbored several spies, one of whom, Rogeirio de Menezes, was sentenced to death for espionage.

POSITIVE VETTING (PV). Introduced in 1950, positive vetting is a procedure intended to check the backgrounds of personnel with access to secret, top secret, and atomic information, The three-part system requires the completion by the candidate for clearance of a long security questionnaire, which is checked against MI5’s own indices and the files held by the Criminal Records Office; the nomination of referees; and finally field inquiries and an interview conducted by an investigating officer.

Positive vetting’s objective is not to identify spies but to check the information supplied by candidates against data already held. Since its introduction, various improvements have been made, and enhanced positive vetting, requiring financial checks and more referees, has been mandatory at regular intervals for all intelligence personnel following the recommendations of the Security Commission, which investigated the Michael Bettaney case in 1983. In addition, a further level termed developed security vetting has been introduced to clear midlevel intelligence personnel.

The government’s reluctant decision to impose positive vetting followed a recommendation from a Cabinet committee, GEN 183, chaired by Prime Minister Clement Attlee in April 1950, following two reviews undertaken in 1947 and 1948 by a working party chaired by a Home Office official, Joseph Baker. The Positive Vetting Committee was chaired by John Winnifrith from the Treasury and included Roger Hollis and Graham Mitchell from MI5, who had both participated in the recent investigation of Klaus Fuchs and had been indoctrinated into VENONA.

POST, KENNETH. Educated at Winchester and Magdalen College, Oxford, Kenneth Post joined the Stock Exchange in 1929 but eight years later was commissioned in the Royal Artillery as a territorial. He served in Norway and in 1943 was seconded to the Ministry of Supply, where he was a member of the CROSSBOW committee set up by the prime minister to assess reports of Hitler’s secret weapons. After the war, he worked as a civil servant in the Ministry of Works, Ministry of House, and Ministry of Defence, but was considered the best candidate to be a GRU spy, revealed in three VENONA texts, codenamed RESERVIST.

POSTMASTER. Special Operations Executive (SOE) code name for an operation conducted by the West Africa country section, headed by Julius Hanau, a former Vickers representative in Belgrade who had been evacuated from the Balkans. The plan involved Gus March-Phillipps, Anders Lassen, and Geoffrey Appleyard sailing a Brixham trawler, the Maid Honor, to Freetown, Sierra Leone. Crewed by six volunteers and skippered by Graham Hayes, formerly the captain of a Finnish grain ship, the Maid Honor reached the Gold Coast in February 1942 and made contact with Philip Leake and Leonard Guise, then working under Louis Franck in SOE’s West African operations section. With the benefit of local intelligence provided by Leopold Manderstam and Hedley Vincent, they then proceeded to hijack two Italian vessels, the freighter Duchessa d’Aosta and the tanker Likomba , which were sheltering off the neutral islands of Fernando Po, then part of Spanish Guinea. Meanwhile an undercover SOE officer, Captain Lippett, visited Fernando Po and threw a tremendous party for the Spanish port officials in Santa Isabel. This diversionary tactic worked admirably, and the two ships were towed into international waters where the Royal Navy boarded them.

PRECAUTIONARY INDEX. Created in 1921 by Eric Holt-Wilson, deputy director-general of the Security Service, this handbook identifies suspects who are to be taken into custody, or placed under surveillance, in the event of war being declared with any of 27 different foreign powers. Constantly updated, the index was the basis of any MI5 assessment of threats to British interests throughout the empire.

PRENDERGAST, SIR JACK. The long reach of British Intelligence overseas is nowhere better exemplified than in the career of Jack Prendergast, an Irish-born local government official in London until World War II when he joined the army and reached the rank of major. In 1946 Prendergast went to Palestine as an assistant district commissioner, and the following year he joined the Palestine Police and served briefly in the Gold Coast (now Ghana). In 1952 he was seconded to the army for a year in the Suez Canal Zone, and in 1953 was appointed director of intelligence and security in Kenya. In 1958 he was sent to Cyprus as chief of intelligence and in 1960 became Hong Kong’s director of Special Branch. In 1966 he was posted to Aden as director of intelligence, and he then retired in 1967, returning in 1973 to establish and run the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) in Hong Kong for five years with the rank of deputy commissioner and director of operations.

Prendergast’s experience directing Special Branch operations during the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya, the EOKA campaign in Cyprus, and the British withdrawal from Aden was unrivaled, and his reputation as a tough but efficient operator made him a natural choice to root out the corruption endemic in the British-run Hong Kong Police.

PRIME, GEOFFREY. Arrested in April 1982 at his home in Cheltenham on child molestation charges, after having been denounced to the police by his wife Rhona, Geoffrey Prime was convicted in November 1982 on charges under the Official Secrets Act and sentenced to 35 years’ imprisonment. Under police interrogation Prime admitted that during the years he had been employed by GCHQ he had spied for the KGB.

Having trained as a Russian linguist, Prime left the Royal Air Force (RAF) in 1968 and was posted to the GCHQ’s Joint Technical Language Service before joining the Soviet section of J Division. In September 1978 he resigned to work as a taxi driver but became obsessed about young girls living in his neighborhood and was suspected of pedophilia. In his confession Prime admitted that he had volunteered to spy for the Soviets while stationed at Gatow with the RAF, and more recently had held meetings with his contacts in Vienna in 1980 and in East Germany in 1981.

PRITT, DENIS. The Labour MP for North Hammersmith between 1935 and 1950, D. N. Pritt, QC, was also a GRU agent. Born in 1887 and called to the bar in 1909, Pritt had been educated at Winchester and London University. Always a Soviet apologist, he was chairman of the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR and the author of Light on Moscow (1939) and Must the War Spread? (1940). He was expelled from the Labour party in 1940, having chaired the notorious Reichstag Fire inquiry, because of his outspoken support for Stalin during the war in Finland. Pritt acted as a conduit between Soviet intelligence personnel and spies who had been arrested, including Wilfred Vernon and Percy Glading. He also went to Ottawa to defend Fred Rose, a Canadian MP and long-term GRU agent who was arrested after being incriminated as a Soviet spy by Igor Gouzenko in September 1945; Rose served six years’ imprisonment. Pritt also defended Jomo Kenyatta, leader of the Mau Mau movement at the beginning of the Kenya Emergency. Among his publications is Spies and Informers in the Witness Box.

PROCTOR, SIR DENNIS. A Harrovian who graduated from King’s College, Cambridge, in 1929, Dennis Proctor joined the Ministry of Health and remained a civil servant until his resignation in 1950 following the suicide of his wife Varda. In 1953 he rejoined the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation and was appointed permanent secretary at the Ministry of Power until his retirement in 1965. A close friend of Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, Proctor had been an Apostle while at Cambridge and was considered a Soviet spy, although when challenged by Peter Wright after his retirement to France he gave a weak denial, saying only that there would have been no need to be recruited as he had no secrets from Burgess, leaving the mole hunters certain of his guilt.

PRODUCTION SECTIONS. During World War II the Secret Intelligence Service’s collection of intelligence from individual countries was channeled through “P” or Production Sections, supervised by a chief of production. The P Sections were:

P1, France, led by Major E. S. Keyser

P1a, North Africa, led by Major L. O. J. Wallerstein

P1b, Non-Free French, led by Major E. S. Keyser

P1c, Free French, led by Lieutenant Commander J. E. Gentry

P2, Iberia, led by Basil Fenwick

P4, Italy, led by Major E. J. Robertson

P5, Poland and French Lines, led by Wilfred Dunderdale

P6, Germany, led by Simon Gallienne

P7, Belgium, led by Major F. J. Jempson

P8, Holland, led by Euan Rabagliati

P9, Norway, led by Eric Welsh

P13, Baltic, led by Leslie Mitchell

P15, PoW/MI9, led by J. M. Langley

P19, Photographic, led by Dr. Carl Winter

Y/S, led by Yugoslavia: John Ennals

Immediately after World War II Dick Ellis was appointed controller of production (CPR), assisted by Charles Dundas and two staff officers, Godfrey Paulson and Rodney Dennys. See also REQUIREMENTS SECTIONS.

PROFUMO, JOHN. The secretary of state for war in Harold Macmillan’s government, but not a member of his Cabinet, Jack Profumo was introduced to Christine Keeler at a weekend party held at Cliveden by Lord Astor early in July 1961. Attracted to this ravishingly beautiful 19-year-old dancer, Profumo conducted a brief affair with her until a month later when he was invited by the Cabinet secretary, Sir Norman Brook, to assist MI5 in an operation to entrap the Soviet naval attaché Eugene Ivanov. Profumo declined to do so and incorrectly interpreted the conversation as a warning that MI5 disapproved of his relationship with Keeler. He immediately wrote her a note calling off their next assignation and did not see her again.

In January 1963 rumors began to circulate that Keeler had sold her story to a Sunday newspaper and had included the assertion that she had conducted an affair with Profumo. When the matter was raised in the House of Commons by George Wigg and Richard Crossman in March 1963, alleging it was a security issue, Profumo made a personal statement, insisting there had been “no impropriety whatever” in his relationship with Keeler and successfully sued two continental journals for libel. However, the Labour Opposition pressed for an inquiry and when in June the lord chancellor, Lord Dilhorne, asked to see Profumo, he confessed to his wife and sent a letter of resignation to the prime minister. An inquiry conducted by Lord Denning investigated the allegations that Profumo had encountered Ivanov at the mews home of their mutual friend Stephen Ward, and that Keeler had acted as an intermediary to seek information from the war minister, but concluded that there were no security implications.

PUJOL, JUAN. See GARBO.

PUTLITZ, WOLFGANG ZU. See ZU PUTLITZ, WOLFGANG.

–Q–

Q SHIPS. Naval code name assigned to dummy warships—either well-armed vessels camouflaged as vulnerable merchantmen to entrap U-boats during World War I, or harmless steamers disguised as recognizable battle cruisers in World War II. In October 1914 Winston Churchill ordered the construction of a dummy fleet of 10 ships to enhance the strength of the fleet; they were moored at Scapa Flow as the 10th Battle Squadron to deceive the enemy.

QUEEN’S MESSENGERS. See KING’S MESSENGERS.

–R–

RABAGLIATI, EUAN. The head of the Netherlands Section of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), Euan Rabagliati’s first operation—sending two agents by boat to Holland across the North Sea in March 1942—proved a disaster. A brand new vessel, MGB 325, commanded by a peacetime solicitor, Peter Williams, was assigned the task of taking the agents across the Channel. MGB 325 was a 110-foot Fairmile “C” Type vessel, capable of 27 knots and carrying a crew of 16. The two agents, one of whom was a Dutch sailor named Maessen, were accompanied by Angus Letty, a leading figure in SIS’s private navy. Having reached the Dutch coast, the agents were rowed ashore by Charles Elwell, the MGB 325’s first lieutenant. Unfortunately, their craft capsized and a German patrol caught both men. Maessen was subsequently shot, and Elwell went to a PoW camp, ending up at Colditz Castle, but not until he too had been questioned. He was later to comment that his chief inquisitor “not only knew the actual numbers of his gunboat, but also the names of many of the officers based at Great Yarmouth,” where the 15th Motor Gunboat Flotilla was berthed.

A former amateur racing-car driver who had been involved in a fatal accident on the Brooklands circuit that claimed the life of his codriver and mechanic, Rabagliati liaised closely with the Dutch government-in-exile in London during the war and later retired to the south of France.

RADIO SECURITY SERVICE (RSS). See ARKLEY VIEW; DIPLOMATIC WIRELESS SERVICE; VOLUNTARY INTERCEPTORS.

RANSOM, CHARLES. During Charles Ransom’s long career in the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), he was only once assigned an overseas post, when he served as the head of station in Rome from 1958 to 1961. His move to Italy followed the suicide of his predecessor there, Harold Gibson. Educated at Harrow County Grammar School and University College, London, where he was a scholar, Ransom started a career in teaching in 1936 but in 1940 joined the York and Lancashire regiment, with whom he served in England and in Italy. In 1946, with the rank of major, he joined SIS, remaining for 20 years.

Ransom was SIS’s expert on the Cominform and spent much of his career in the counterintelligence branch designated R-5, studying international communism and persuading his colleagues that it posed a serious threat to the West. In the end, he was proved correct. Upon his retirement in 1966, aged 55, he returned to academic life, first at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and then at Sussex University. In 1972 he published East–West Relations in a New Europe and soon afterwards joined Professor Sir Harry Hinsley’s team to write the official history of British Intelligence in the Second World War. He died in July 1986, two years before the second part of the third volume was published. In this short book, written for the Centre for Contemporary European Studies at Sussex University in 1974, Ransom turned his considerable analytical skills to assessing the Soviet Union’s likely reaction to the newly enlarged European Economic Community. The fact that Ransom had been studying this topic as an intelligence officer remained undisclosed.

RASTVOROV, YURI. At the end of 1953 the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) station commander in Japan, Maclachlan Silverwood-Cope, reported that Major Yuri A. Rastvorov had indicated his wish to defect, but once the resettlement package had been negotiated and agreed in London, Rastvorov suddenly changed his mind and went to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) instead in January 1954. Rastvorov claimed to his delighted CIA handlers to have heard on the NKVD grapevine that SIS had been severely penetrated and therefore could not guarantee his safety. As evidence, he cited the example of Lieutenant Ivan Skripkin, an NKVD subordinate who he said had approached SIS somewhere in the Far East in 1947, but had been arrested in Moscow soon afterward.

According to his CIA dossier, Rastvorov was born in July 1921 in Dimitriyevsk in the Kursk province of central Russia. His father was an officer in the Red Army and his mother a physician. His paternal grandfather was accused in the 1930s of being a kulak—a landowner—and was dispossessed, dying of starvation in the famine that followed collectivization. During World War II, Rastvorov had been conscripted into the Red Army and was assigned to a Japanese language training school and then to a foreign intelligence unit of the KGB. He married a ballerina, Galina Andreevna Godova, who in 1945 gave birth to a daughter, Tatyana. He was posted to Tokyo in 1946, then recalled for a security check, and in 1950 reassigned in Tokyo. His mission was to cultivate agents at a Tokyo tennis club, so he became a proficient player. He had been recalled to Moscow following the arrest of Lavrenti Beria, and fear of the reception he was likely to receive prompted his approach to the British. His Russian daughter and wife, from whom he was later divorced, remained in the Soviet Union.

After he was resettled in the United States by the CIA, Rastvorov lived in the Washington, D.C., area and adopted the identity of Martin F Simons, knocking three years off his age. Rastvorov had married his CIA case officer, Hope Macartney, who bore him two children, but it was not until Jennifer was 11 and her sister, Alexandra, was 13, that they learned their father’s real identity—and his real name. Their mother told them on a family outing in Minnesota. “Your father has two birthdays,” she began, as the sisters exchanged incredulous looks. “He is not who you think he is. He is a Soviet defector.”

Rastvorov’s alias was that of Martin Simons, born in September 1924 in Tehran, the son of a Dutch petroleum engineer who had worked in the Baku oil fields before the Communist revolution of 1917 and a Russian mother. He claimed to have grown up in Tehran and Iraq and came to the United States in 1953 after his parents had died. His Russian accent was easily explainable by the fact that he had a Russian mother and when friends suggested they could not detect a Dutch accent, he usually changed the subject of conversation. He was an enthusiastic tennis player, a founding member of Edgemoor Tennis Club in Bethesda, Maryland, and his two daughters attended the Holton-Arms School. Friends knew him as an ebullient, athletic, fun-loving man who dressed well, drove expensive cars, and supported charitable causes.

In November and December 1954, writing under his Soviet name, Rastvorov authored a three-part series in Life magazine in which he discussed the political machinations at the highest levels of the Kremlin. After publication he vanished, emerging only to testify before a Senate investigations subcommittee in 1956. He received U.S. citizenship by a special act of Congress in 1959. After his defection, Simons continued working for the CIA in a variety of consulting and advisory jobs and in various CIA-front businesses. He died in January 2004, supposedly 79 years old, five days before the 50th anniversary of his defection to the United States. He had never recovered from a debilitating stroke he suffered in 2002, following knee replacement surgery. Prior to his convalescence, he had lived in a condominium at the Rotunda in McLean, Virginia, for the prior 20 years.

RAWLINSON, A. P. Colonel A. P. Rawlinson served in MI1(a) in 1917, having been educated at Rugby and Pembroke College, Cambridge, and joined up with the Queen’s Regiment in 1914. As a reservist in World War II, he was placed in charge of MI9(a), responsible for the interrogation of enemy prisoners. He shared a room with Gerald Templer at the War Office. After the war, Rawlinson became a successful playwright. He also wrote the scripts for several BBC Radio series. He died in 1994.

REED, RONALD. Born in 1916, the son of a waiter at the Trocadero, Ronald Reed joined the BBC as an engineering apprentice and was a skilled practitioner of a highly unusual art—the ability to adopt the “fingerprint” of another wireless operator.

Before World War II Reed held an amateur radio license, known in the trade as a radio ham. Upon the outbreak of war he, like many of his kind, joined the Radio Security Service (RSS) on the recommendation of the Radio Society of Great Britain. His task was to monitor the airwaves for illicit enemy transmissions, but there came a moment when MI5 found itself in possession of a growing number of enemy agents, some of them equipped with transmitters.

Reed’s initiation into clandestine wireless took place in October 1940 when he was driven to Camp 020 at Ham Common, Richmond, and introduced to Wulf Schmidt, a Nazi agent who only three weeks earlier had parachuted into Cambridgeshire. After dozens of hours of intensive interrogation, Schmidt had agreed to switch sides and help MI5 to dupe his Abwehr controllers. Reed’s role was to keep a close watch on everything Schmidt did and ensure he double-crossed only the enemy and made absolutely no attempt to warn the receiving station that he was operating under duress. At exactly midnight Schmidt tapped out his recognition call sign, D-F-H, which was acknowledged by Hamburg. This exchange was to be the first of hundreds of coded messages that passed between Schmidt and the Abwehr during the course of the war. The final transmission took place in May 1945, just as Allied troops entered Hamburg, forcing the Abwehr operators to evacuate their base.

At first Reed’s task was limited to monitoring Schmidt’s wireless procedure, but when the spy went into the hospital for surgery to his duodenal ulcer, another RSS operator, Russell Lee, was obliged to take over the transmitter and impersonate Schmidt’s style. Lee’s performance was judged perfect by Reed but to reduce the risk of detection, MI5 decided to allow Lee to continue the charade with Schmidt standing close by to answer any awkward questions posed by his Abwehr controllers.

As a result of the successful deception perpetrated by Reed and Lee, both men were invited to stay in the Security Service after the war. Reed worked in the counterespionage branch between 1951 and 1957, and in 1960 he was posted to New Zealand as security liaison officer. When the time came for an official history to be written of MI5’s wartime achievements, Reed, who had retired in 1977, was invited to contribute a monograph on the subject of clandestine wireless. Written anonymously, “Technical Problems Affecting Radio” appeared as an appendix in volume 4 of the British Intelligence in the Second World War series edited by Professor Sir Harry Hinsley and Anthony Simkins.

REES, GORONWY. Until the defection of his friend Guy Burgess, Goronwy Rees was regarded by most of his friends as a lovable and highly intelligent Welsh rascal. Suddenly, overnight, his life changed and his friends turned on him, not so much because they believed he was still a Marxist or was implicated in espionage, but because of his bizarre behavior in seeking to exploit the situation.

Born in Aberystwyth, Rees went to New College and All Souls, Oxford, and while still at university came under the spell of Burgess, who confirmed his commitment to Communism. They planned to visit the Soviet Union together but Rees instead began work on the Manchester Guardian and the Spectator. However, Burgess did confide in him that he was a Soviet agent, and that Anthony Blunt was also part of his ring.

Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, Rees joined a territorial unit as a private soldier but in 1940 was sent to Sandhurst and received a commission in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. Thereafter he spent much time on the staff in London, occasionally visiting Burgess at Lord Rothschild’s flat. In 1944 he was transferred as an intelligence officer to the planning staff of the 21st Army Group in preparation for the Normandy landings. It was his duty to obtain signatures from Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay and Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory on the final set of orders that set Operation OVERLORD into play. Rees recalls that moments before adding his name to the historic document, Leigh-Mallory proposed several slight alterations, and he was obliged to tell the most senior Royal Air Force officer in the country that it was now too late for amendments.

At the end of the war, Rees went with the occupation forces to Germany and then joined the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). According to his autobiography, A Chapter of Accidents (1971), Rees became increasingly concerned that both Burgess and Donald Maclean were still secret supporters of the Comintern, and he reported this to David Footman as soon as the news broke that Burgess had disappeared.

Five years after these events, as principal of the University College of Wales, Rees wrote a series of six anonymous articles for the People entitled “Guy Burgess Stripped Bare: His Closest Friend Speaks at Last.” In it he implicated Blunt—although he was careful not to identify him by name—and smeared enough other people to spark a scandal. As soon as he was exposed as the author, he was dismissed from his academic post and sued for libel. Among the few who stayed loyal to the tempestuous Welshman, and were named as such in his memoirs, were his former SIS colleagues, Robert Zaehner, A. J. Ayer, and Footman.

Having wrecked his careers in intelligence and academia, Rees took to writing novels and was mildly successful. He was, however, distrusted by the Security Service mole hunters, who were convinced he too had been a spy, and he was shunned by Blunt who thought Rees had betrayed him. Ironically, Rees died a few months before Blunt was exposed as a traitor by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in November 1979 and stripped of his honors.

REFERENTURA. See REZIDENT.

REGIONAL SECURITY LIAISON OFFICER (RSLO). During World War II the Security Service posted representatives known as RSLOs across the United Kingdom, attached to the local military districts, to liaise with the military authorities and the local chief constable. All contact with MI5 from the police and military was channeled through the RSLO, who carried a pass issued under the Defence of the Realm Act granting him almost unlimited powers to demand cooperation. See also SECURITY LIAISON OFFICER.

REGISTRY. The foundation of both MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) is their ability to retain information so it may be cross-referenced and retrieved when required. Thus the heart of the Security Service has always been the Registry, an efficient storage system initially based on thousands of hand-sorted card indices managed by a staff of women clerks supervised by the “Registry Queen,” a figure of considerable responsibility and power. Individual files were divided between personal and subject files (designated PF and SF, respectively), each with a separate card punched with holes so retrieval and sorting could be achieved with knitting needles. During World War II, a business efficiency expert was introduced to improve the filing system and a Hollerith automated card-sorting machine was purchased.

In September 1940 MI5’s Registry was hit by a Luftwaffe incendiary and the resulting fire damage prompted the Security Service to modernize and duplicate the card indices. As highly secret signals intelligence material became available, new categories of files were developed—with the “Y” Box files containing the most sensitive information—and kept as “Retained Files” by particular sections, which created their own separate registries. As the number of individual files increased, management of them became increasingly complex and all new PFs were identified using the appropriate National Insurance numbers. Later files were color-coded to indicate their currency, and a policy was adopted of destroying defunct files deemed to be of no historical value.

Within MI5’s wartime Registry, the subsections were R1, the head of Registry in London; R2, Indices; R3, File Correcting; R3Y, Special Files; R5, File Making and Carding; R7, Policy Index and Registration; R8, Communist Recording; and R9, Destruction of Files.

During World War II, SIS’s Central Registry of case histories, records, and individual dossiers, headed by Bill Woodfield, was evacuated to Brescia, a house in King Harry Lane on the St. Albans estate of the Earl of Verulam.

REILLY, SIDNEY. Born Sigmund Rosenblum in Odessa in 1874, the illegitimate son of a local Jewish doctor, Reilly adopted the Irish surname of his first wife’s father and thereafter pretended to have his origins in Connemara. He was an adventurer, an arms dealer and traveler, and lived for a time in New York where he made and lost a fortune, and London, where he found a patron in Sir Henry Hozier, Winston Churchill’s father-in-law.

Reilly’s travels began when he emigrated to Brazil, but his first marriage took place in London to a widow, Margaret Reilly Callaghan. A second, bigamous marriage followed to Nadine in New York where he operated as a purchasing agent of munitions for the Russian government.

In 1916 Reilly volunteered for military service and was commissioned into the Royal Canadian Flying Corps. Two years later, in March 1918, he was transferred to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and posted to Murmansk with the code name “ST-1.” His task was to foment resistance against the Bolsheviks and, together with George Hill, he played a key role in the Lockhart Plot, the failed assassination attempt on Lenin. When Reilly and Hill eventually escaped to Sweden, in October 1918, they were decorated with the Military Cross and the DSO, respectively.

Reilly’s commitment to the anti-Bolshevik movement became something of an embarrassment to SIS, although he continued to advise the Foreign Office of developments in Moscow until his eventual return in September 1925. The journey from Finland was sponsored by “the Trust,” a shadowy opposition group that claimed extensive support even within the Communist party’s hierarchy. In reality the Trust was a sophisticated deception, manipulated by the OGPU, that exercised control over the dissidents and occasionally enticed troublesome opponents of the regime across the frontier and into elaborately staged traps. Its history, written by KGB archivists, is contained in 37 volumes. Reilly’s political mentor, Boris Savinkov, was a victim of just such a scheme and in August 1924 he set off from Berlin, under the Trust’s protection, with the intention of reestablishing contact with his supporters. He was arrested immediately upon his arrival and, after a trial at which he was sentenced to death, received a pardon that effectively marked his conversion to Communism. He is believed to have committed suicide in May 1925, as was recorded by his biographer, David Footman.

Despite Savinkov’s experience, Reilly was persuaded to slip across the Russian frontier on 25 September 1925 to address a secret gathering of the Trust’s senior membership. The meeting took place in a dacha at Malakhova and afterwards Reilly was driven not, as he expected, to a safehouse but to the notorious Lubyanka Prison. Months of interrogation followed, but neither SIS nor his most recent wife, actress Pepita Bobadilla, had any news of his whereabouts. She knew he had been in Helsinki, and SIS had last heard of him via a postcard mailed from Moscow two days after he had left Finland. In fact Reilly, shaken by the speed and efficiency of his entrapment, had written a very full confession and had agreed to cooperate with his captors. The person responsible for leading Reilly across the Finnish border was a leading member of the Trust, Toivoi Vjahi, who was later identified as a senior OGPU officer, I. M. Petrov.

An announcement of Reilly’s death was made in the Times on 15 December 1925 but in reality he had by then been dead for more than a month. He had been kept a prisoner, under constant interrogation, until his execution on 5 November by a single bullet in the back of the head. Documents purporting to have come from Reilly’s dossier, recently released from the KGB archives, show that he was driven into the woods near Bogorodsk and shot, and then buried in the courtyard of an OGPU prison. There are, however, various reports of uncertain reliability indicating that Reilly was either a Soviet-controlled double agent—a theory propounded in 1968 by a leading academic, Revolt Pimenov—or that he survived his imprisonment, a claim made to George Hill in 1943 by his NKVD contact, Colonel Ossipov.

Reilly’s widow Pepita persisted in her attempts to extract information from the British authorities, and even approached Churchill for help, but he insisted that her husband “did not go into Russia at the request of any British official, but went there on his own private affairs.” Heartbroken by these rebuffs, she arranged for Reilly’s memoirs, which contained the names of several senior SIS officers, to be published. Her intention was to embarrass SIS and force them to help her husband, but by the time she had finished the necessary editorial work and the book was released, Reilly could not be saved.

RELATOR. See MAD DOG.

REMORSE. Special Operations Executive code name for a sophistcated financial operation conducted by a rubber merchant, Walter Fletcher, and Edward Wharton-Tigar, which exploited the wartime Chinese currency market and manipulated the local black market in dollars. REMORSE was an extraordinarily successful operation and was backed by the British Treasury to fund Reuter’s News Agency, the Red Cross, the British Embassy, the Ministry of Information, and the clandestine services.

RENNIE, SIR JOHN. Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) from 1968 to 1973, Rennie and his predecessor were the only Chiefs appointed from outside SIS. He had no background in intelligence, although he had spent five years, from 1953 to 1958, running the Information Research Department (IRD).

Born in Marylebone in January 1914 to a match manufacturer, Rennie had been educated at Wellington and Balliol College, Oxford. After graduating with a third-class degree in modern history, he spent four years in New York as an advertising executive, where he married a Swiss woman, Anne-Marie Godat, who bore him one son. A talented painter, he had works exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1930 and 1931 and at the Paris Salon in 1932. A week after the outbreak of World War II, Rennie joined the Consular Service in Baltimore, and in September 1940 he transferred to the British Press Service in New York and then moved to the British Information Service before returning to London in January 1946, when he formally joined the Foreign Office. Three years later, in March 1949, he was posted to Washington, D.C., with the rank of first secretary (commercial), and in June 1951 went to Warsaw.

Following his unusually long stint in the IRD, where Nigel Clive (who ran IRD for three years) says he was “widely admired for his skill and ingenuity,” Rennie was posted to Buenos Aires as minister (commercial) in April 1958, and then in November 1960 went straight to Washington, D.C., where he served alongside Maurice Oldfield and Denis Greenhill. In 1964, having returned to London to take a year off to nurse his terminally ill wife, Rennie was promoted to assistant undersecretary in charge of the Americas, concentrating on the dispute between Guatemala and British Honduras. He spent the following year on loan to the Civil Service Commission, chairing the interview board. In October 1966 he was back at the Foreign Office, having been promoted to deputy undersecretary for defense, and having married a widow, Mrs. Jennifer Rycroft, by whom he had two more sons. The following year he was awarded the KCMG.

Probably the most memorable event during the period of Rennie’s tenure was the defection of Oleg Lyalin, the culmination of a recruitment achieved by a joint MI5-SIS group that had targeted potentially vulnerable suspected KGB and GRU professionals.

Rennie’s tenure as Chief was brief, and after just five years he retired, the catalyst being the embarrassment caused when his eldest son Charles and daughter-in-law were arrested in a squat for possession of Chinese heroin and tried at the Old Bailey. Despite the protection of a D Notice, which requested discretion on the identity of SIS’s chief and his personnel, the inevitable publicity in Stern and the foreign press, which spilled over to England, was too much for Rennie to endure, especially as he had become the first Chief to be a target for terrorists, and he handed over the reins to his deputy, Oldfield, a few months short of what would gave been his official retirement date, January 1974.

REQUIREMENTS SECTIONS. During and after World War II the Secret Intelligence Service mirrored the “P” production sections with “R” requirements sections responsible for liaising with clients of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in Whitehall and setting targets for intelligence collection. The R Sections were headed by the director of requirements (DR), the ACSS, Wing Commander James Easton. The R Sections were R1 (Political), R2 (Air), R3 (Naval), R4 (Military), R5 (Counterespionage), .R6 (Economic), R7 (Science), and R8 (Coordination). The size of each section varied from a single officer in R1 (David Footman) to 20 in R5. The reorganization in 1944 resulted in the following personnel in the R Sections:

R1: George Pinney, Charles Dundas, Francis Head, Richard Comyns-Carr, Enthoven, Miskin

R2: Squadron Leader Hugo

R3: Commander George Birley

R4: Lieutenant C. Priest, Major Skinner

R5: Kim Philby, Tony Milne, F. Witty, A. M. M. Makins, Mrs. H. M. Montgomery, Michael Morton, Robert O. Slocum, Charles Ransom, Peter Fairbairn, Geoffrey Hinton, Smith-Wright, White-stone, Evans, Robert Carew-Hunt, Mrs. Jane Archer, I. de Jong, Kenneth Worke, Robert Smith

R6: Rear Admiral Limpenny

R2 and R4 personnel were not SIS officers but seconded staff from the War Office and Admiralty, usually on a tour of two years.

RESETTLEMENT. One geographical advantage exploited by British Intelligence has been its ability to resettle redundant agents or isolate troublemakers without imprisoning them. Thus Johann De Graaf, Olga Gray, and Gottfried Treviranus were successfully relocated in Canada prior to World War II, and during the Cyprus Emergency, Archbishop Makarios was spirited away to the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. Similarly, St. Helena was used to accommodate the son of a Gulf potentate who had plotted against his father in the 1960s. More recently the British sovereign bases at Akrotiri and Dhekelia on Cyprus have provided secure housing for informants withdrawn from Northern Ireland.

Although the process of resettlement can be traumatic, the Secret Intelligence Service has suffered only one public embarrassment of a defector complaining about his treatment, and Viktor Makarov, a former KGB officer exfiltrated to England, was compensated with a payment of £65,000 following a public campaign for better treatment.

REUTER’S NEWS AGENCY. In 1894 Lord Rosebery agreed to pay Reuter’s £500 from the secret service funds in return for confidential reports from its correspondents across the world. The arrangement was terminated by Lord Salisbury in 1898 when Reuter’s submitted a dispatch from Port Arthur about the Royal Navy that turned out to have been fabricated. In 1909 a limited service, amounting to £200 for information from the Reuter’s North China News Agency, was contracted to keep the enterprise afloat and not succumbing to German competition.

For many years thereafter, Reuter’s received a concealed subsidy from the Foreign Office dating back to the secret 1916 guarantee given to the original company to enable Sir Roderick Jones to buy it, following the suicide of Baron Hubert de Reuter. The fact that Jones, who had been Reuter’s South Africa correspondent during the Boer War, bought the agency using financial support from the secret vote was never disclosed, although his appointment as director of Cable and Wireless War Propaganda was officially announced, as was his subsequent position as director of propaganda when the Ministry of Information was created.

Numerous overseas Reuter’s offices were opened for the sole purpose of gathering intelligence, and both during and after World War II several Reuter’s correspondents pursued a parallel clandestine career. Peter Brown, formerly the Morning Post’s correspondent in Belgrade, joined Reuter’s before he was recruited by David Footman into the political section of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) as an expert on left-wing movements in Europe. Leslie Smith, who spent much time in prewar China, joined SIS’s Southeast Asia staff; Brian Connell, latterly ITV’s chief commentator on foreign affairs, went into Naval Intelligence, while Courtney Young became a mole hunter at MI5. Frederick Vanden Heuvel, a legendary SIS officer who was also a count of the Holy Roman Empire (and a director of Eno’s Fruit Salts) masqueraded as the assistant press attaché in Bern, Switzerland, throughout the war, and his SIS colleague Wilfred Hindle, who masterminded many of SIS’s anti-Soviet operations, wrote Portrait of a Newspaper and Foreign Correspondent while based at SIS’s station in prewar Budapest.

REZIDENT. The title of the senior Russian intelligence officers in London. The “legal” rezident, commanding the rezidentura at the embassy, acts in parallel to his counterparts, the “illegal” rezident and the GRU rezident. The rezident at the embassy usually ranks as colonel or general, works independently of the rest of the diplomatic mission, and is accountable directly to Moscow Center and not to the ambassador. Before and during the Cold War, the identity of the rezident was not declared to his British hosts, and one of MI5’s principal objectives was to identify him and place him under physical and technical surveillance in the hope of establishing the names of his subordinates and their contacts. The rezident’s office is known as the referentura and is located in a closely guarded upper floor where countermeasures have been taken to prevent eavesdropping.

The OGPU/NKVD/KGB legal rezidents based at the Soviet embassy in London were N. N. Alekseyev (1924–25), N. V. Rakov (1925–27), P. A. Zolotussky (Feb–May 1927), Yevgenny P. Mitskevich (1932–33), Max M. Zinde (1933–35), Adolf S. Chapsky (1936–37), Grigory B. Grafpen (1937–38), Anatoli V. Gorsky (acting, 1938–Feb 1940; official, Dec 1940–44), Ivan A. Chichayev (1941–43), Konstantin M. Kukin (1944–47), Nikolai B. Rosin (1947–52), Georgi M. Zhivotovsky (1952–53), Sergei L. Tikhvinsky (1953–55), Yuri I. Modin (1955–56), Nikolai B. Rodin alias “Korovin” (1956–61), Nikolai B. Litvinov (1961–62), Nikolai B. Bagrichev (1962–64), Mikhail T. Chizhov (1964–66), Mikhail I. Lopatin (1966–67), Yuri N. Voronin (1967–71), Leonid A. Rogov (1971), Yevgeny I. Lazobny (1971–72), Yakov K. Lukasevics (1972–80), Arkadi V. Gouk (1980–84), and Leonid Y. Nikitenko (1984–85).

The known illegal rezidents were Vasili Spiru (1930–31), Yevgenny P. Mitskevich (1931–32), Ignaty Reif (acting, 1933–34), Alexander N. Orlov (1934–35), Arnold Deutsch (acting, 1935–36 and 1937), Theodore Mally (1936–37), and Konon Molody alias “Gordon Lonsdale” (1955–61).

REZIDENTURA. The Russian term for the intelligence organization subordinate to the rezident. The rezidentura consisted of representatives from all branches of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, namely, Line PR (political reports staff); Line N (illegal support officers of Directorate S); Line X (scientific and technical specialists of Directorate T); Line R (counterintelligence personnel from Directorate K); and Line SK (security officers to protect the Soviet colony).

The busiest period for the London rezidentura was during World War II, when the staff was swamped by the huge quantity of political and scientific intelligence being supplied by ideologically motivated spies. Under the sheer pressure of work, their numbers were increased in 1941 by the addition of André Graur, operating under first secretary cover to work under his own name, and Boris Krotov (later identified in VENONA with the code name BOB). The other declared NKVD officer in London was Ivan Chichayev, who acted as a liaison officer to Special Operations Executive. In 1943 Konstantin Kukin was transferred to London, and a year later he took over as rezident upon the departure to Washington, D.C., in September 1944 of Anatoli Gorsky, to run Donald Maclean.

REZUN, VLADIMIR. In June 1978 Major Vladimir Rezun, a 31-year-old GRU officer working under UN cover in Geneva, was smuggled out of Switzerland to England with his wife and two young children. A career soldier, he had participated in the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and later had supervised the training of the elite Spetsnaz special forces. In his memoirs Rezun is deliberately vague about his career, but he undertook missions in Munich, Rome, Basel, Amsterdam, Vienna, and Hamburg.

Using the pseudonym “Viktor Suvorov,” he has written several books about the Soviet military and his experiences. The first was Inside the Soviet Army, which discussed the relationship between the KGB and its military counterpart, the GRU. This was followed by Inside Soviet Military Intelligence, his autobiography Aquarium, and Spetsnaz. Whether Rezun really wrote all four books, in the space of five years, has been questioned, particularly since some of his assertions have proved inaccurate. For example, his claim that the head of the GRU in 1940, I. E. Proskurov, was deposed in July 1940 and shot is definitely wrong. In fact Proskurov was appointed to the Far East Air Force in August 1940, and at the end of September 1940 he was transferred to Strategic Aviation. He was arrested in April 1941 and executed in October of that year. According to Michael Parrish of Indiana University, Rezun has made other mistakes about the careers of Ivan Serov, A. P. Paniflov, I. I. Il’ichev, and I. F. Dashichev.

In 1993, still using the pen name Suvorov, Rezun released Icebreaker in Russia, a controversial interpretation of the origins of World War II, which concluded that Stalin had always intended to go to war against Germany in July 1941—a theory not entirely unknown in Western academic circles, but a proposition that was demolished convincingly by the scholar David M. Glantz writing in the Journal of Military History.

RHYDYMWYN. In December 1940, as a first step in the development of an atomic bomb, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) was awarded a contract to produce uranium hexafluoride, a highly corrosive gas that hitherto had been a key to fission research, and the company set up an internal unit to liaise with the Maud Committee. Five months later, in May 1941, Metropolitan-Vickers was contracted to build a pilot gaseous-diffusion plant at Rhydymwyn in northern Wales, and a plausible cover story was prepared for the local population that the heavily guarded site was engaged in the manufacture of synthetic rubber.

The site selected for the British atomic bomb project, codenamed Tube Alloys, was remote and secret and was then in use by ICI as an underground storage facility for high explosives and the highly toxic chemical ingredients of mustard gas. The entire area of the Alyn valley was dotted with abandoned lead and zinc mines and quarries, amounting to some 80 miles of passages and connected workings, and in September 1938 the Ministry of Supply had begun tunneling into the limestone at Hendre to construct a series of deep chambers, initially to store up to 10,000 tons of TNT. By October 1940 2,200 miners had dug four shafts into the hillside 30 feet wide and 760 feet long and fitted them with air vents, blast doors, and two 2-ton cranes to carry the munitions. In addition, a separate facility, codenamed WOODSIDE, was constructed nearby as an overflow. Those engaged in building the complex were sworn to secrecy and told that it was intended to store the nation’s art treasures, whereas in fact those were actually deposited some distance away at a different quarry, at Grange, in the same county of Clwyd.

The Rhydymwyn site became operational in June 1940 when ICI delivered the first consignment of chemicals, accompanied by massive army and police escorts, with a mobile decontamination unit, and stored them temporarily in a surface facility codenamed ANTELOPE while the runcol (the blistering agent in mustard gas) was transferred into massive lead-lined underground tanks. During the last months of 1941, when there were already 262 workers based in the compound, the Tube Alloys staff began to arrive, with contingents from ICI at Randle and Billingham, together with technicians from Metropolitan-Vickers and the Clarendon Laboratory. At the height of its activity, there were more than a thousand people on the site, with 120 of them categorized as engaged in atomic research in the surface laboratories and the remainder assembling millions of smoke shells and other munitions, as well as processing the acids required for chemical weapons.

Although the British atomic bomb project was absorbed into the Anglo-American Manhattan project, Rhydymwyn continued as a classified research site until the end of the Cold War.

RICHARDS, SIR BROOKS. Intelligence coordinator to the Cabinet from 1978 to 1980, Brooks Richards was director of intelligence, Northern Ireland, from 1980 to 1981. Educated at Stowe and Magdalene College, Cambridge, Richards joined the Royal Navy in 1939 and served in Special Operations Executive’s secret navy, headed by Gerald Holdsworth, which ran agents across to Nazi-occupied France from Cornwall. At the end of the war, he joined the Foreign Office to serve in Paris, Athens, Bonn, and the Persian Gulf. He was ambassador in Saigon and Athens before his appointment, after his official retirement, as intelligence coordinator to the Cabinet, and then director of security and intelligence in Northern Ireland. After his final retirement, he was commissioned to write Secret Flotillas, the history of the wartime clandestine boat organizations, which was published in 1996. He died in September 2002, aged 84. See also RICHARDS, SIR FRANCIS.

RICHARDS, SIR FRANCIS. Director of GCHQ from 2000 to 2003, Francis Richards was the son of Sir Brooks Richards and was educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge. He served with the Royal Green Jackets before he joined the Foreign Office in 1969 to serve in Moscow and Vienna, and as assistant private secretary to the foreign secretary, Lord Carrington, from 1980 to 1981. In 2003 he was appointed governor of Gibraltar.

RICHTER, KAREL. A 29-year-old Sudeten Czech who had lived in the United States before World War II, Karel Richter parachuted into Hertfordshire in May 1941 and was arrested the same day. His identity papers included a genuine Czech passport and documents naming his as “Fred Snyder.” He was interrogated at Camp 020 and agreed to accompany his captors back to where he had hidden his parachute, and surrendered a quartz valve he had been instructed to deliver to TATE. When confronted with Josef Jakobs, who had been arrested the previous week and with whom he had trained, Richter’s resistance collapsed. According to his confession, Richter had been a marine engineer serving aboard the S.S. Hansa when the war started, and his wife was still living in California. He had deserted his ship in Hamburg and had attempted to return to the United States through Sweden, but had been arrested in Stockholm and deported to Germany. There, he had been placed in a concentration camp until he was offered the opportunity join the Abwehr. His mission had been to meet TATE to deliver the quartz crystal and check that he was not operating under the enemy’s control. Richter was tried at the Old Bailey in October 1941 and was hanged at Wandsworth Prison in December.

RICKETTS, SIR PETER. Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee and intelligence coordinator to the Cabinet in succession to Michael Pakenham from June 2000 to 2001, Peter Ricketts was educated at Bishop Vesey’s Grammar School, Sutton Coldfield, and Pembroke College, Oxford. He is married, with one son and one daughter. Ricketts joined the Foreign Office in 1974 and after postings to Singapore and the British Delegation to NATO in Brussels, he served as assistant private secretary to Foreign Secretary Francis Pym from 1983 to 1985. He also served in Washington, D.C., and Paris and was the Foreign Office’s deputy political director from 1997 to 1999, with particular responsibility for the Balkans.

RICKMAN, ALEXANDER. Long before the outbreak of World War II, Sweden was regarded as a vital source of strategic minerals for Germany, and accordingly the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) prepared various schemes to deny the Reich’s heavy industry some of its key supplies. While a group of conspirators at the Ministry of Supply plotted to bust any blockade imposed in the Baltic by the Kriegsmarine, Section D concentrated on a scheme to smuggle explosives into Stockholm and then destroy the cargo handling installations at certain selected ports.

Alexander Rickman was assigned to survey potential targets for this sabotage. His cover was his wholly authentic claim to be researching a book for the respected London publishers of Faber & Faber on Sweden’s principal industry. The resulting book was indeed released in August 1939, betraying no clue to the author’s true purpose. Unfortunately Section D’s plan went horribly wrong at a very early stage, causing much embarrassment for the British embassy, which tried unconvincingly to distance itself from the fiasco.

While still in the preparatory stages of the operation, which was codenamed STRIKE OX, Rickman recruited two members of the British expatriate business community. One was the local British Petroleum representative, Harry Gill, and the other was Ernest Biggs, a one-legged tea importer. Unknown to Rickman, his attempts to recruit a network of saboteurs had not gone unnoticed by the ubiquitous Swedish secret police, which placed him under surveillance and tipped off the SIS head of station, John Martin. Unfortunately Martin decided to keep this information to himself, apparently for fear of compromising his Swedish contact, and in consequence Rickman was arrested while moving his cache of explosives to Oxelösund and Lulea, the principal ice-free harbors in Sweden used for loading iron ore, following the destruction of the quays at Narvik. Biggs was also caught carrying two suitcases packed with dynamite, and two other conspirators, Elsa Johansson and Arno Behrisch, were taken into custody. All were convicted after a short trial, with Rickman sentenced to eight years’ hard labor, Biggs five years, and the two Swedes three and a half years. Rickman spent the remainder of the war in prison, but Biggs was released in October 1941 and subsequently joined F Section of Special Operations Executive.

RIDEAL, SIR ERIC. Born in 1890 and educated at Oundle and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, Eric Rideal was the son of Dr. Samuel Rideal, an admired research chemist and a leading authority on drainage and sanitation. During the World War I, Eric Rideal served in the Royal Engineers and was gassed in France. Later he was known to be an admirer of Conrad Noel, “the red vicar of Thaxted,” and was part of the group of antiwar scientists that gathered around J. D. Bernal. As professor of colloid science at Cambridge between 1930 and 1946, he was closely associated with atomic research and was an expert on heavy water.

Rideal became an espionage suspect and was identified as a Soviet spy codenamed ERIC, who was the NKVD’s first significant source of information from inside the British atomic weapons project and was run by Vladimir Barkovsky of the London rezidentura. Barkovsky had established contact with his valuable source in early 1943 and had reported to Moscow Center in December 1942 that a Communist sympathizer had passed a detailed report on atomic research in Britain and America. The unnamed scientist intended to send the material to the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) but it had been relayed to the Soviets, which suggested that the scientist was ideologically motivated.

Barkovsky’s colleague Anatoli Gorsky had asked the Center for permission to establish direct contact with this scientist and when approval was given, Gorsky requested his contact to meet the scientist again and ask him to agree to a meeting with a Soviet intelligence officer. In a letter to the Center in March 1943 the rezidentura reported on the meeting with ERIC:

At first he hesitated, saying that he would have to think it over and that he saw no need for meeting anybody since he had already written all he knew about the atomic problem. Later in the conversation his attitude changed and he said that he hoped it would not be an Englishman since his English comrades were very careless. Finally, after assurances that everything would be properly organized, he said that he would be glad to meet our comrade.

The meeting took place in January 1943 at a London tube station, and after the usual signs and passwords had been exchanged, the scientist was judged to be straightforward and friendly, although obviously nervous. He verified all the arrangements for the meeting and it lasted more than an hour and a half, during which nothing was called directly by its name, but, concluded the rezidentura, “ERIC knew with whom he had agreed to cooperate.” Barkovsky remembers that when he met his new source for the first time, he had been asked whether he understood nuclear physics. Upon receiving an unsatisfactory reply, ERIC said that he wanted his contact not to be just a transmitting channel but to understand what it was all about. He urged the intelligence officer to study Applied Nuclear Physics by Pollard and Davidson. Barkovsky took his advice and was grateful to ERIC for insisting on this, as the American textbook turned out to be a great help to him in running his source.

He told me, “We’ll go through the book together, and then it will be considerably easier for you to deal with me.” I also did not see any other way out. I was completely swamped with work, but I started poring over the textbook.

ERIC passed on the secret material to which he had direct access and, being of a daring nature and something of an adventurer, he also took what was kept in the safes of his colleagues. Barkovsky recalls how, when the scientist told him about this opportunity and brought him the impression of a door key, a duplicate was required. It was too dangerous to have this work done in a local shop, and it would take too long to send the impression to the Center, as the wartime diplomatic bag had to be sent via the United States and the Far East and took months to reach Moscow. However, as a young man Barkovsky had been a sixth-grade fitter, and he did the job himself and made a duplicate that fitted perfectly.

As a result of the decision taken by us we manufactured a copy of the key for ERIC and worked out arrangements for meetings so that we can contact him three times a week in London without prior notification. As a result we managed to remove from ERIC all the available American materials ... and other interesting materials on ENORMOZ [the Anglo-American atomic bomb project].

ERIC’S importance as a source is confirmed by a reference to him in an internal NKVD memorandum entitled “On the Composition of the Agent Network for ENORMOZ of the First Directorate of the NKVD of the USSR (as of August 1945)”:

During the period of his cooperation with us he supplied an enormous quantity of most valuable, genuine documents in the form of official American and British reports on the work on ENORMOZ and, in particular, on the construction of uranium piles.

Describing ERIC’S relationship with the NKVD, Barkovsky noted in a letter to the Center that he had been motivated by ideology and was scrupulous when it came to money:

ERIC as before works for us with enthusiasm, but still turns down the slightest hint of financial reward. Once we gave him more to cover his expenses than he had asked for. He showed his displeasure and stated that he was suspicious of our desire to give him financial help. He asked us to stop once and for all our attempts to do so. In view of this we fear that any gift to him as a sign of gratitude for his work would have a negative effect. ERIC is completely unselfish and extremely scrupulous in regard to anything that might appear as “payment” for his work.

Although ERIC’S true name has not been disclosed, it is highly likely, based on recent Russian efforts to conceal his original code name—and the poor security exercised at the time in the choice of cryptonyms, which was left to the often limited imaginations of individual Soviet case officers—that it was indeed Rideal. Barkovsky described ERIC as a young physicist and CPGB member who volunteered information from inside the British atomic research program, but also had access to data from the United States and was able in 1943 to assert that “the Americans are far ahead.” He was “a person who had come to us by himself, without any recruitment. He wanted to help and correct the injustice.” In ERIC’s opinion, justice lay in preventing Russia’s allies from knowing very important work of a defense nature.

At our first meeting he began explaining something to me with much enthusiasm, but I had only the slightest idea about the structure of the nucleus.... He not only gave me technical data, but explained the sense of it, so that I could comprehend what we were discussing. I prepared my own glossary that proved to be extremely useful. All the terms were new ones that no one had ever heard of before. And these people did not cost the treasury one pound. They were our kind of people, brave people with initiative who considered that giving aid to the Soviets was a moral and political duty. Understandably this pertains, I hope, not only to atomic scientists.

Documents in the KGB archives disclosed in 2003 suggest that Rideal, who was knighted in 1951, may have been attributed the NKVD code name ALKIT in 1943. Although the word appears to have no meaning, there was a wartime military tailor of that name in England during World War II with branches in London and Cambridge.

RIEUL, ROLAND. A sergeant in the French army, Roland Rieul was captured by the Germans in 1940 and spent three years in captivity, including six months at the Henschel aircraft factory at Schoenfeld. After two unsuccessful escape attempts, Rieul broke out of Stalag IIIB at Furstenburg-on-Áder in May 1943 and made his way by train to the village of Besbach, where he had a contact in the local school. Having found his teacher and been given shelter, he was escorted to the railway marshaling yards nearby and instructed to climb on a train for Italy. He hid in one of the goods compartments and soon was in Basel, Switzerland. There he reported to the British consulate and was given a warm welcome by the consul, Tim Frenken, to whom he supplied a detailed description of the German aircraft factory where he had worked.

Frenken also happened to be the local Secret Intelligence. Service (SIS) head of station, and once Colonel H. A. Cartwright, the British military attaché at the embassy in Bern, confirmed his credentials—that his father was French and his mother British, and that his English wife and two children were in England—Rieul was sent to Porentruy to recover from the rigors of captivity. In mid-July 1943 he was taken to the French frontier by Sergeant Cartier, a member of the Swiss Border Police who was in Cartwright’s pay, and safely dispatched into enemy territory on his first mission to Paris.

Rieul’s instructions were to establish himself in the capital, carry out some minor assignments, and then return to Basel. He traveled by train and upon his arrival stayed with his uncle in Passy, who introduced him to a friend that had access to the Ritz Hotel’s guest list. As the hotel had been requisitioned by the occupation forces for the use of senior German officers, this information was regarded as significant, and after a brief period in Paris, Rieul returned to Switzerland to report a successful conclusion to his first mission.

Thereafter Rieul made more than two dozen trips back to Paris, crossing the frontier in complete safety under the protection of the Swiss intelligence service, with which SIS had reached an accommodation: The Swiss provided the facilities needed for clandestine infiltration into France—a farm near Boncourt that straddled the border—on condition that each agent report his arrival as soon as he made the return journey.

At the end of the war Rieul was reunited with his family and they returned home to Paris, where they lived until 1960 when, because of his wife’s ill health, they moved to the Isle of Wight. Rieul has now retired as director of a fertilizer supply company and lives near Ryde on the Isle of Wight.

THE RIGHT CLUB. Founded in 1939 by Captain Archibald Ramsay, the Unionist MP for Peebles since 1931, the Right Club attracted a membership similar to the Link and the Anglo-German Fellowship and was the subject of intensive surveillance and penetration by MI5. Ramsay was detained in May 1940 under the Defence of the Realm Act and remained in Brixton Prison until 1944.

RIMINGTON, DAME STELLA. Director-general of the Security Service from 1992 to 1996 and the first woman to be appointed to the top job in any British intelligence agency, Stella Rimington, a librarian, had accompanied her husband John to New Delhi when he was posted to the British High Commission there. She was offered part-time employment as a secretary by the security liaison officer, Sir Graham Lake. Upon their return to London in 1969, she accepted a full-time post with MI5.

Rimington served in all MI5’s branches and in 1980 spent three years in K3 running Soviet Bloc agents in England. She then joined the countersubversion branch as an assistant director before moving to counterterrorism, where she was appointed director. At the end of 1990 she succeeded David Ransom as one of the two deputy director-generals, and two years later took over from Sir Patrick Walker.

After her retirement, Rimington caused consternation in Whitehall by writing her memoirs, Open Secret, and was much criticized because she had prevented so many other colleagues from taking the same course.

ROBERTS, ALFRED. An employee of Kodak, Alfred “Ken” Roberts was a trade union activist campaigning for trade union recognition in January 1964 when he was prosecuted under the Prevention of Corruption Act for selling proprietorial photographic processing secrets to the East Germans via a double agent, Dr. Jean-Paul Soupert. None of the information compromised by Roberts or his friend Geoffrey Conway was classified. MI5’s code name for the investigation Was AIR BUBBLE.

At the time, there were two photographic factories in East Germany, plants owned prewar by Agfa and Kodak, which the East Germans had been unable to modernize. Handicapped by Western patents, they were in need of technical knowledge to improve the poor quality of the local photographic paper and processes.

Originally from Yorkshire, Roberts had moved to Kodak’s factory in Harrow from the metal merchants Johnson Matthey and had been recruited into the Communist Party of Great Britain by a porter, Dick Payne. Called up for war service in the Royal Air Force (RAF) as a flight mechanic, Roberts had been posted to South Africa and India and had continued to be active politically, participating in the strike committee during the RAF mutiny in Cawnpore. Upon his return to England, Roberts went back to his job with Kodak and in May 1951 was invited to Moscow on a trade union-sponsored trip to the annual May Day celebrations. Several more visits followed, and Roberts was cultivated as a source for information about Kodak’s chemical processes. His contact was Soupert, alias “Dr. Harry Stevens,” whom he met occasionally in Ostend.

When Soupert became a double agent for the Belgian Sureté, he identified Roberts and Conway as having sold details of Kodak’s chemical formulas to him for £5,000, and the two men were arrested in December 1964. At his trial at the Old Bailey, Roberts’s counsel, Jeremy Hutchinson, QC, undermined Soupert’s evidence and his client was acquitted, although Roberts was unable to retrieve his job with Kodak. He died in January 1994.

ROBERTSON, T. A. Known to colleagues as “Tar” because that is how he initialed documents, Colonel Tommy Robertson was an MI5 officer from 1932 until he transferred in 1948 to GCHQ in the role of security adviser. Robertson joined the Security Service from the Seaforth Highlanders on the recommendation of John Kell, son of the first director-general of the Security Service, and his first task was to assist Colonel W. A. Alexander in an investigation of the Invergordon Mutiny. In 1939 Robertson arrested Captain John King after MI5 received information from the United States that had originated with Walter Krivitsky.

Robertson was the consummate case officer and ran Arthur Owens, B Division’s first double agent, acquired from Colonel Edward Peal of the Secret Intelligence Service’s Naval Section in 1939, when it was clear that the Welshman, later to be codenamed SNOW, was working for the Abwehr. Under Robertson’s shrewd management, his German counterespionage section, designated B1(a), was to develop a large stable of double agents who were manipulated to act as a conduit for strategic deception. Robertson took a particular interest in TATE, who even lived with him and his wife Joan (who worked as a volunteer in MI5’s canteen) at their home in Radlett, Hertfordshire. Always modest, and much admired by his subordinates, Robertson’s role as an MI5 officer was eventually disclosed by Lily Sergueiev in her memoirs, Secret Service Rendered.

ROBINSON, HENRI. Born in 1897 in Germany, his father a Russian Jew, Robinson studied in Geneva during World War I and became closely associated with the Communist Youth International. In 1936 he was working alongside the Soviet military attaché in Paris before being placed in charge of all the GRU’s French and English networks the following year. Among his agents in London was Ernest Weiss, but there is some evidence that he lost Moscow’s confidence during the purges. Upon the outbreak of World War II, he was ordered to subordinate his activities to Leopold Trepper, the illegal rezident in Brussels, and reluctantly he obeyed. There was no love lost between the two men, and their mutual hostility was later to be exploited by the Germans, who succeeded in penetrating the network which they codenamed the ROTE KAPELLE.

When Robinson was arrested at his apartment in Paris in December 1942, the Gestapo seized four false passports and a large quantity of incriminating files that after the war were to be studied by MI5’s Michael Serpell and Robert Hemblys-Scales. Some of the documents, known as “the Robinson Papers,” indicated that before the war Robinson had been running an espionage network in London and identified his contacts as Wilfred Vernon and Ernest Weiss. Subsequent study of VENONA suggested that his agent JEROME was André Labarthe. Robinson’s principal agent in England in 1939 was a man codenamed JEAN, who also appeared in the VENONA traffic; JEAN had experienced financial difficulties in February 1941 when he had been unable to establish a link with Robinson’s successor. Among the Robinson Papers was a copy of a message to Moscow dated March 1941 which referred to PROFESSOR, his wife SHEILA, and M.P

According to postwar interrogations of Gestapo personnel, Robinson had been kept in a villa on the Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris for six months and then transported to Germany, where he was tried in June or July 1943 and executed.

ROLPH, WILLIAM. The manager of a restaurant, Hatchett’s of Piccadilly, William Rolph was an electrical engineer who had served in the Security Service during World War I. In May 1940 he was confronted by Colonel T. A. Robertson with information that he had supplied an MI5 double agent, SNOW, with documents to be passed on to the Abwehr, and he confessed. However, he gassed himself before MI5 made a decision about what action should be taken.

ROMANIA. Special Operations Executive (SOE) was in contact with Dr. Julius Maniu (codenamed TOM), the leader of the opposition to the pro-Axis government in Romania during World War II, but in 1941 Gardyne de Chastelain of AUTONOMOUS was arrested and his wireless set captured. However, in March 1944 Prince Stirbey arrived in Cairo to negotiate an armistice, but a proposal to send another SOE mission to Bucharest was blocked by the Foreign Office, which had agreed with Moscow that the British would stay out of Romania in return for Soviet acceptance not to interfere in Greece.

ROMEO SPY. The term applied to male agents trained during the Cold War in the art of lovemaking with the objective of cultivating, seducing, and recruiting vulnerable women as intelligence sources. This tactic was a specialty of the East German intelligence service. The KGB persuaded a former Scotland Yard detective, John Symonds, to learn and apply the skills required to target the wives and daughters of Central Intelligence Agency personnel in Africa and India during the 1970s.

ROOM 40. Named after its location within the Old Admiralty Building, “Room 40” became the term used to refer to the director of naval intelligence’s cryptographic unit, the origin of the Naval Intelligence Division’s best signals intelligence during World War I, including the Zimmermann Telegram in 1917. Room 40 staff, headed by Sir Alfred Ewing and Admiral Reginald Hall, included some of Britain’s most impressive codebreakers, among them Nigel de Grey and Oliver Strachey. As well as reading the enemy’s diplomatic wireless traffic, they read many of the Zeppelin and U-boat signals.

ROPER, HUGH TREVOR. See TREVOR ROPER, HUGH.

ROSBAUD, PAUL. The editor of Springer Verlag scientific journals before World War II, Paul Rosbaud was an Austrian, married to Hildegard Frank, who was Jewish. Rosbaud had become an Anglophile while a prisoner of the British in Italy during World War I and was willingly recruited by Frank Foley of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in Berlin in 1933. A Roman Catholic, he was considered highly reliable and his messages were assessed to be especially significant and accurate because he regularly talked to Walther Gerlach, the physicist who was responsible for coordinating the Nazi atomic bomb project. According to R. V. Jones, the SIS scientific adviser,

Rosbaud’s wartime reports were particularly valuable because they helped us correctly to conclude that work in Germany towards the release of nuclear energy at no time reached beyond the research stage; his information thus calmed fears that otherwise might have beset us.

Rosbaud had been trained as a physicist at the Technische Hochschule at Berlin-Charlottenburg and “although he did not have access to their work it was clear that this had no association with a large-scale effort such as the production of an atomic bomb would require.”

After the war, Rosbaud went into partnership with publisher Robert Maxwell in a venture that became the Pergamon Press to exploit the prewar scientific articles which had been banned for general release by the Nazis. When Rosbaud’s material was exhausted, Maxwell discarded him, and he died in London penniless in January 1963.

In 1986 Rosbaud was incorrectly identified as an SIS spy codenamed THE GRIFFIN and as the author of the Oslo Report, which actually had been written by Hans Mayer.

ROTE KAPELLE. Literally “red chapel,” the ROTE KAPELLE was the code name given by the Abwehr during World War II to a lengthy investigation and penetration of a large GRU network that extended to Switzerland and Britain and was the subject of a detailed postwar study conducted by MI5’s Robert Hemblys-Scales and Michael Serpell. A key figure in the network, Henri Robinson, was found to have controlled agents in London before and during the war, and papers recovered from his flat in Paris identified some, but not all, of its members.

ROTH, ANDREW. A World War II U.S. Naval Intelligence officer, Andrew Roth was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the Amerasia investigation in which the journal’s editor, Philip Jaffe, was convicted of the theft of government property. Roth later moved as a correspondent for the Nation to London, where he edited Parliamentary Profiles and played a leading role in exposing the Profumo affair.

ROTHSCHILD, LORD. Victor Rothschild inherited his peerage in 1937 from his uncle Lionel, his father having committed suicide by cutting his own throat in October 1923 when young Victor was not yet 13. At Cambridge he was a member of the Apostles, and he knew all the Cambridge Five, but his years at the university were blighted by a car accident that resulted in his prosecution for manslaughter. The trial caused his imminent 21 st birthday party to be canceled, and he later married Barbara Hutchinson, the daughter of the defense counsel who secured his acquittal.

Recruited into MI5 in 1940 Rothschild found a niche for himself as the Security Service’s resident scientist and expert on sabotage. He had become known to the Security Service after he had submitted a paper on the subject of the German banking system to the War Office. His proposition was that Nazi intentions could be predicted by monitoring certain financial and other transactions. Little came of the idea but, as a scientist, Rothschild’s skills were attractive to MI5 and he was effectively given carte blanche to run his own section in the counterespionage division, designated B1(c).

One of those who served with Rothschild in MI5’s subsection was Leonard Burt, to whose memoirs the baron contributed a short preface. Rothschild’s encyclopedic knowledge of bomb disposal techniques, which apparently included the task of ensuring the prime minister’s Cuban cigars had not been tampered with, took him to Gibraltar and Paris, where he was billeted briefly with Malcolm Muggeridge at the Rothschild mansion in the Avenue Marigny. The acerbic journalist, also a committed Socialist, recalled this episode in his memoirs:

His disposition was a curious, uneasy mixture of arrogance and diffidence. Somewhere between White’s Club and the Ark of the Covenant, between the Old and the New Testament, between the Kremlin and the House of Lords, he had lost his way, and been floundering about ever since. Embedded deep down within him there was something touching and vulnerable and perceptive; at times lovable even. But so overlaid with the bogus certainties of science, and the equally bogus respect, accorded and expected, on account of his wealth and famous name, that it was only rarely apparent.

Rothschild’s undoubted intellectual prowess made other members of the service feel uneasy. His boast of an IQ of 184 was almost calculated to engender unpopularity, and there was considerable adverse comment when he was decorated with the George Cross for dismantling a crate of Spanish onions that contained an incendiary device. Over a field telephone line, Rothschild gave a remote running commentary on how he was tackling the mechanism and his remarks were transcribed by his secretary, and future wife, Tessa Mayor. Somehow the resulting typescript of this episode reached the commander of the local military district, who was so impressed by the MI5 officer’s bravery that he recommended him for a gallantry award. As Rothschild was technically a “civil assistant at the War Office,” he was ineligible for a military decoration so he received the highest medal for civilian bravery, the George Cross. When this was gazetted, it confounded some of his critics like Sir Harry D’Avigor Goldsmidt, the Jewish MP who, ignorant of the peer’s employment by MI5, had once demanded to know why an able-bodied man such as Rothschild was not in uniform like his contemporaries, serving in the armed forces.

Rothschild’s decoration was a blatant breach of the long-standing convention that members of the secret services would never be singled out for recognition, and it drew some adverse comment from his colleagues. The suspicion that Rothschild had retained a copy of his official report on the onion crate incident and ensured that it received a wide but unauthorized circulation was compounded when in 1977 he published a collection of essays that included a short account of his handling of the bomb disposal episode.

After the war Rothschild returned to academic life but retained close links with the Security Service. He remained on good terms with Guy Liddell, MI5’s postwar deputy director-general, and assisted Dick White to investigate his friend Kim Philby. Rothschild was much embarrassed by his old connections to Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, both of whom he had allowed to live in his West End apartment during the war. In his memoirs, Random Variables, he described the news that Blunt had been exposed as a traitor as a devastating blow.

Rothschild died in March 1990, not long after he was embroiled in another controversy, this time over Peter Wright. To his profound discomfort, Wright had disclosed that Chapman Pincher’s notorious expose of MI5, Their Trade Is Treachery, had been written based on information Wright had provided, and that Wright had been introduced to Pincher by Rothschild. Perhaps even more awkward was Wright’s admission that the secret financial arrangement settled between himself and Pincher, via a company registered in the Cayman Islands, had been organized by Rothschild.

Always a controversial figure, Rothschild was himself was at one time under suspicion as a possible Soviet mole. Eventually it was concluded that the tips he had volunteered to MI5, particularly in regard to Philby’s treachery, probably cleared him, but when the elderly peer demanded of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher a formal statement confirming his innocence of espionage, her reply was extraordinarily ambiguous and unconvincing and haunted the peer until his death in March 1990.

Documents in the KGB archives disclosed in 2003 suggest that Rothschild may have been attributed the code names VALET and WALLET by the NKVD in 1943.

ROVER. MI5 code name for a double agent who was active from May 1944 until the end of World War II. ROVER was a Polish seaman who had been captured by the Germans and after two years of forced labor had agreed to spy for them in England. They had invested in a year’s Morse training for him, but when he reached England from Spain in May 1944 his letters containing secret writing went unanswered so he was returned to the Polish navy. Then, unexpectedly, the Abwehr tried to contact him by radio so a Radio Security Service (RSS) operator took ROVER’S place and an exchange of signals in October indicated the substitution had been successful. However, the RSS operator died in hospital the following month, so a second substitute was required to transmit on his behalf, reporting air raid damage, and contact was maintained until the end of hostilities.

ROYAL AIR FORCE (RAF). The RAF’s contribution to British Intelligence ranges from the overt role played in aerial reconnaissance and the processing of photographic imagery—which dates back to artillery-spotting over enemy lines by the Royal Flying Corps during World War I—to the more covert collection of signals intelligence during the Cold War, conducted by 2 Signals Unit at Bampton Castle and 9 Signals Unit at Boddington. The RAF’s signals intelligence headquarters is RAF Digby in Leicestershire, which is linked to numerous outstations in Europe and beyond, among the largest being 35 Signals Unit based at Pergamos in Cyprus. As well as operating ground stations as surrogates for GCHQ, the RAF also has airborne signals and electronic intelligence capabilities, based during the Cold War at Watton and Wyton, respectively.

ROYAL CANADIAN MOUNTED POLICE (RCMP). Prior to World War II the RCMP had very limited experience of counterespionage , but after the arrival in Ottawa of Cyril Mills from MI5 in 1942 as security liaison officer, the RCMP established a Special Branch and began an exchange program so Canadian personnel could be trained in counterintelligence techniques in London. In 1970 the RCMP created a partly civilian Security Service based on MI5’s model and continued to cooperate closely with British Intelligence. In May 1983, following a judicial investigation of misconduct committed during the investigation of the Front de Liberation Quebecois, the Security Service was absorbed into a new organization, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. See also CANADIAN SECURITY AND INTELLIGENCE.

ROYAL CORPS OF SIGNALS. Although not officially acknowledged as a branch of British Intelligence, the Royal Corps of Signals has played an important role in the development of Britain’s intelligence capability and has been the principal source of intercept operators engaged on monitoring target wireless traffic since the regiment was created out of the Royal Engineers Signal Service in 1913. During World War II, Royal Signals provided the personnel for the Special Communications Units (SCUs) and Special Liaison Units, which linked the Secret Intelligence Service’s Section VIII at Whaddon Hall to fixed stations at Delhi (SCU 2); Dhakurla (SCU 11/12) at Calcutta; Heliopolis, Egypt; and Sarafand, Palestine; and to mobile units attached to the military commands authorized to receive ULTRA.

ROYAL OBSERVATORY PLOT. In March 1893 a French tailor, Martial Boudin, blew off his arm while attempting to dynamite the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. He died of his injuries, but not before Inspector William Melville had extracted from him the address of his fellow anarchists in London: a hairdressing salon in Bennett Street, Soho. The premises were put under surveillance by Special Branch detectives and a notorious anarchist, George Charpentier, was watched while he conducted a burglary. He was arrested and imprisoned in March 1894.

ROYAL PREROGATIVE. In the absence of any statutory authority, MI5, the Secret Intelligence Service, and GCHQ existed under the Royal Prerogative until the passage of the Security Service Act in 1989 and the Intelligence Services Act in 1992. Literally, this was a legal dispensation granted by the Sovereign to conduct operations without other approval.

ROYAL ULSTER CONSTABULARY (RUC). The provincial police force serving the six counties of Ulster, the RUC’s name was changed during the peace process to the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The RUC Special Branch has had unrivaled experience at combating republican and loyalist terrorism, but its failure to cultivate sources within the nationalist community in the early 1970s left a vacuum that was filled by the army and later the Security Service.

ROYAL VICTORIA PATRIOTIC SCHOOL (RVPS). Originally built for the daughters of soldiers killed in the Crimea, RVPS accommodated the London Reception Centre during World War II to screen refugees from enemy-occupied territories. All arrivals were interrogated about their antecedents, and their details were checked by MI5 against ISK and isos decrypts. Those identified as spies were transferred to Camp 020 for further questioning. After the war, a Dutch interrogator, Colonel Oreste Pinto, published three books describing the skills he had used to identify enemy agents, but he neglected to mention the advance notice he was given by MI5 of particular suspects who had been compromised even before their arrival in London.

RUTLAND, FREDERICK. Known as “Rutland of Jutland” because of his exploits during World War I in the Royal Naval Air Service, pioneering the flight of aircraft off warships, Frederick Rutland was arrested in December 1941 under Defence Regulation 18B and detained at Brixton Prison. In June 1942 he was transferred to the Isle of Man and released there in September 1943, never having been charged with any offense. He gassed himself in January 1949, outraged that his loyalty had been called into question.

Rutland had retired from the Royal Navy in 1923 and he, like Lord Semphill, was engaged as a consultant by the Japanese navy to advise on maritime aviation and to help Mitsubishi’s designers build an undercarriage suitable for landing on the deck of a warship. By 1937 he had taken up residence in California, where he came to the notice of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a suspected Japanese agent. Nine days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he returned to London, only to be detained for what were later described by the home secretary in the House of Commons as his “hostile associations.” The precise nature of the evidence against Rutland has never been disclosed.

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SALMONE, HABIB ANTHONY. A Syrian professor educated in England, Habib Salmone offered secret information in March 1885 to the Foreign Office about plans of the Mahdi to undermine the British occupation of Egypt. He was in contact with Djamal-ed-din, a noted scholar who had confided in him. Prime Minister William Gladstone and the foreign secretary, Lord Granville, authorized various payments to him from secret service funds, but these were terminated when Salmone’s role became known in the region.

SARAFAND. The British Army radio relay station in Palestine, located at Sarafand, was GCHQ’s principal intercept site in the region. In March 1946 Irgun terrorists, dressed in army uniforms, entered the compound driving army trucks and raided the armory, stealing enough weapons to equip the Haganah.

SATYR. MI5 code name for a classified contract given to Marconi in 1952 to discover the secrets of an ingenious listening device concealed in the Great Seal that had hung in the office of the U.S. ambassador in Moscow since it had been donated as a gift some years earlier. The capsule containing the microphone appeared to have no external power source and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been baffled by its simplicity but could not make it work. At Marconi a young technician named Peter Wright experimented with the apparatus for 10 weeks before he found that the sensitive diaphragm inside the capsule resonated at 800 Megahertz, the length of the antenna, when bombarded with radio waves. He also determined that the diaphragm modulated when there were other sources of sound waves nearby, such as voices, and that the emissions could be detected and converted into speech. Thus while the equipment, devoid of any moving parts, seemed unsophisticated, it was actually a work of technical genius, acting passively, without electric power, and transmitting whatever conversations were held in its vicinity to a receiver up to 300 yards away.

In May 1960 Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, produced the seal in the Security Council as an example of KGB duplicity, much to the undisguised mirth of the Soviet delegation. Regarded as a breakthrough in clandestine surveillance, SATYR was adopted by M15 as a useful system for monitoring conversations without the necessity of replacing batteries.

SCARLETT, JOHN. A career Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer and later chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), Scarlett was SIS’s head of station in Moscow when he negotiated with Yevgeni Primakov, the director of the Russian intelligence service SVR, an agreement that would result in the declaration of each other’s liaison personnel. According to Primakov’s account, contained in his memoir Au Coeur de Pouvoir (“At the heart of power”), published in France, Scarlett offered to cooperate on condition that the SVR and GRU reduced their presence in London, and this took two years to achieve..

After his expulsion from Moscow, following the arrest of one of his agents, Scarlett supervised the Mitrokhin project, which resulted in the publication of The Mitrokhin Archive, and he was appointed chairman of the JIC in 2001. He was called to give evidence to the Hutton Inquiry in August 2003 following the death of David Kelly, whom he had suspected of leaking information to the media. In August 2004 he was appointed chief of the Secret Intelligence Service in succession to Sir Richard Dearlove.

SCHROEDER, ADOLPH. Formerly a publican in Rochester, Kent, Adolph Schroeder, using the alias “Frederick Gould,” was placed under surveillance by MI5 in December 1913 when incriminating documents were found by the new landlord of his pub. Schroeder’s mail was intercepted, and in February 1914 he received a telegram from Brussels seeking to agree a price on the sale of an unidentified commodity. When Schroeder’s wife Maud began a journey to Ostend, she was searched and found to be carrying restricted Royal Navy charts, plans, and a gun book. Schroeder and his wife were tried at the Old Bailey in April 1914, and he was convicted and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. No evidence was offered against his wife because there was no proof that she knew the content of the three envelopes she had intended to take to Ostend for her husband.

SCIENTIFIC INTELLIGENCE. Until World War II neither MI5 nor the Secret Intelligence Service employed a scientific adviser, but R. V. Jones was recruited to fulfill that role in 1940, while Lord Rothschild headed the Security Service’s antisabotage section. After the war, Sir Frederick Brundrett acted as an adviser to both agencies, and in 1955 Peter Wright was appointed as MI5’s first scientific officer.

SCOTLAND, ALEXANDER. A World War II interrogator at the London Cage, a Luftwaffe PoW center in Kensington Palace Gardens, Colonel A. P. Scotland was the son of a railway engineer from Perthshire. Scotland had left school at the age of 14 and traveled to South Africa to fight in the Boer War but arrived in 1903 after the conflict had come to an end. Instead he joined an insurance company as a clerk and was posted to Ramonsdrift on the border with German South-West Africa. There he accepted an invitation to become a Kriegsfreiwilliger (“war volunteer”) and spent three years in the German army. In 1914 he was briefly imprisoned as a British spy in Windhoek, and in 1915 returned to England to be commissioned into the British army and serve under Captain James Marshall-Cornwall at GHQ in France as an Intelligence Corps officer. Fluent in German and knowledgeable about the German order of battle, Scotland became a skilled interrogator of prisoners and in 1918 undertook three undercover missions to the German garrison at Bereloo in Belgium.

At the outbreak of World War II, aged 60, Scotland was posted to Dieppe in charge of port security and an empty PoW camp, but was evacuated, with 18 PoWs, in May 1940. Thereafter he headed an embryonic War Crimes Investigation Unit and was later to give evidence at several postwar prosecutions, including that of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring. He published his memoirs, The London Cage, in 1957 in the face of considerable opposition from the War Office.

SCOTLAND YARD. See METROPOLITAN POLICE; SPECIAL BRANCH.

SCOTT. NKVD code name for the leader of the Oxford Ring, an espionage network of Communists recruited at the university before World War II. SCOTT’s true identity is unknown, but one candidate is Christopher Hill, the Marxist historian and former master of Balliol College.

The KGB archives in Moscow contain several references to SCOTT written by Theodore Mally. One reads: “SCOTT. I wrote to you about him in my last letter. Through him we acquired BUNNY. He has given me about 25 leads. Most of these are raw material, but there are 4–5 among them who have already been studied and on whom we have already started working.”

SCOTT submitted a report in April 1937 entitled “On Potential Candidates in Oxford”:

The number of student Party members is at present 115. By June this number will increase to 145. I have a list of the future professions of 80 students and will soon get another list of 35 people. Of the above, 32 students will leave Oxford at the end of the next term (June).

He listed the graduates according to profession, and they included:

Civil Service, 17; Scientific workers, 18; Teachers, 23; Army, 1; Law, 5; University lecturers, 7; Business, 2; Politicians, 3; Social services, 1; Doctors, 1; Undecided, 1. Judging by the experience of the previous 5–6 years, we may expect that 80–90 percent will remain active Party members. As far as I know, during this period, of about 600 people, only two have betrayed the Party. One became a fascist—the other a Trotskyite. About 60 became passive members or were lost sight of. This can be explained by the fact that either they obtained appointments which were incompatible with Party activity or they were unable to understand the policies of the working class and it was difficult for them to settle down in small provincial towns. On the whole we have come to the conclusion that the most able people remain loyal to us, a great number of whom become the most capable and responsible among Party members.... Bearing this in mind, if we set about it the right way, we could, within a given period, achieve considerable results. Since we can find people wherever we look for them, it is necessary to have in the University a man who is able, trustworthy and responsible only to us.

In July 1937 SCOTT submitted another report, “On the Students in the Party,” in which he concluded that there were a total of 900 students in the Communist Party of Great Britain: 150 in Oxford, 200 in Cambridge, 300 in London University, and the remainder in provincial universities.

Cambridge is evidently the most important university. It has a more solid Party organization than Oxford and it is also a larger university. Moreover Cambridge education bears a more special character and the general intellectual level of students is higher than in Oxford. When looking for really good positions, considerably more people go to Cambridge than to Oxford. ... A great number of persons who occupy senior positions in government departments come from Oxford and Cambridge. London University is also of great importance, especially as regards to scientists. As I was told, nearly half of the scientists studying at present will enter government service.... If we work cautiously in the universities the risk is not very great. We can be practically sure of always being able to select reliable people.

SCOTT, EDWARD. Formerly the charge d’affaires at the British embassy in Prague, Edward Scott resigned from the diplomatic service in March 1961, having been compromised with a girl. During World War II, Scott had served as military attaché in Kabul, and in May 1951 he shared an office with Guy Burgess. In 1969 Josef Frolik revealed that Scott, under the code name LORA, had been coerced into supplying classified information to the Czech Intelligence Service. Although Scott acknowledged this was true, he was never prosecuted, merely allowed early retirement.

SCOTT-FORD, DUNCAN. In August 1942 Duncan Scott-Ford, who had been dismissed from the Royal Navy in Alexandria before the war for dishonesty, was questioned at Salford Docks about a merchant seaman identified in ISOS as RUTHERFORD. Two months earlier Scott-Ford had reported being approached in Lisbon by a German who was interested in information, but Scott-Ford insisted that he had turned the offer down. Under interrogation at Camp 020, however, Scott-Ford admitted that he had passed details of convoys to the Germans and had taken notes concerning HMS Malaya to pass on to them at the next opportunity. Unrepentant, Scott-Ford was tried at the Old Bailey in October 1942 and hanged at Wandsworth in November.

SCRAMBLE. Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) code name for an operation to infiltrate agents into the southern Soviet republics after World War II. Most of the agents were captured and turned, and in January 1963 Kim Philby was accused of having betrayed the network while he was SIS’s station commander in Istanbul between 1946 and 1949. While Philby admitted having spied for the Soviets, he denied having undermined SCRAMBLE.

SECRET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE (SIS). Created in 1909 as the Foreign Section of the Secret Service Bureau, SIS has been headed by 13 Chiefs. Known since 1916 as MI6, the organization’s military intelligence designation, SIS was not officially acknowledged by ministers as having a peacetime existence until 1992. Hitherto Whitehall had maintained the convenient fiction that SIS had operated only during World Wars I and II.

SIS achieved its largest size and greatest influence in the latter stages of World War II, when the organization’s leadership included Kenneth Cohen as director of production and his controllers Patrick Whinney (Western Hemisphere), Harry Carr (Northern Region), John Teague and Commander William H. Bremner (Eastern Mediterranean), Rex Millar (Americas), and Dick Ellis (Special). The head of the Intelligence Department was John Morley, assisted by Annabel Leach.

The production sections included: P2 Europe (Italy, Spain, Portugal, North Africa, Switzerland), headed by Desmond Bristow; P3, headed by Peter Bide, assisted by Phillip Wyatt; P5 (Balkans), under Leonard Harris, assisted by Wilhemind Payne Sparrow; P6 and P7, headed by Christopher Phillpotts and Wood (Scandinavia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Finland, and the Moscow Station); and P8, headed by Malcolm Munthe. Reporting to the controller, Far East, was P9, led by Major Barff. The controller, Americas, supervising P8, was Reginald Moare.

SIS’s overseas stations were located at The Hague, Brussels, Paris, Toulouse, Madrid, Barcelona, Gibraltar (where the head of station also represented MIS), Lisbon, Tangier, Casablanca, Rome, Milan, Trieste, Caserta, Bari, Zurich, Vienna, Klagenfurt, Bad Salzuflen, Hamburg, Hannover, Berlin, and the Ruhr. The P2 stations were at Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Prague, Moscow, and Warsaw. The P3 stations were at Budapest, Bucharest, Belgrade, Athens, Salonika, Florina (a substation of Salonika), Istanbul, Tehran, Abkhaz, Baghdad, Beirut, Damascus, Jerusalem, Cairo, and Tripoli, with a planned station in Addis Ababa. The P4 stations were at Singapore, Batavia, Honor, Hong Kong, and Nanking, with plans for stations at Shanghai, Tientsin, Bangkok, Seoul, and Tokyo.

SECRET OFFICE. In 1512 the master of posts was established and within his organization was a Secret Office responsible for the interception and decryption of correspondence. During the Commonwealth this role was taken over by the secretary of state so he could communicate with his agents abroad, and in 1657 the structure was absorbed into the General Post Office. In 1732 William Bode and his family was brought over from Hannover to head the Secret Office, while decryption was adopted by various members of the Willes family.

The secretary of state continued to monitor the mails, especially diplomatic correspondence, under warrants authorized in 1765, and specific warrants were allowed for in the 1711 Post Office Act. Following the Economic Reform Act of 1782, the costs of maintaining the Secret Office were met by the secret vote. Following the scandal surrounding the interception of the mail from Guiseppe Mazzini, the Secret Office was closed in 1846 by Lord Palmerston, although Bode and his staff were retained on a full salary by Lord Aberdeen for a further year. In 1851 the Secret Office’s records were destroyed.

SECRET SERVICE FUNDS. Unvouchered funds for unavowable, clandestine activities have been available to successive foreign secretaries since the days of Henry VIII and Sir Francis Walsingham. The Economic Reform Act of 1782 established the source of funds as a charge on the Civil List, available to the secretaries of state for home and foreign affairs, with the foreign secretary being accountable for it to the Treasury, via the Audit Office. The act also obliged British ambassadors to swear affidavits within a year of returning to London to confirm the nature of payments they had made. Records survive of disbursements made during the French Revolution, including payments in Berlin, St. Petersburg, Italy, Spain, and the Ottoman Empire. In 1807 the foreign secretary, Lord Canning, authorized secret payments of £100,000 to Prussia and £30,000 to Russia. The amount of this expenditure grew to £120,000 during the Napoleonic wars, but after 1815 dropped to £40,000. Numerous pensions were paid to individuals who had helped the Crown.

In 1833 the secret service funds were transferred from the Civil List to the Consolidated Fund. In July 1836 Lord Palmerston queried the annual cost of £7,400 and set a pattern of politicians seeking to cut covert budgets. As well as buying information on such diverse topics as Russian fortifications on the Bosporus and Arab opinion on the Red Sea coast, secret service funds were authorized in 1851 to pay a French seaman named Botquelen E16 a year to compensate for the loss of his “sight while on board the French whaler Ronald in his efforts to save the crew of the English ship India when on fire at sea. He was declared incurably blind in 1847.” Secret service funds continued to be made available by the foreign secretary until 1909 when the Secret Service Bureau was established at an annual budget of £7,400.

SECRET VOTE. Budget approval for the annual expenditure of secret service funds was known as the secret vote and traditionally was presented to the chancellor of the Exchequer without further parliamentary scrutiny. The cost of maintaining MI5, the Secret Intelligence Service, and GCHQ remained classified. The secret vote has been replaced with the single intelligence vote (SIV).

SECRET WRITING. A communications technique intended to prevent an intended reader of seeing a covert message, secret writing was popular as a method of conveying messages in World War I and World War II. British intelligence agencies researched chemical detection formulas to identify suspect texts and to develop new chemical agents for use as invisible ink. During World War I MI5 established a laboratory to test correspondence extracting from the mail through routine Imperial Censorship. During World War II Secret Intelligence Service trainees were taught that among the more easily acquired ingredients for secret ink were human urine, bird excreta, and aquae vitae.

SECTION D. A sabotage organization created by Major Laurence Grand of the Royal Engineers in March 1938 and based at 2 Caxton Street and in the neighboring St. Ermin’s Hotel, Victoria, with cover as the War Office’s nonexistent “Statistical Research Department.” Section D (for “destruction”) was intended to eliminate vital strategic assets on the Continent and thereby deny them to the Nazis. According to a minute dated 5 June 1939, Grand’s “D for Destruction”. unit was instructed to “investigate every possibility of attacking potential enemies by means other than the operations of military forces”—but he had no staff apart from Monty Chidson and a ruth-, less Australian businessman, George Taylor. Funding was supplied by mining magnate (Sir) Chester Beatty.

Section D’s target area was the Balkans and its key figure in the region was Julius Hanau, a British businessman with close connections with Beatty who was the Vickers representative in Belgrade. Beatty’s company, the Selection Trust Group, owned huge holdings in southeastern Europe, including the Trepca Mines in Serbia, one of the richest mineral deposits in Europe, which at that time employed some 3,000 miners. Two of Beatty’s local management team—metallurgist S. W. (“Bill”) Bailey and a South African mining engineer, D. T. (“Bill”) Hudson—participated in Hanau’s scheme to sabotage the flow of Romanian oil from Giurgiu to Regensberg in Germany by blowing up the Danube gorge known as the Iron Gates, using gelignite from the Trepca mine. Among the first targets were the Ploesti oil fields in Romania and the docks at Oxelösund, but none of these operations succeeded.

Section D personnel were deployed abroad under king’s messenger cover and established caches of explosives for use in the event of a Nazi invasion. Among those recruited into Section D were David Walker, Alexander Rickman, Merlin Minshall, Gerald Glover, and Louis Franck.

Although STRIKE OX, the plan to destroy the Swedish port facilities upon which Germany relied for supplies of iron ore, proved an embarrassing failure, Section D personnel accomplished the removal of Amsterdam’s stocks of industrial diamonds, the recovery of the Bank of Belgium’s gold reserves, and the rescue of Madame de Gaulle. In addition, Section D planned a propaganda offensive against the Nazis, employing a BBC radio talks producer, Guy Burgess, to advise on broadcasting.

SECTION I. The Secret Intelligence Service branch responsible, prior to reorganization during World War II, for political intelligence, headed by Malcolm Woolcombe and then David Footman.

SECTION II. The Secret Intelligence Service branch responsible, prior to reorganization during World War II, for military intelligence, headed by Stewart Menzies and then Major Hatton-Hall.

SECTION III. The Secret Intelligence Service branch responsible, prior to reorganization during World War II, for naval intelligence, headed by Captain “Barmy” Russell of the Royal Navy and then Christopher Arnold-Foster.

SECTION IV The Secret Intelligence Service branch responsible, prior to reorganization during World War II, for air intelligence, headed by Group Captain Fred Winterbotham and then Squadron Leader John Perkins.

SECTION V. The Secret Intelligence Service branch responsible during World War II for counterespionage. Staffed before the war by Colonel Valentine Vivian, his assistant Felix Cowgill took over in 1941, at which time the entire section expanded to process the Abwehr’s ISK and ISOS decrypts and moved to Prae Wood and Glenalmond, two houses on the estate of Lord Verulam in St. Albans. Section V was led by Tim Milne (V), assisted by Dick Brooman-White (Dep/V) and Anne Petrie (V.z). The section was divided into subsections, including:

V.A studied the operations of the intelligence services of unfriendly powers in the Western Hemisphere, the Pacific, and the Far East, including India and Afghanistan, as well as Indian affairs across the world, and liaised with the Indian Political Intelligence Bureau. Staff: S. H. H. Mills (V.A), K. I. F. Worke (V.A.1), D. B. Cumming (V.A.3), D. Royle (V.A.5), J. E. Baddeley (V.A.6).

V.B studied the operations of the intelligence services of unfriendly powers in France, Monaco, Corsica, Andorra, Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg. Staff: Colville Barclay (V.B), B. H. L. Townshend (V.B.5), M. Setton (V.B.6), R. F. Lancaster (V.B.7), C. Payne-Payne (V.B.8).

V.C liaised with MI5 and the London Reception Centre and provided documentation for agents. Staff: C. Blake-Budden (V.C), Mrs. Bromley-Fox.

V.C.R liaised with the Central Registry.

V.D studied the operations of the intelligence services of unfriendly powers in the Iberian Peninsula, Spanish Morocco, Tangier, and the Balearic and Atlantic islands. Staff: H. D. V. Pakenham (V.D), F. Witty (V.D.1), E. A. Rumboll (V.D.2), Ted Davies (V.D.3), H. A. Fisher (V.D.4), R. Keyes (V.D.6).

V.E studied the operations of the intelligence services of unfriendly powers in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Italy, Yugoslavia, Albania, Turkey, Russia, and Near and Middle East countries, including Persia, Libya, Egypt, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Abyssinia, Eritrea, and the French, British, and Italian Somalilands. Staff: J. F. C. O’Brien (V.E), H. Hudson-Williams (V.E.1), W. K. C. Guthrie (V.E.2), M. Duncan (V.E.3), C. D. Derring (V.E.11), Evelyn Sinclair (V.E.15).

V.F studied the operations of the intelligence services of unfriendly powers in Greater Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic countries, and Scandinavia, including Iceland and Greenland. Staff: P. G. Mason (V.F), M. Wallace-Hadrill (V.F.1).

V.H dealt with the application censorship overseas. Staff: R. G. Evans (V.H).

V.X was responsible for double agents and deception plans. Staff: Desmond Bristow (V.X) and Rex Hamer (V.X.2).

In support of Section V’s work there was V.L (carding of intercepts and maintenance of a reference library), V.R (distribution of mails), V/RVPS (liaison with the London Reception Centre), V/Photo, V/ Driver, V/Translations, and V/TP (teleprinting). Sub-section SP/SD consisted of J. R. Adams, A. C. V. Elphinstone, J. Smith-Wright, E. Blake-Budden, and Miss B. Arthur.

SECTION VI. The Secret Intelligence Service branch responsible, prior to reorganization during World War II, for industrial intelligence, headed by Admiral Limpenny.

SECTION VII. The Secret Intelligence Service branch responsible, prior to reorganization during World War II, for the organization’s finances, headed by Commander Percy Sykes of the Royal Navy.

SECTION VIII. The Secret Intelligence Service branch responsible during World War II for communications, headed originally by Henry Maine and then Richard Gambier-Parry, assisted by Ted Maltby, and based at Whaddon Hall, Buckinghamshire.

SECTION IX. The Secret Intelligence Service branch responsible, prior to reorganization during World War II, for developing and distributing the organization’s ciphers.

SECTION X. The Secret Intelligence Service branch responsible, prior to reorganization during World War II, for press liaison, headed by Raymond Henniker-Heaton.

SECURITY COMMISSION. A nonstatutory body, the standing Security Commission was created in 1964 following the report by Lord Radcliffe into the apparent breaches of security at Portland and then into the background of John Vassall. The Security Commission was headed by a judge and former Naval Intelligence Division officer, Sir Rodger Winn, who sat with the retired Cabinet secretary, Norman Brook, and a former first sea lord, Sir Caspar John. In June 1965 the Security Commission published a report into the espionage cases of Frank Bossard and Sergeant Percy Allen. The last chairman of the Security Commission was another judge, Lord Griffiths, who served from 1985, when he retired as an Appeal Court judge, to 1992.

SECURITY CONTROL OFFICER. During World War II MI5 officers from D Division, known as security control officers, were posted to 27 British sea and airports to supervise entries and departures.

SECURITY LIAISON OFFICER (SLO). MI5 officers posted abroad, usually under diplomatic cover but declared to their hosts so they may conduct liaison duties, are known as security liaison officers. In the postwar era, SLOs represented the Security Service in most major Commonwealth countries, but during the Cold War MI5 limited its overseas posts to Auckland, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Jamaica, Trinidad, Cyprus, Ottawa, Nairobi, New Delhi, Salisbury, and Lagos. The most important SLO was in Washington, D.C., to liaise with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency. Among those filling the U.S. post have been Dick Thistlethwaite (1945–49), Geoffrey Paterson (1949–54), Harry Stone (1954–64), Michael McCaul (1964–69), Barry Russell-Jones (1969–72), Cecil Shipp (1972–75), John Murley (1975–80), Neville Giradot (1980–85), Martin Flint (1986–89), and Eliza Manningham-Buller (1980–82). See also REGIONAL SECURITY LIAISON OFFICER.

SECURITY SERVICE ACT. The 1989 Security Service Act, placed MI5 on a statutory footing for the first time and introduced an element of oversight—a compromise formula achieved by the home secretary, Douglas Hurd, who was switched to the Foreign Office in October 1989. Hurd had guided the Security Service Bill through the House of Commons as home secretary and persuaded a reluctant Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of the need to legislate. It had been Antony Duff as MI5’s reforming director-general who had talked Hurd into altering his service’s status in January 1987, but whereas he was able to persuade Robert Armstrong to agree by April, it took more than a year before the prime minister finally accepted the idea, having authorized a bill to be drafted in July. By the time the bill received the royal assent in December 1989, Duff had been replaced as director-general by his deputy, Patrick Walker. The bill had been welcomed by MI5’s management, long tired and apprehensive about their quasi-legal status resting on an ancient, untested royal prerogative.

SELBORNE, EARL OF. Born in 1887 and educated at Winchester and University College, Oxford, Roundell Palmer was known as “Top” and inherited the title Viscount Wolmer on the death of his father in 1895. In 1905 he joined the Hampshire regiment and for the first two years of World War I was engaged in training troops. In December 1910 he was elected a Conservative MP, and he remained in the House of Commons, latterly representing Aldershot, for nearly 30 years. In 1940, having been chairman of the Cement-Makers’ Federation, he was appointed director of cement in the Ministry of Works, and in February 1942 he was sent to Hugh Dalton’s Ministry of Economic Warfare, where he sacked the first director of Special Operations Executive (SOE), Sir Frank Nelson, and then dismissed his replacement Sir Charles Hambro 18 months later.

After the war Lord Selborne’s proposal to maintain SOE’s worldwide organization into the peace was rejected by the new prime minister, Clement Attlee, so he devoted himself to the Church of England and the National Provincial Bank. He died at home, on his estate at Blackmoor, Hampshire, in September 1971.

SERGUEIEV, LILY. Codenamed TREASURE by MI5, Lily Sergueiev first became known to the British authorities when she appeared in Madrid in June 1943 seeking a visa for Britain. In an interview with Kenneth Benton the following month, Sergueiev admitted that she had been sent to England as an Abwehr spy and disclosed a mass of material about her German controller in Paris. The decision was taken to allow her to come to London, and in October 1943 she reached Gibraltar, where she came into conflict with the authorities over her dog, which was obliged to go into quarantine rather than accompany its owner to England.

After a lengthy interrogation, Sergueiev was enrolled as a double agent, and in January 1944, with the help of Ronald Reed, TREASURE made radio contact with the Abwehr. This was to be a unique event, because her usual method of communication was secret writing in letters sent to an address in Lisbon. In March 1944 Sergueiev flew to Portugal for a meeting with her Abwehr controller, who supplied her with a new transmitter. Using the radio, she reestablished wireless contact upon her return, but a Radio Security Service (RSS) operator was substituted to replace the temperamental double agent. Although she had no knowledge of GARBO or any of MI5’s other double agents, TREASURE contributed to an elaborate deception scheme designed to deceive the enemy over where the D-Day landings were likely to occur. Sergueiev subsequently joined the French army and went back to Paris after the Liberation, leaving an RSS expert to transmit on her behalf for a further five months.

After the war Sergueiev married an American officer and wrote her memoirs, Secret Service Rendered, in which she gave a detailed account of her duplicity. What she did not divulge was her connection with Soviet intelligence. One of her uncles was Nikolai V. Skoblin, a senior NKVD officer, and the other was Evgenni Miller, a White Russian general who was assassinated in Paris in 1937. Much later, counterintelligence investigators concluded that she had probably operated for the NKVD throughout the period of her supposed service for MI5 and the Germans.

SERIOUS AND ORGANISED CRIME AGENCY (SOCA). Announced in February 2004, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency absorbed the National Criminal Intelligence Service and the National Crime Squad to create an investigative body with an intelligence function covering drug smuggling, people trafficking, money laundering, and other organized crime. SOCA’s first director was Sir Stephen Lander, the retired director-general of the Security Service.

SERPELL, MICHAEL. A career MI5 officer and expert on Soviet espionage, in 1947 Michael Serpell undertook a detailed study of captured German files and documented the Gestapo’s investigation of the ROTE KAPELLE network during World War II. The result, circulated under the joint authorship of Robert Hemblys-Scales, demonstrated the existence of a GRU network in England before and during the war and identified some of the spies run by the concert pianist Ernest Weiss.

SETH, RONALD. A Cambridge graduate who worked as a lecturer before the war in the University of Tallinn, Ronald Seth was regarded—wrongly, in his view—as an expert on Eastern Europe. Accordingly, in 1941 he was transferred from the Royal Air Force to Special Operations Executive (SOE) and trained in parachute and sabotage techniques. He was dropped on a mission into Estonia in October 1942, but was captured within hours of his landing and sentenced to death as a spy. His subsequent adventures, while in German custody, are described in his war memoirs A Spy Has No Friends, which he compiled after his release from German custody in April 1945.

Exactly what happened after his arrest is unknown, and the only record is Seth’s own version. In his book he gives a reasonably plausible explanation for his appearance in Paris in November 1943 with official Luftwaffe identification papers and for the accusations made by several British ex-PoWs who had denounced Seth as a Gestapo collaborator who had worked for their captors as a stool pigeon. According to him, he was imprisoned in Riga, and then Frankfurt, by the Gestapo, and then handed over to the Abwehr, which intended to send him back to England as a German spy. This plan apparently was vetoed by the Sicherheitsdienst in August 1944 and he was transferred to a transit camp, Stalag XIIA near Limburg, to report on the political opinions of the inmates. After just 10 days he was transferred to a permanent camp, Oflag 79 at Brunswick, where he remained until January 1945 when Seth aroused the suspicions of the British officers who discovered a leakage of information to the guards. Diagnosed as a schizophrenic, Seth was withdrawn in March and escorted to Berlin to meet Heinrich Himmler and Walter Schellenberg, who suggested that he travel to Switzerland with a peace proposal for the Allies.

On the night of 11/12 April, Seth crossed the Swiss frontier near Bludenz and the following day reported to the British military attache in Bern. His extraordinary story was accepted and he was later flown to London for debriefing. After the war Seth was warned that he was likely to be prosecuted, but evidently he managed to persuade his interrogators of his innocence. Not only did he win his freedom, but he also recovered his back pay from SOE for the period he had spent on what he had claimed was active service on the Continent.

Seth went on to write more than 60 books and, under the name Dr. Roger Chartham, produced an advice column in a men’s magazine and marketed a sex aid. He died in February 1985, aged 73, having returned to Wiltshire from his retirement home in Malta.

SETON-WATSON, HUGH. Educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, Hugh Seton-Watson was the son of a prominent historian, R. W. Seton-Watson. An early recruit into Section D of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), he undertook missions in the Balkans while based in Belgrade and Bucharest. In 1941 he transferred to Cairo and worked in the Yugoslav Section of Special Operations Executive until 1944. He then later returned to SIS before resuming his studies at University College, Oxford, and his subsequent appointment in 1951 as professor of Russian history at London University.

Seton-Watson’s first book, Eastern Europe between the Wars, 1918–1941, was published in 1945 and his own experience in Central Europe provided much of the background for it and his second book, The Eastern European Revolution. He acquired a formidable reputation as a scholar and concentrated on nationalism and Communism, both topics in The Pattern of Communist Revolution and The Decline of Imperial Russia, 1855–1914. At the time of his death in December 1984 Seton-Watson was professor emeritus at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies at London University, as well as a frequent lecturer in the United States.

SHAI. An abbreviation for Sherut Yedlot, the Shai was the intelligence branch of the Haganah, and its membership had been trained mainly by the Secret Intelligence Service during World War II to participate in stay-behind networks organized from April 1941 in and around Jerusalem. The Shai did not participate in terrorism, unlike the Irgun or the Stern Gang, but ran a very effective compartmented information collection and counterintelligence agency that later formed the basis of Mossad, founded by Isser Harel who had been trained by the Palestine Police (and later dismissed for insubordination).

SHAYLER, DAVID. David Shayler left MI5 in early 1997 after five years in the service and engaged a literary agency to circulate a book proposal to publishers, masquerading as a senior woman retiree who had served in Northern Ireland, but the proposal was turned down because of the legal implications. Instead, he sold a long article to the Mail on Sunday, published at the end of July 1997. Further articles would have followed, except that the government obtained an injunction to prevent further unauthorized disclosures and Princess Diana was killed the following weekend, seizing the newspaper headlines for weeks to follow.

Shayler fled to Paris to escape arrest and met Richard Tomlinson, a disgruntled former Secret Intelligence Service officer. Together in Paris they represented a potent threat to both organizations and the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire was persuaded to detain both. Shayler remained in French custody at La Santé prison until November, when the British extradition application on an arrest warrant issued in London in July for two offenses under the 1989 Official Secrets Act was rejected. Subsequently Shayler negotiated his return to Britain, where he was convicted at a trial at the Old Bailey and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment.

SHERGOLD, HAROLD. Born in December 1915 and a graduate of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Harry Shergold was a schoolmaster at Cheltenham Grammar School before the war, when he joined the Hampshire regiment and was transferred to the Intelligence Corps and posted to the Middle East, and later Italy. In 1945 he joined Security Intelligence Middle East and the following year was appointed station commander at Bad Salzuflen under British Control Commission for Germany cover. Apart from a year at Broadway in 1947, he remained in Germany until 1954. In 1960 he was appointed the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) case officer to run Oleg Penkovsky, and in 1961 he supervised the interrogation of George Blake, which lasted five days at SIS’s office in Carlton Gardens. When Blake finally confessed, he was taken to a cottage owned by Shergold’s mother for the weekend while a decision was taken about prosecuting him, and he was arrested the following Monday. Shergold retired from SIS in 1980 and lives in southwest London.

SHETLAND BUS. Established in Lerwick by Commander Frank Slocum in 1940, the Shetland Bus provided a means of infiltrating and exfiltrating agents from Nazi-occupied Norway. Initially the missions, in fishing boats, took up to four days, but later in the war fast gunboats, supervised by Leslie Mitchell, made the 600-mile round trip in 24 hours.

SIAM. Special Operations Executive (SOE) conducted operations in Siam during World War II to establish contact with supporters of the pro-British regent, Luang Pradit. The Japanese occupied the country in 1941 and the government declared war on Britain in 1942, although the Free Siam Movement formed the basis of a resistance organization. SOE’s operations included PRITCHARD, APPRECIATION, BRILLIG, SEQUENCE, and PANICLE. Efforts at sabotage, including BILLOW, BLANDINGS, and CLEVE, were largely unsuccessful. MASTIFF and MANNA were mounted to support Allied prisoners of the Japanese held in camps in Siam.

SICHERHEITSDIENST (SD). The intelligence branch of the Nazi party, the Sicherheitsdienst deployed representatives overseas and conducted espionage operations in parallel with the rival Abwehr. British Intelligence encountered the SD in November 1939 when Walter Schellenberg supervised the abduction of two Secret Intelligence Service officers, Captain Sigismund Best and Major Richard Stevens, at Venlo. Centrally organized, in contrast to the devolved structure of the Abwehr, the SD proved ruthless adversaries in occupied territories, and the penetration of the British embassy in Ankara in 1943 was an SD operation.

Suspicion that the SD might have attempted to develop a parallel network in Britain, independent of the Abwehr’s spy rings that had fallen under MI5’s control, were dispelled when Schellenberg was interrogated at Camp 020 in 1945. He confirmed that the SD had not infiltrated any agents into England and gave a comprehensive account of the organization’s activities, earning him an early release from his imprisonment on war crimes charges.

SIDNEY STREET SIEGE. In 1909, a bungled robbery at Tottenham led to an extraordinary rampage by two Latvian anarchists armed with semiautomatic pistols, leaving 25 wounded and two dead. At the end of the following year, five police officers were shot in the City of London—three fatally—as a result of another robbery by several Russian immigrants with anarchist sympathies. Two were eventually traced to a house in Stepney (a third having been accidentally shot by his comrades during the first confrontation) and so began the Siege of Sidney Street in January 1911. It led to a five-hour exchange of gunfire between the forces of order—contingents of the City of London and Metropolitan Police supported by a detachment of Scots Guards from the Tower of London—and the desperate men armed with two 7.63mm Mauser semiautomatic pistols and a Browning. Some 2,000 rounds of ammunition were expended and the building destroyed before the threat from the gunmen was neutralized and their burnt corpses recovered. The home secretary, Winston Churchill, had arrived at the “Battle of Stepney” to take personal charge of operations, and later authorized the purchase of 900 .32-caliber Webley semiautomatics by the Metropolitan force and an increase in surveillance on foreign political extremists.

SILLITOE, SIR PERCY. In 1946 the new Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, called for Sir Percy Sillitoe, who was then chief constable of Kent, and invited him to become the director-general of the Security Service at the end of April, upon the retirement of Sir David Petrie. A professional police officer with experience that dated back to the British South African Police in 1908, Sillitoe had made his reputation as a gang-buster in Glasgow and a no-nonsense copper with few intellectual pretensions. During the war he had written a report for the Home Office on Communist agitation, and this may have brought him to the attention of the incoming home secretary, Chuter Ede.

As director-general, Sillitoe authorized two of his officers to indulge in literary pursuits: Courtney Young helped write Handbook for Spies, the autobiography of a Briton, Allan Foote, who had defected from the Soviet GRU; and Jim Skardon was encouraged to collaborate with Alan Moorehead who wrote The Traitors, a study of the atomic spies Allan Nunn May, Bruno Pontecorvo, and Klaus Fuchs. None of this help was acknowledged publicly, but both books served MI5’s purposes.

Sillitoe remained as director-general until August 1953, and during that turbulent period he oversaw some of MI5’s more notorious investigations, including the arrest of the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs and the defections of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. The former case was traumatic for Sillitoe because, reluctantly, he allowed himself to be persuaded to lie to the prime minister in order to conceal an appalling blunder that had been committed by a subordinate. Sillitoe pretended that MI5’s identification of Fuchs as a traitor in 1949 had been the culmination of a lengthy investigation that had been conducted properly at every stage. When challenged by Attlee, the director-general denied that any mistake had occurred or that Fuchs should have been caught years earlier. He suggested Fuchs had been trapped by dedicated professionalism, whereas the truth was that the Americans had acquired enough evidence to incriminate the scientist from cryptographic sources and had simply passed on the information. Indeed, a dossier had been compiled on Fuchs as a likely Soviet spy immediately after the war, and a note had been attached to the file by Michael Serpell, an officer whose suspicions had been aroused, drawing attention to the need for further inquiries to be made urgently. However, the then director of the counterespionage division had ignored the recommendation and thus had enabled Fuchs to continue spying for a further three years.

After eight years in the Security Service, Sillitoe retired to Eastbourne, where he ran a sweetshop, but soon afterwards he was approached by the de Beers organization to investigate diamond smuggling. Sillitoe was enthusiastic about the project and became sufficiently expert on the subject of illicit diamond buying to be mentioned by Ian Fleming in Diamonds Are Forever, his James Bond thriller of 1956.

Sillitoe was bitter that he had been corrupted by what he regarded as an unhealthy coterie of Security Service intellectuals, and he promised a group of senior staff gathered in the canteen of MI5’s headquarters that he would not repeat the exercise to save their skins, but he never alluded to the incident again. Even in his memoirs, Cloak without Dagger, ghosted largely by Russell Lee, his personal assistant, he gives the official version of MI5’s investigation into Fuchs and omits any reference to the embarrassing oversight of Serpell’s comments that had caused him such anguish.

SILVER. D Division code name for Bhagat Ram Talwar, a committed Communist whose brother had been hanged for assassinating a British official before World War II. In 1941 Talwar had played a role in the escape of Subhas Chandra Bhose to Afghanistan, and then to Germany, but his loyalty was always to Moscow so in May 1942, when he was caught by the British, he received permission from the NKVD to work for MI5 as a double agent. Under D Division’s supervision, Talwar communicated with his German contact in Kabul on the MARY transmitter and founded the All-India Revolutionary Committee. Talwar made five visits to Kabul to meet his German controller, was decorated with the Iron Cross, and supplied large quantities of deception material to the Japanese.

SIMKINS, ANTHONY. Educated at Marlborough, Anthony Simkins gained a first-class honors degree in modern history at New College, Oxford, and was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1936. He served in the Territorial Army and the Rifle Brigade from the outbreak of World War II until the end of hostilities, part of which he spent as a PoW after being captured by the Italians in 1941. In September 1943 he was released when the Italians left the Axis, and he walked south for six weeks until he was recaptured by the Germans and sent to a camp near Brunswick. Upon his liberation, he was persuaded by his sister, who had served in Special Operations Executive, to join MI5. In 1948 Simkins was posted to Rhodesia as MI5’s security liaison officer, and in 1951 he returned to headquarters to run C Branch, the personnel division. He was appointed deputy director-general in December 1965 to Sir Martin Furnival Jones, who was director-general.

In 1971 he retired, having been commissioned to write MI5’s wartime history. When he did so, there was no prospect of publication, so he was able to prepare a thoroughly comprehensive account of the organization’s success in taking control of the enemy’s espionage apparatus in England. However, when Professor Sir Harry Hinsley was asked by the Cabinet Office to prepare an account of British Intelligence in the Second World War, he collaborated with Simkins to produce an abbreviated version of his manuscript, which was published as volume 4 of the official history in 1990, entitled Security and Counterintelligence. Simkins died in December 2003, aged 91, leaving a widow, a son, and a daughter.

SIMOES, ERNESTO. Even before his arrival at Poole from Lisbon at the end of July 1943, MI5 was aware, from ISOS, that Ernesto Simoes had been recruited by the Abwehr. A well-traveled Portuguese, he was allowed to land partly to test the efficiency of the reception process in England and also to see if he had any other contacts. He was placed under surveillance and passed through the immigration controls without difficulty, and then was given discreet help to obtain a job at the Percival Aircraft factory in Luton, where he lodged with one of the other employees. He wrote a single letter to a German cover address in Lisbon and, apart from seducing his landlady, made no attempt to engage in espionage, even when he was encouraged to do so by an MI5 agent provocateur. Simoes was arrested, questioned at Luton police station, and then interrogated by Tomás Harris of B1(g) at Camp 020, where he remained until September 1945 when he was deported to Portugal to be reunited with his wife and daughter. He escaped prosecution only because of the unsuccessful use of the agent provocateur, but gave a detailed confession, acknowledging that he had been supplied with the ingredients for making secret ink, concealed in cotton wool stitched into the lining of his overcoat, and had been instructed to report on the arrival of American troops in Britain, the movement of troops, and anything else of interest. However, he insisted that he had never intended to engage in espionage and simply wanted to earn good wages in England, a country he could not have reached without German assistance.

SINCLAIR, SIR HUGH. Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) from 1923 to 1939, Admiral “Quex” Sinclair (so called after “the wickedest man in London” in Sir Arthur Pinero’s play The Gay Lord Quex) was appointed Chief upon the death of Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming. who had been at SIS’s helm for more than 13 years—a period marked by the continuing financial pressure from the Treasury and a crisis inherited from Smith-Cumming’s anti-Bolshevik adventures.

Despite a difficult private life and a divorce in 1920, Sinclair had enjoyed an exceptional career in the Royal Navy, beginning in 1886 when he first went to sea. In 1919, as Admiral Reginald Hall’s deputy, Sinclair was appointed director of naval intelligence, and in 1923 he was named chief of the Submarine Service, a post he held only briefly because of Smith-Cumming’s death. According to his entry in Who’s Who, he went onto the retired list in 1926, whereas in fact he had been appointed “C” two years earlier.

SIS’s battle with the Treasury ended in the closure of the stations in Madrid, Lisbon, Zurich, and Luxembourg and staff reductions at Rome and The Hague, but having at least established the right to an independent existence, albeit under the Foreign Office’s secret vote and with an annual budget of just £90,000, reduced from £240,000 in 1919.

Sinclair was unexpectedly engulfed in a major crisis over the Zinoviev Letter. His complicity in the affair did little to undermine SIS’s status within Whitehall, however, for C even proposed to the SSC in 1925 and 1927 that his organization might be the most appropriate to absorb MI5, the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS) and even the Special Branch. This was a complete reversal of the position in which Smith-Cumming had found himself, fending off “amalgamation” from the War Office, but Sinclair argued that such a strategy would eliminate wasteful duplication. MI5 fought back, and C retired from the field with control over the code-breakers of GC&CS, who were moved from Queensgate and accommodated in SIS’s main office block at 54 Broadway. Simultaneously he moved up from his home in Fishery Road, Maidenhead, and installed himself in a splendid, 18th-century town house at 21 Queen Anne’s Gate (which conveniently backed onto Broadway Buildings), with his sister Evelyn acting as his housekeeper, although reputedly as a bachelor he spent much of his time at his club in Piccadilly, the Naval & Military, typically surrounded by a thick cloud of cigar smoke.

Despite the cultivation of some impressive sources, Sinclair remained impotent in dealing with the Treasury, and he often complained that SIS, with its secret vote of £180,000, cost the Exchequer less in a year than a single destroyer operating in home waters. SIS’s unpopularity in Whitehall was in part because his message, especially on the subject of the scale and speed of German rearmament, was unwelcome. On more than one occasion, he clashed with Stanley Baldwin over official estimates of the size of the Luftwaffe, and on one occasion, in May 1935, threatened to resign unless the prime minister returned to the Commons to correct a misleading statement about German aircraft production figures. The issue led to a secret Cabinet inquiry chaired by Philip Cunliffe-Lister (then secretary of state for air, and later Lord Swinton) in July 1935 to take evidence on the true strength of German front-line aircraft, and the Chief was supported by Desmond Morton and the head of SIS’s air intelligence section, Fred Winterbotham.

The reality was that SIS had produced some very precise statistics but Baldwin, claiming that he had been misled, was reluctant to accept them because he believed, as he later acknowledged, that rearmament was politically unacceptable to the British electorate in May 1935. However, Sinclair and his team persuaded the committee that SIS’s estimates were accurate, and the government belatedly recognized the need to promote the Royal Air Force. Sinclair had warned Winterbotham that their future lay in the balance, but once the Air Staff’s opposition collapsed, the Chief triumphed. “On our way back to the office,” recalled Winterbotham, “the Admiral congratulated Morton and myself on our performance. It was, in a way, a turning-point for my career in MI6. We all had a drink in the Admiral’s flat.”

Having survived the debacle over the Zinoviev letter, Sinclair’s legacy was a series of rearguard actions against Treasury parsimony that left his stations abroad badly depleted and strapped for cash. In failing health, Sinclair was to succumb to cancer at the London Clinic on 4 November 1939, probably his greatest achievement being his dress rehearsal for war, conducted during the Munich Crisis of 1938; which had temporarily moved the entire organization to its secret “war station” at Bletchley Park, a hideous mansion and estate the Chief had bought with his own funds so as to avoid a further drain on the secret vote, which had been increased belatedly to £350,000. Accommodated alongside SIS’s various individual sections at Bletchley was GC&CS, which through bureaucratic inertia had remained under C’s umbrella and had mobilized a cadre of academics to exercise their codebreaking skills. This apparently unpromising investment was to prove to be a war winner, but until the source initially codenamed BONIFACE, and then ULTRA, came on stream, Sinclair would be recalled by Winterbotham as a Chief “whose absolute personal loyalty and fairness to his staff were qualities which were rarely found in his successors.”

SINCLAIR, SIR JOHN. Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) from 1952 to 1956, Sir John Sinclair was known as “Sinbad” because he had made the unusual career change from the Royal Navy to the army. Born in Fulham, the son of the archdeacon of Cirencester, he was always known to his family and close friends as “Alec” and did not use the name John until he received his knighthood in 1953. Sinclair had been educated at Osborne and Dartmouth and had spent the first two years of World War I as a midshipman in submarines, afflicted with chronic seasickness. After participating in the landings in the Dardanelles, helping to land the Lancashire Fusiliers on the west beach, his health collapsed and he returned to England to recuperate and, after just six years, to leave the Royal Navy.

In 1918, having taught briefly at the Downs School in Winchester, Sinclair attended the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich as a cadet, uniquely winning both the Sword of Honour and the Pollock Medal (for academic achievement), before being commissioned into the Royal Field Artillery in 1919. He served in the North Russia campaign in Murmansk and then was posted to India before returning to Aldershot. Between 1929 and 1931 he was adjutant of the Honourable Artillery Company, and he attended the Staff College at Camberley from 1932 to 1933.

At the outbreak of World War II, Sinclair was an instructor at the Senior Staff College at Minley and then served as a planner for the British Expeditionary Force. In 1941 he was appointed deputy director of military operations at the War Office and then went on the staff of South-East Command before being promoted deputy chief of the General Staff, Home Forces. In 1944, having worked on the plans for the invasion of Normandy, he was named director of military intelligence (DMI), and in June the following year was appointed vice chief of SIS upon the retirement of Claude Dansey.

Sinclair was a straightforward military man, “a tall lean Scot with the angular, austere features of a Presbyterian minister,” according to George Blake, “with no pretensions to intellectual prowess”—a view he would probably have agreed with. Despite his severe exterior, Sinclair also had a highly developed sense of humor and kept a toy missile on his desk, a gift from a subordinate who had “received a severe rocket from his Chief.” In 1927 he married Esme Sopwith, the daughter of the archdeacon of Canterbury, who bore him two sons and two daughters. Sinclair always had been Stewart Menzies’s candidate as his successor. He possessed an inquisitive, analytical mind with a talent for analyzing and solving difficult problems and was never impressed by the Soviets, convinced that the Communists’ inability to produce consumer goods would eventually lead to the economy imploding. Sinclair had inherited his father’s commitment to Anglicanism and remained involved in church affairs throughout his life. Kim Philby admired him and in his autobiography expressed his regret at having lied to Sinclair when, at his final interrogation, he had been confronted by the vice chief and the assistant chief, Air Commodore James Easton, and again had protested that the allegations against him were false. Referring to them as “bludgeon and rapier,” Philby had plenty of respect for Easton, who ran the “R” or requirements sections of headquarters until his retirement in 1958, while Sinclair handled the “P” or production sections, which meant the worldwide network of stations overseas. Then, as now, the “R” side was the more demanding, involving close liaison through the 10 R sections with SIS’s exacting clients, whereas the management of the stations was relatively untroubled, each station being largely autonomous and reporting through the appropriate regional controllers.

Instead of accommodating SIS’s risk-takers, Sinclair brought what Maurice Oldfield would later describe as “high moral standards and integrity of purpose” to SIS’s operations. These Sinclair directed, living in 21 Queen Anne’s Gate during the week and spending the weekends at his country home in Sussex, which he had bought after having lived at Fernden Cottage, Haslemere, during the immediate postwar years. He had a reputation for being somewhat austere and frugal, preferring to lunch on soup and cheese and occasionally going to his club, the Army & Navy in St. James’s Square.

Sinclair’s short tenure as chief was marked by BOOT, an operation to protect Britain’s large investment in the recently nationalized Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and install an administration in Tehran that would be more pliant, thereby incidentally deterring any other challenges to British interests vulnerable elsewhere. Two catastrophes befell SIS under Sinclair within a few days of each other in April 1956: the exposure of the Berlin tunnel, which was, in intelligence terms, the more significant, and the loss of an SIS diver, Commander Lionel Crabb.

Infuriated by the Crabb debacle, Prime Minister Anthony Eden admitted to the House of Commons on 9 May that “what was done was done without the authority or the knowledge of Her Majesty’s Ministers.” He added, “Appropriate disciplinary steps are being taken.” Eden asked the Cabinet secretary, Sir Edward Bridges, “to prepare a short report”; this took Bridges just four days to draw up and was presented to a Cabinet subcommittee consisting of the prime minister, Lord Cilcennin from the Admiralty, Defence Secretary Walter Monckton, and Selwyn Lloyd. Having read Bridges’s conclusions and his recommendation for disciplinary action, he was asked by the committee “to look further into the question of Ministerial responsibility, and inter-departmental coordination of certain types of covert operation.” None of this, however, was Sinclair’s fault but as he was anyway ready to retire, having committed himself to SIS for only 10 years when he was originally persuaded to join, but when he announced his departure, many erroneously concluded that Eden had sacked him. Sinclair then withdrew to East Ashling Grange, a large nine-bedroom Georgian house north of Chichester, and became a nonexecutive director of the Universal Asbestos Company and Chinnor Industries, firms run by former wartime friends.

In his retirement Sinclair continued his lifelong interest in cricket and took an active role in the church as a member of the board of Bishop Otter College, a seminary in Chichester for those entering the Anglican priesthood. He was also chairman of the Diocesan Dilapidation Board, which dealt with housing for country parsons, and kept up his links with the army as colonel commandant of the Royal Artillery, for a few years running the Royal Artillery’s charitable fund. In 1976, a few weeks short of his 80th birthday and his golden wedding anniversary, he went into St. Richard’s Hospital in Chichester for a checkup and died there. He was buried at nearby Funtington Church, and his funeral proved to be a large occasion as he had requested not to have a memorial service; Oldfield attended representing the service, along with Menzies and Dick White.

As was the custom at the time, Sinclair’s obituaries omitted any reference to his service in SIS, where he was fondly remembered for having introduced some of the reforms—of pay, conditions, and pensions for staff—that Menzies had neglected. Noting that Sinclair’s obituaries had ended with his role as DMI, Oldfield rectified the omission by writing to the Times anonymously and somewhat mysteriously mentioning his “Government service for a further ten years,” to set the record straight, recording Sinclair’s

determination to build an organization which by its esprit-de-corps and fair conditions would attract the right type of young recruits. He laid the foundations which have stood the test of time and for which those who served with him are grateful. He expected of others the same high same standards he set himself; weakness was not for him nor for those who served with him.

Alluding to Sinclair’s continued silence over the circumstances of his departure and his refusal to record what really had occurred, Oldfield recalled Sinclair’s

inability for security reasons to answer some of the criticisms made long after the event of happenings, during his period of office. Those who know the truth of such matters sympathized with him and are above all grateful for the memory of a dedicated upright patriot.

SINGLE INTELLIGENCE VOTE (SIV). Funding for the security and intelligence services is granted by the Exchequer through the single intelligence vote, formerly known as the secret vote. MI5, the Secret Intelligence Service, GCHQ, and other participants in the process submit their estimates to the intelligence coordinator to the Cabinet, who then submits the budget to the Permanent Secretaries’ Committee on the Intelligence Services. Once approved, it is placed before ministers, either directly to the chancellor of the Exchequer or through the Ministerial Committee on the Intelligence Services—which has not met since 1997. The published SIV, now at £1 billion, is not an accurate guide to total expenditure on security and intelligence because GCHQ receives support from around a thousand members of the armed forces, deployed mainly on collection duties, and various other items are borne by other departmental budgets, including the Ministries of Defence and Transport.

SKARDON, JIM. Formerly a Scotland Yard detective sergeant, Jim Skardon joined MI5 in 1940 and at the end of World War II acquired a reputation as a skillful interrogator, having questioned William Joyce. In 1949 he extracted a confession from Klaus Fuchs without compromising the signals intelligence source of the original clue to the existence of a Soviet spy, but in 1951 he failed to persuade Kim Philby to make any incriminating admissions. Later Skardon was transferred to head MI5’s Watcher Service, supervising the surveillance on Morris and Lona Cohen in Ruislip. He retired in 1961, finally moving to Torquay where he died in March 1987.

SKRIPKIN, IVAN. In 1946 Ivan Skripkin had made a tentative approach to the Secret Intelligence Service in the Far East to defect, but after his return to Moscow he fell for a classic entrapment technique involving two English-speaking counterintelligence officers in the NKVD who called at his home and pretended to be SIS officers wanting to work out the details of his defection. Skripkin incriminated himself sufficiently to be arrested and executed, leaving the suspicion that word of Skripkin’s offer must have leaked in London. In 1963, when challenged with having betrayed Skripkin, Kim Philby denied he had done so, leaving the issue unresolved.

SLOCOMBE, GEORGE. Having joined the Daily Herald as a reporter at age 18 in 1912, George Slocombe served in the Army Air Corps during World War I and in 1919 was appointed the Daily Herald’s chief foreign correspondent, a post he kept until 1931. While in Paris he headed the Federated Press of America bureau. In 1950 Slocombe was interviewed by MIS’s Max Knight, to whom he gave a detailed account of the Soviet espionage network run by his Daily Herald colleague, William Ewer.

SLOCUM, FRANK. Born in September 1897, Frank Slocum graduated from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and served in World War I in the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet and afterward was on a destroyer in the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. In 1937 Slocum joined the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) from the Royal Navy’s Tactical School and was appointed one of the Chief’s two assistant chief staff officers. In 1940 he created a cover Naval Intelligence branch, designated NID(C) and based on the Helford estuary, with a forward base in the Scilly Isles, to run agents across to France. His private navy ran in competition to Special Operations Executive’s organization, led by Gerald Holdsworth, and there was considerable friction. He was also responsible for supervising the link to Norway known as the Shetland Bus. In 1954 Slocum was appointed SIS’s head of station in Oslo. He retired in 1956 and died in May 1982.

SMILEY, DAVID. In 1940 David Smiley, then a young Household Cavalry officer with three years’ experience after Sandhurst and posted with his regiment to Palestine, volunteered for the Somaliland Camel Corps. When he arrived in Egypt, he persuaded General Sir Archie Wavell, who was a family friend, to help him transfer to No. 52 Middle East Commando, a unit operating behind the Italian lines in Abyssinia. In January 1943 he was recruited into Special Operations Executive (SOE) and briefed by Basil Davidson for a mission to Albania codenamed CONSENSUS. The four-man team departed in April and was dropped by parachute into Greece, where they were received by a group of guerrillas led by a British liaison officer. Soon after their arrival, they trekked across the frontier into Albania and made contact with the local Communist partisans. Smiley remained in Albania until October, when he was withdrawn by boat from the Adriatic coast to Bari. After a brief rest in Italy, he was flown to Cairo and then, in January 1944, was brought to London to report in person to Prime Minister Anthony Eden.

Early the following month, Smiley returned to Cairo and prepared for a second mission to Albania, flying from Bari with Julian Amery. On this occasion they linked up with royalist supporters of King Zog who specialized in ambushing German road convoys. After many adventures, Smiley’s party was withdrawn by boat to Brindisi in October 1944.

Early in 1945 SOE sent Smiley to the Far East, and in May he was dropped into the northeast of Siam. This mission was aborted after just three weeks when a booby-trapped case exploded, covering Smiley in flames. He was badly burned and was flown for medical treatment to Calcutta. He had recovered by August, however, and went on a second mission to Siam, accompanied by SOE’s regional commander.

Smiley returned to London in November 1945 and was posted to Warsaw as assistant military attaché, but after just nine months he was accused of espionage and declared persona non grata. He then spent a year with the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in the Adriatic, attempting to stem the flow of illegal Jewish refugees to Palestine before returning to his regiment, the Royal Horse Guards, as second in command.

In July 1949 Smiley was invited to rejoin SIS, this time to supervise the training of Albanian émigrés who were to be infiltrated back into their country with the intention of subverting Enver Hoxha’s hated Communist regime. A special school was established under conditions of great secrecy in Malta, and several teams of agents were put ashore from fishing boats manned by SIS personnel. Once the last group had landed, Smiley moved to Greece, under the cover of an attachment to the British Military Mission. It soon became clear to Smiley that the operation had been betrayed, however, for the local security apparatus seemed well prepared for their arrival. Disappointed, Smiley rejoined his regiment in 1952 and commanded the Blues in Germany until 1955 when he was appointed military attaché in Stockholm. After three years in Sweden, he went to Oman to command the sultan’s army, and in 1962 he became the military adviser to the imam of Yemen and his guerrillas.

After four years in the Gulf, Smiley retired to a farm near Alicante in Spain and wrote Arabian Assignment (1975). His second volume of memoirs, Albanian Assignment, followed in 1984, shortly before the author’s return to England.

SMITH, SIR HOWARD. Director-general of the Security Service from 1979 to 1981, Howard Smith was a diplomat who had served as the British ambassador to Moscow until his appointment. Born in October 1919 and educated at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, Smith joined the Foreign Office in 1939 and served in Oslo, Washington, D.C., Caracas, and Moscow before going to Prague as ambassador in 1968. Upon his return in 1971, he was posted to Belfast as the UK representative for a year, and in 1976 went back to Moscow as ambassador. He succeeded Sir Michael Hanley as MI5’s director-general, and upon his retirement saw his deputy, John Jones, take over.

SMITH, MICHAEL. A former Communist Party of Great Britain member, Michael Smith was arrested in August 1992 following an MI5 false-flag operation. Smith, had been identified the previous month by Viktor Oshchenko, a KGB officer who had defected from the Paris rezidentura. An MI5 officer masqueraded as his new KGB contact and Smith, who had worked until May for the defense contractor Thorn-EMI and had access to classified contracts, including the fuse for the We-177 nuclear bomb, accepted him as genuine. Persuaded that the Russians wanted to reestablish contact, Smith was entrapped on 8 August 1992 and incriminated himself by offering to resume his espionage. A search of his home in Kingston-upon-Thames revealed some classified documents he had taken home years earlier, and he was sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment.

SMITHERS, SIR PETER. Educated at Harrow and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he gained a first in history, Peter Smithers was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1937 and on the outbreak of World War II joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. However, in January 1940 he fell ill and while recuperating received an invitation from Ian Fleming to serve with Naval Intelligence in Paris, attached to Biffy Dunderdale’s Secret Intelligence Service station. Upon the fall of France, Smithers was posted to MI5, searching for Nazi parachutists, and undertook a survey of wrecks in the North Sea and the Western Approaches in case any could conceal German radio operators. In 1941 the director of naval intelligence sent him to Washington, D.C., as assistant naval attaché, and then down to Mexico and Panama to supervise a coast-watching network. He returned to London in 1945 to be adopted as the parliamentary candidate for Winchester, a seat he held until 1964 when he was appointed secretary-general of the Council of Europe.

SMOLLETT, PETER. The only Soviet spy known to have been recruited by Kim Philby during World War II was Henri P. Smolka, the London correspondent of the Austrian Neue Freie Presse. Smolka, a Marxist who changed his name to Peter Smollett, was to head the Russian Department of the Ministry of Information and was run successively by Philby, Guy Burgess, and Anthony Blunt. Codenamed ABO, he had come to London from his native Vienna in 1933 and achieved some celebrity with his pro-Soviet book Forty Thousand against the Arctic, a romanticized account of the Gulag in Siberia. Philby was rebuked by the rezident, Anatoli Gorsky, for having recruited Smollett without obtaining the permission of Moscow Center.

SNOW. MI5 code name for Arthur Owens, the Welsh proprietor of a battery company who made regular visits to Hamburg prior to World War II. Originally run as an agent by the Secret Intelligence Service’s Colonel Edward Peal, study of his correspondence showed that he had been in undeclared contact with the Abwehr since the end of 1936, so he was taken into custody in September 1939 as an espionage suspect. However, he traded possession of his wireless transmitter and his cooperation for a degree of freedom and exchanged messages with Hamburg from his cell in Wandsworth Prison using a hand cipher that proved extremely helpful to the Radio Security Service experts working on ISK and ISOS traffic.

Once accepted by the Abwehr, SNOW was invited to a meeting in Rotterdam, to which he was accompanied by an MI5 nominee, G. W., who posed as a militant Welsh nationalist. While in Holland, SNOW was briefed to approach CHARLIE, who would act as his photographer, and was told to expect money from another German agent in England, who turned out to be Mrs. Mathilde Krafft.

SNOW attended a further rendezvous with the Abwehr in Antwerp in October 1939, also accompanied by G. W., and again in April 1940. At another meeting, held in Lisbon, SNOW introduced BISCUIT to his controller, and he was enrolled as an Abwehr spy and given $3,000 and a transmitter. Indeed, the Abwehr trusted SNOW to such an extent that he was asked to supply identities for future spies, and early in September 1940 Jose Waldberg, Charles van der Kieboom, Carl Meier, and Sjoerd Pons were arrested on the Kent coast within hours of having rowed ashore in a dinghy. All carried papers bearing names supplied by SNOW and three were hanged.

SNOW and BISCUIT were scheduled to attend a rendezvous with a German submarine in the North Sea, apparently to receive another agent, but although a trawler was arranged by MI5 to facilitate his reception, there was a misunderstanding between the two men, with each accusing the other of being a triple agent and really working for the Abwehr. When SNOW was searched, he was found to be carrying unauthorized documents that subsequently were traced to William Rolph, a retired MI5 officer.

In January 1941 SNOW returned to Lisbon accompanied by another MI5 nominee, CELERY, who was taken to Hamburg for questioning but then escorted back to Portugal and given £10,000 and some sabotage equipment. Upon their return SNOW’S nerve failed and it was decided to detain him at Dartmoor Prison, reporting to the Abwehr that he had ceased operations because of a breakdown. He remained in custody for the rest of the war, emigrated to Canada afterwards, and died in Dublin.

SOLDATENSENDER CALAIS. Ostensibly a German radio station broadcasting to troops stationed on the Western Front during World War II, Soldatensender Calais was actually broadcasting black propaganda from England, transmitting popular programs skillfully prepared by the Political Warfare Executive at Woburn Abbey and designed to undermine the enemy’s morale.

SOSUS. The acronym for Sound Surveillance Under the Sea, SOSUS was a passive acoustic network of underwater listening equipment intended to monitor the passage of Soviet submarines at selected choke-points such as Gibraltar and the Faeroes–Iceland gap. Developed under the code name CAESAR in 1954, the individual seabed arrays were the size of double-decker buses connected by hundreds of miles of secure cable. Britain’s role in the American-funded and -operated project was to provide sites for the land terminals, and these included Bermuda, Gibraltar, Brawdy in Wales, and the test area off Andros in the Bahamas. Closed down at the end of the Cold War, SOSUS terminals have been either abandoned or donated to oceanographic research for the study of underwater mammals.

SOVIET TRADE DELEGATION. Originally located at Chesham House, the Soviet Trade Delegation acted as the Soviet Union’s diplomatic mission to London until the Bolshevik government was granted official recognition. During the Cold War, the Soviet Trade Delegation was based in a large office in Hampstead, North London, overlooking the Heath. It employed more than 600 staff and was a target for surveillance operations conducted by MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service. According to Break-In by a former military policeman and Special Branch informant, Bill Graham, his double-glazing firm had been used as a front to install clandestine recording equipment when he was contracted to refurbish the building in 1979.

SPANISH EMBASSY. Throughout World War II the Spanish embassy in London was a center of German espionage, masterminded by the press attaché, Angel Alcazar de Velasco. He was allowed to leave the country, but his replacement, Luis Calvo, was detained at Camp 020 until the end of hostilities. MI5 maintained a close interest in the building and monitored its activities through TRIPLEX and various double agents, among them SWEET WILLIAM and PEPPERMINT, both Britons who worked in the embassy, and G. W. and SNOW, who reported to it. In addition, DUCK, a secretary for one of the senior diplomats, gained access to cryptographic material, which assisted the Government Code and Cipher School in solving some of the Spanish Foreign Ministry’s ciphers.

SPECIAL AIR SERVICE (SAS). Created by David Stirling to undertake unorthodox commando-style operations with relatively small groups of soldiers, the Special Air Service began in August 1941 as “L Detachment, SAS Brigade,” with only seven officers and 60 men, as part of a Middle East deception intended to persuade the enemy that a full airborne brigade had been deployed to the Western Desert. The SAS launched its first attack, on five enemy airfields in Tunisia, in November 1941, but only four officers and 18 men survived out of the 64 parachutists dropped. Only one of the target airfields was attacked, and none of that group returned.

Despite this unpromising start and the capture in early 1943 of Stirling, who spent the remainder of the war at Colditz Castle, the SAS concept caught on, with 2 SAS commanded by David’s brother Bill Stirling. By 1945, when the regiment was deployed to Norway to disarm the German garrison, it consisted of 1, 2, 3, and 4 SAS; two French battalions; and a Belgian SAS regiment. However, in 1947 the War Office disbanded the regular units and formed 21 SAS (Artists) TA, a reserve regiment.

The SAS was reformed in January 1951 in Malaya and by the following year, having retrained as 22 SAS, was running patrols in support of the local police. It participated in HELSBY, a deep penetration of the jungle to eliminate terrorist camps close to the Thai border. However, it was not until January 1957 that 22 SAS became part of the regular army, with a brief that included “the collection of intelligence by active and passive means,” leaving 21 SAS as a territorial unit, and 23 SAS drawing on territorials from the north of England.

Since 1957 22 SAS has been deployed in Oman (1958–59), Borneo (1962–66), Aden (1964–67), Dhofar (1970–77), Ulster (1968–97), the Falkland Islands (1982), Iraq (1991), Afghanistan (2002), and on numerous other short-term operations, among them the storming of the Iranian embassy in London in 1980, the liberation of hostages in Sierra Leone in 2002, and the training of local special forces in Colombia.

The deployment of the SAS in Northern Ireland in 1970 gave the regiment unrivaled experience in counterrevolutionary warfare, and the tough regime of constant training, much of it in the jungle in Belize and the hills of the Brecon Beacons. One of the three saber squadrons is always on standby, available to respond instantly to terrorist emergencies, and 22 SAS also seconded troops to Brixmis during the Cold War and continues to provide personnel and equipment for the Increment, a detachment assigned to the Secret Intelligence Service.

SPECIAL BRANCH. Created in 1883 as the Special Irish Branch to deal with Fenian terrorism in London, the Special Branch is a part of the Metropolitan Police’s Criminal Investigation Division, staffed by detectives who have been selected for their language or other skills. Until December 1998 Special Branch provided personal protection officers for the royal family and other vulnerable targets, policed the ports, investigated breaches of the Official Secrets Act, and was responsible for countering Irish republican terrorism. Headed by a deputy assistant commissioner in London, there are local Special Branches in most of the provincial forces that liaise closely with the Metropolitan Police Special Branch (MPSB), which is located in New Scotland Yard.

Unlike their counterparts in MI5, Special Branch detectives are ordinary police officers, carry a warrant card, enjoy powers of arrest under the Metropolitan Police Act, and are subject to police discipline. Because MI5 officers have never enjoyed the power of arrest, Special Branch has always acted as its executive arm, collecting intelligence, passing on informants for recruitment as agents, and conducting arrests and searches.

The term “Special Branch” came into common usage in 1887, and after World War I the provincial forces introduced their own permanent Special Branches. There are now Special Branches in each of the 52 police forces in Great Britain, although their size varies from a handful of officers commanded by a detective sergeant in some of the smaller forces, to the 1,000 based at New Scotland Yard under the direction of a commander holding assistant chief constable rank. The heads of each branch hold regular quarterly regional meetings to coordinate their activities and the national coordinator of ports policing supervises the various agencies represented at the United Kingdom’s 70 commercially significant seaports, 142 civil airports, and 3,000 private landing strips.

Until reorganization in 1985, when it was redesignated SO12, Special Branch existed as a separate elite within Scotland Yard. Sir Basil Thomson’s attempt to develop the branch as a Directorate of Intelligence ended with his resignation in 1921, and the branch’s civilian staff, led by Guy Liddell and Hugh Miller, was transferred to MI5 in the Treaty of Westminster in 1931. Only one former head of Special Branch, Leonard Burt, has served in MI5, being on secondment during World War II. Currently the MPSB sections include:

the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, which collects information about major disturbances

the National Terrorist Financial Investigation Unit, responsible for monitoring financial support for terrorism

the National Joint Unit, which coordinates operations with the provincial forces

the National Special Branch Technology Unit, which manages technical support for branch operations

the Communications Intelligence Unit, which handles telephone intercept warrants and the recovery of computer data from suspect computers

the National Ports Office, coordinating the individual Port Units

the MPSB Training Unit, which runs specialist courses with the Security Service

the European Liaison Section, which maintains a link to Europol and foreign police forces on behalf of the provincial forces

The MPSB also retains the remit for VIP and ministerial close protection. The heads of Special Branch have included John Littlechild (1883–1903), Patrick Quinn (1909–18), James McBrien (1918–29), Edward Parker (1929–36), Albert Canning (1936–46), Leonard Burt (1946–58), Evan Jones (1958–66), Ferguson Smith (1966–72), Victor Gilbert (1972–77), Robert Bryan (1977–81), and Colin Hewett (1981–85).

SPECIAL COMMUNICATIONS UNITS (SCU). The Special Communication Units were outstations of Section VIII of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), linked to Whaddon Hall in Buckinghamshire by radio. Originally named Special Signals Unit 1, Whaddon Hall was designated SCU 1. SCU 2 was a pair of mobile stations attached to the British Expeditionary Force and after the evacuation from Dunkirk in May 1940 was assigned to Delhi. SCU 3 was the Radio Security Service headquarters. SCU 4 was Heliopolis in Egypt. SCU 5 and SCU 6 were SIS stations in Algiers and the Mediterranean. SCU 7 was the Section VIII training center and workshops at Little Horwood. SCU 8 was created to channel ULTRA material to the forward military commands in Europe after D-Day. SCU 9 was created to connect 21st Army Group with SIS field agents and SUSSEX teams and consisted of two radio trucks that deployed to Normandy, spent six weeks in Paris, then moved up to Brussels, and in September 1945 settled in Bad Salsuffen. SCU 11 was formed at Sarafand and was eventually based in Delhi. SCU 12 in Calcutta communicated with agents in Burma and maintained contact with the SIS station in Kunming. SCU 13 was intended to deploy to Singapore. Other SCUs were attached to General Dwight D. Eisenhower mobile headquarters (on his personal train), to the prime minister whenever he traveled abroad (with Edgar Harrison as his personal operator), and to the Dutch intelligence headquarters at Eindhoven. The SCUs were dismantled in 1946 and the personnel and equipment inherited by the Diplomatic Wireless Service.

SPECIAL COUNTERINTELLIGENCE UNITS. Prior to the invasion of Europe in June 1944, the Secret Intelligence Service and U.S. Office of Strategic Services cooperated to develop small teams of indoctrinated personnel who were sent into recently liberated areas to identify, detain, and exploit enemy stay-behind networks. The SCI units were guided to particular people or locations by information acquired from ISK and ISOS intercepts with the objective of persuading the captured spies to participate in a double cross operation supervised by 21st Army Group.

SPECIAL INTELLIGENCE SERVICE. Created in 1941 by the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI Special Intelligence Service deployed 360 special agents to various Latin American countries during 1942 under commercial and diplomatic covers. Numerous American-owned international firms were approached to supply business covers for the FBI Special Intelligence Service personnel who operated independently of the local diplomatic missions.

The FBI Special Intelligence Service developed in response to a perceived Nazi threat to South America and an inability on the part of the United States to gather intelligence about the region or monitor the growth of German espionage. Hoover dispatched two senior officers to London in 1940 to study British techniques, and the Secret Intelligence Service allowed the FBI to make a tour of its stations in South America, which were later used as a model. By the end of the war, the FBI Special Intelligence Service had established legal attaches at many missions overseas, including London, Lisbon, and Paris. However, while these posts remain to the present day, the business covers were closed down at the end of the war. Many of the FBI Special Intelligence Service personnel opted to join the Central Intelligence Agency when it was established in 1947.

SPECIAL LIAISON. Immediately after World War II, Biffy Dunderdale was placed in charge of a secret, dedicated organization concentrating on signals intelligence operations against the Soviet Union as controller, Special Liaison. The organization was divided into two subsections, Atlantic (dealing with certain types of intelligence relating to the Soviets) and Non-Atlantic (liaising with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, Polish intelligence, and French intelligence).

The Atlantic Section collected intelligence from radio traffic intercepted by the Poles at their stations in Stanmore and Scotland and decrypted at Boxmoor; radio telegraph messages en clair; radio-telephone intercepts; and open sources such as the Soviet press. The en clair traffic was read by a system run by Major Heal of Section X of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), responsible for telephones, telegrams, and liaison with the General Post Office and telegraph companies. The intercepted material was passed to Captain Eddie Hastings at GCHQ and then returned to Dunderdale’s operational headquarters, accommodated at Firbanks, in Roehampton, where Major Allen and Squadron-Leader Macdonald represented SIS. The radio-telephone intercepts were supervised by a crippled White Russian named Bunakov, who collected material from as far away as Kizel, Tannu Ola, and Tashkent, and were analyzed by an office on the first floor of the Alliance Building in Caxton Street near Broadway. The Atlantic Section was subdivided into:

Department A, run by Mr. Shelley, who was responsible for communications between Head Office and all the production units

Department B, headed by Sandy McKibbin, which analyzed reports on labor, wages, cost of living, social conditions, taxation, financing, oil, coal, and timber in the Eastern Bloc

Department C, under Major Rikovsky, the military section dealing with the Red Army and NKVD and industry relating to chemicals, rubber, medium machine-building, and railways

Department D, led by Major Narkevich, the naval section that dealt with power stations, agriculture, bread supplies, livestock, export and import, the building industry, and reconstruction issues

Department E, under General Baranov, the aviation section, which also covered metals, machine tools, heavy machine-building, and coke production

SPECIAL LIAISON UNITS (SLU). To facilitate the distribution of ULTRA summaries to military commands during World War II, the Secret Intelligence Service created an independent wireless network that linked Whaddon Hall to Special Liaison Units (SLUs) attached to headquarter staffs authorized to receive the information. The first four SLUs were at the Admiralty, War Office, Air Ministry, and Royal Air Force Fighter Command.

Individual SLUs consisted of specially cleared and trained noncommissioned officers, who decrypted the summaries using onetime pads, kept custody of each ULTRA summary, ensured that only those who had been indoctrinated handled the documents, and supervised the summaries’ destruction. The size of a self-sufficient SLU could be up to 60 men, equipped with jeeps, wireless trucks, cipher vans, motorcycles, and, later in the war, converted Dodge ambulances. They also carried Typex machines and other communications gear, fitted with explosives in case destruction was necessary.

SPECIAL MEANS. The term used for controlled leakages of sensitive information to the enemy during World War II. “Special means” included techniques such as the manipulation of double agents.

SPECIAL OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE (SOE). Special Operations Executive began its short life headed by Sir Frank Nelson, a Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer and the former Conservative MP for Stroud. In the 71 months of its existence, until it was officially disbanded on 30 June 1946, it trained and equipped more than 9,000 agents and inserted them into enemy-occupied territory with varying degrees of success. It operated on a global basis, running missions in China, Malaya, East Africa, South America, and the Middle East, as well as 19 European countries. Among SOE’s most famous missions were GUNNERSIDE, to destroy the Nazi stocks of heavy water in Norway, and ANTHROPOID, to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich.

Initially SOE was an amalgam of two existing clandestine units: the black propaganda staff known as Electra House, headed by Sir Campbell Stuart; and SIS’s sabotage branch, Section D, consisting of 140 hastily recruited intelligence officers. Together they formed the foundation of SOE, an ad hoc organization created to foment subversion across the world and, in Winston Churchill’s famous phrase, “set Europe ablaze.” See also ALBANIA; AUTONOMOUS; BAKER STREET; DANISH SECTION; DH; D/P; F SECTION; GREECE; HUNGARY; JEDBURGH; MAD DOG; MARYLAND; MASSINGHAM; MP; NETHERLANDS SECTION; NORWEGIAN SECTION; SIAM; SPECIAL TRAINING SCHOOLS; T SECTION; VEMORK; WHEELWRIGHT

SPECIAL OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE ADVISER. A Foreign Office post filled until 1978 by Edward Boxshall, a veteran Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer who had headed the Bucharest station between 1918 and 1939 and had served in SOE throughout World War II as an expert on the Balkans. He was succeeded by Christopher Woods, Gervase Cowell, and finally Duncan Stuart, the last incumbent who supervised the transfer of the remaining Special Operations Executive records from SIS to the National Archive.

SPECIAL SIGNALS UNITS (SSU). When World War II started, Section VIII of the Secret Intelligence Service designated its radio headquarters at Whaddon Hall as SSU 1 and the two mobile units attached to the British Expeditionary Force in France as SSU 2. The designations were changed to Special Communications Units at the end of 1940 when ULTRA came on stream and Section VIII supplied the radio and teletype channels to the approved recipients.

SPECIAL TRAINING SCHOOLS (STS). During World War II, Special Operations Executive developed a large training organization to give volunteers the skills to infiltrate enemy-occupied territory, run wireless networks, and plan and execute clandestine operations. The schools were divided into three groups: a preliminary paramilitary course (Group A), usually in the Scottish Highlands; a “finishing school” (Group B), where agents were prepared for operations in the field; and sabotage or tradecraft operations courses run by individual country sections (Group C).

After their initial recruitment interviews, which were usually conducted in War Office premises, candidates underwent a month’s intensive training at the Group A schools, mainly centered around Arisaig House and six neighboring properties in the inhospitable and rugged Highlands terrain surrounding Loch Morar in Inverness-shire. Here Colonel Pat Anderson and Captain James Young taught the basic rules of survival and unarmed combat, as well as some of the more arcane arts such as sabotage, silent killing, and weapon handling. Others teaching on this preliminary paramilitary course were Gavin Maxwell, later the author of Ring of Bright Water, and Matthew Hodgart, a Cambridge don. Local residents, of whom there were few, were told that the area had been allocated to training commandos. Graduates from Group A moved south to the Group B schools, each linked to George Taylor’s country sections, which put the finishing touches to the agents’ skills and prepared them for undercover work in the field. Thereafter the agents were either dispersed to holding centers to await deployment or to other courses run by Group C operational schools.

Parachute training (STS 51a) was given under the guidance of Wing Commander Maurice Newnham at Dunham House, Dunham Massey, Cheshire, and later at two houses close to RAF Ringway, Manchester. A staff officers course (STS 3) was run from Stodham Park near Petersfield, and George Rheam, formerly of the Central Electricity Board, headed a specialist industrial demolition course at Brickendonbury (originally designated Station XVII) near Hertford, the commandant of which, Captain Frederic Peters, RN, won the Victoria Cross at Oran but died in an air crash in Devon on the way home. Those with an aptitude for radio work did a wireless operators course at Thame Park (STS 52). Finally, agents who passed a four-day test, requiring them to reconnoiter a target somewhere in England where the local police had been alerted for possible saboteurs, spent their last few nights before a mission at Brockhall (STS 61) in Northamptonshire, not too distant from Tempsford, or from “Farewell House,” which was actually Hassells Hall in Sandy.

Each of the country sections had its own separate schools. The Czechs went to Chicheley Hall (STS 46) near Newport Pagnell, while the Poles were concentrated at Hatherop Castle (STS 45), Gloucestershire, and Audley End House near Saffron Walden. The Danes were at Gumley Hall (STS 41), Market Harborough, and the Norwegians at Gaynes Hall (STS 61), St. Neots. As well as at Wanborough Manor, F Section was accommodated at Bellasis near Dorking (STS 2), Chorley Wood in Hertfordshire, and 11 secluded houses on Lord Montagu’s estate at Beaulieu in the New Forest. RF Section was based at Inchmery, near Southampton.

SPECIAL WIRELESS GROUPS (SWG). During World War II the Royal Corps of Signals developed an intercept capability known as Special Wireless Groups. Trained at the Royal Signals depots at Trowbridge and Bridgewater in Somerset, SWGs were deployed across the world to monitor enemy wireless traffic and relay intercepted signals to the local regional headquarters—Bletchley Park; Sarafand, Palestine; Heliopolis, Egypt; or Kandy, Ceylon.

SPEDDING, SIR DAVID. Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) from 1994 to 1999, David Spedding was the son of a colonel in the Border Regiment and was educated at Sherborne. He marched with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament to Aldermaston and joined SIS in 1967 at the age of 24 while working as a postgraduate student at Oxford, having read medieval history at Hertford College. In his gap year, Spedding traveled to Chile and had found temporary work as an assistant in the press office of the British embassy in Santiago, which gave him entree into SIS.

Upon joining SIS, Spedding underwent the usual year’s training in England. Already fluent in French and Spanish, he was posted to MECAS at Shemlan to learn Arabic for two years before joining the SIS station in Beirut in May 1970. However, the following year, when the British government expelled 105 Soviet diplomats from London, Spedding was named by Kim Philby in Izvestiya as the local SIS station commander in Lebanon. His transfer to Santiago followed in 1972, together with his wife Gillian Kinnear who had been brought up in Chile, but the country was then in turmoil under President Salvador Allende’s short-lived, left-wing regime that came to an end with General Augusto Pinochet’s military coup in September 1973.

Spedding returned to London in September 1974 and in 1977 was posted to Abu Dhabi where he remained until 1981. Back in London, Spedding was appointed to the Middle East Directorate and then went as head of station in Amman in 1983. It was during the queen’s four-day state visit to the kingdom the following year that Spedding was credited with foiling a plot hatched by Palestinian extremists led by Abu Nidal to assassinate her. Forty-eight hours before her arrival, a bomb was detonated in the Inter-Continental Hotel’s car park and a second device, with 31 sticks of gelignite, was found nearby. The local security situation was considered so grave, with the certainty that Abu Nidal’s men were active in the capital, that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher held an emergency meeting of the Cabinet at Chequers to decide whether the visit should be canceled, but the queen and the prime minister were determined it should proceed. Spedding’s timely intervention, with the Jordanian security apparatus which arrested the bombers, prevented a disaster and he was made a commander of the Royal Victorian Order during her visit.

In 1986 Spedding was placed in charge of a joint MI5–SIS task force monitoring Middle East terrorists in Britain, and he became controller, Middle East, to run SIS’s operations during DESERT STORM, the Gulf War. His promotion to head the Middle East Controllerate had been fortuitous, because when hostilities opened, he had been acting as the deputy head, but the officer directly above him had been on leave at the crucial moment, leaving Spedding to impress Colin McColl and others with his grasp of the conflict.

In 1993 the director of requirements and production, Barrie Gane, took early retirement to go to Group 4 Securitas, and the Chief, McColl, appointed Spedding as his successor, effectively placing him in charge of SIS’s 60 overseas stations. He also named him his assistant chief, to take over from him as Chief in September 1994. Spedding’s appointment, at the age of 50, was announced to the public in March 1994, only the second time the government had ever openly acknowledged the identity of a new Chief. Thus for the second time in his career, Spedding’s name attracted publicity, but he continued to live at his homes in Richborne Terrace, near Vauxhall Cross, and in Church Street, Henley, and to play a few rounds at the nearby Huntercombe Golf Club and lunch in London at the Atheneum. He was the youngest Chief in SIS’s history and the first never to have served in the forces.

His first crisis concerned unauthorized disclosures from a dismissed officer, Richard Tomlinson, who had left SIS embittered in April 1995. During Spedding’s tenure as Chief, he supervised SIS’s move from Century House to its flashy new headquarters at 85 Albert Embankment on the south side of the Thames at Vauxhall Cross in 1994. He was widely regarded as a youthful modernist and certainly promoted that image of himself. He authorized the filming of the riverside exterior of Vauxhall Cross for the 1999 James Bond movie The World Is Not Enough and even invited Dame Judi Dench, the actress who played “M” in the Bond movies, to SIS’s Christmas lunch in December 1998. She was not allowed to be driven in her own car, and the SIS driver had difficulty finding her house, with the result that she was 45 minutes late. Nevertheless, she later declared herself to have “found the experience very exciting” and was “fascinated, but not surprised, at how many languages everyone spoke.” At the end of the lunch, Spedding presented her with a miniature spy camera in a red leather case—but no film.

Another of Spedding’s widely publicized initiatives was his announcement, in February 1999, that SIS had posted its first gay couple to an overseas post. The officer concerned was Christopher Hurran, who was sent to Prague accompanied by his Venezuelan partner, and the Chief’s objective had been to make the point that declared homosexuality was no longer a barrier to a security clearance. In addition, SIS was experiencing considerable difficulty in persuading staff to take on overseas stations where their families might be exposed to risk. Indeed, most middle-ranking personnel with young children were reluctant to interrupt their education by going abroad at all.

Spedding retired from SIS at the end of August 1999, just two weeks before the publication of The Mitrokhin Archive, a book that was to plunge the service into controversy. Always a heavy smoker, Spedding suffered from cancer throughout his short retirement and finally succumbed to it in June 2001, at the age of 58.

SPIRO, EDWARD. Before World War II, Edward Spiro worked as a freelance journalist for several British newspapers in his native Austria, and it was this connection which saved his life when he was arrested by the Gestapo and incarcerated in Dachau and then Buchenwald. Diplomatic pressure was brought to bear on the Nazi authorities and in 1939 he was released to start a new life in England. Spiro’s connection with the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) had begun in Austria after he graduated from Vienna University and became political editor of the city’s evening paper. In 1936 he was recruited by Captain Thomas Kendrick, the SIS head of station, as a source, and this was the lever that was subsequently used to obtain his freedom and bring him to England.

Spiro arrived in London a penniless refugee but, like so many of his Jewish countrymen forced to flee to England, he made a great success of his second career. However, before joining the Daily Telegraph as a lobby correspondent in the House of Commons or achieving distinction with his works of nonfiction, he operated as a stool pigeon for the Security Service by infiltrating groups of suspected Nazis who had been interned under the wartime emergency regulations. Spiro’s task was to test the loyalties of the German inmates and report those whom he believed to be active party members or potential enemy spies.

Following a stay at Cookham in Berkshire, Spiro changed his name to E. H. Cookridge and was later employed on propaganda work for the Ministry of Economic Warfare, the government’s department of dirty tricks, which broadcast ingeniously prepared radio programs to Germany. After the war he wrote extensively on the subject of espionage, publishing biographies of Kim Philby and George Blake. By coincidence he had first met Philby as a Cambridge undergraduate in Vienna in the summer of 1933 when both had been active in the anti-Fascist underground and Philby had met and married his first wife, Litzi Friedman. In his book on Philby, Cookridge, who died in February 1979, explained how their friendship, which was to last 33 years, began.

SPRINGBOK. The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) code name for Hans von Kotze, a German aristocrat married to an Englishwoman, who had emigrated to South Africa in 1929 to work as a fur buyer and miner. Soon after the outbreak of World War II, hoping to avoid internment as an enemy alien, he had moved to Portuguese East Africa but had been expelled. In a further attempt to avoid internment, von Kotze took a passage to Europe but had been captured by a French ship and detained in Morocco until July 1940. When he was finally released, he was offered the option of serving in the Wehrmacht or working for the Abwehr, and he chose the latter. In June 1941 he was dispatched on a LATI flight from Rome to Brazil to join an organization headed by Albrecht Engels as FRED, under commercial cover as a buyer in the leather trade, but what he really wanted to do was reestablish contact with his wife, who had been interned in South Africa, and their children.

When finally in March 1942 he was ordered to move to South Africa, von Kotze wrote to the British consulate in São Paulo and offered his services to SIS. In exchange for a British passport after the war, some money, and the opportunity to be reunited with his wife without being arrested, he was prepared to supply a wealth of information about the Abwehr’s network in Brazil, its members, and its codes and to identify its leader Engels, codenamed ALFREDO. Von Kotze also revealed that, accompanied by his beautiful Hungarian girlfriend, he had visited Buenos Aires in late August 1941 to confer with Dietrich Niebuhr and had also had dealings with the German military attaché in Brazil, Günter Neidenfuhr, who apparently had expressed his disapproval of the frequency with which von Kotze’s had been spotted at the gaming tables in Santos, accompanied by conspicuously attractive young women. Doubtless it was General Neidenfuhr’s attempt to instill some discipline in his subordinate that had prompted him to approach the British, although he may also have been unnerved by some unsubtle surveillance by the Brazilian secret police (DOPS), which included snatching a few photographs of him relaxing on a beach near Santos.

As he also had much to say about an Abwehr spy ring in South Africa, SIS quickly agreed to terms and enrolled von Kotze as SPRINGBOK, but the plan to let him go to South Africa collapsed when the authorities there refused him entry. Instead von Kotze suggested he might try North America and, with the Abwehr’s consent, he made his way using the alias “Johannes van Huges” to Canada, where he attempted to establish wireless contact with Germany through Werner Waltemath, codenamed ANTONIO, one of the radio operators in the Engels network who, coincidentally, he had met on the flight to Recife from Rome. Although he was a trained Wehrmacht technician, Waltemath experienced considerable problems with his homemade transmitter in São Paulo and, despite a lengthy correspondence conducted in 13 letters and 10 telegrams in a code based on The Martyrdom of Man, was unable to help von Kotze. Instead, SPRINGBOK, by now ostensibly working for a British company, Vickers & Benson Ltd. in Toronto, tried to reach the Germans at a postbox address in Lisbon, but by the time his letter arrived, on a slow mail ship rather than by airmail on the transatlantic clipper, the DOPS had pounced on the Engels network and Waltemath had gone into hiding. When eventually Waltemath was caught by the DOPS, in June 1943, he accepted an offer from SIS to act as a double agent, but his controllers in Germany were not fooled, and the connection was severed, leaving Waltemath facing a prison sentence of 27½ years.

Meanwhile SPRINGBOK, out of touch with the Germans, became a nuisance to British Security Coordination (BSC), especially after he had seduced Dorothy Hyde, the wife of his case officer, Harford Montgomery Hyde. His role as a double agent ended in August 1943 when his name was released in Brazil and he was sentenced in absentia. Although BSC arranged for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to announce his arrest, so as to protect his cooperation, von Kotze was allowed to sail to England from Halifax in February 1945.

SPRINGHALL, DOUGLAS. A member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) since 1932, Douglas Springhall had been dismissed from the Royal Navy for causing dissention and had attended the 1924 Communist International in Moscow. During the Spanish Civil War, he was the first political commissar of the Xth (British) International Brigade, and upon his return to London, he was appointed the CPGB’s national organizer. Identified as the espionage contact of Olive Sheehan and Ormond Uren in 1942, Springhall was arrested at his flat in the King Street headquarters of the CPGB and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. To distance the party from the embarrassment, Springhall was expelled from the CPGB and his wife lost her job on the Daily Worker. Upon his release from prison, Springhall traveled to China and died in Moscow.

SPYCATCHER. In 1981 Peter Wright, a disaffected former MI5 officer, collaborated with journalist Chapman Pincher on his expose Their Trade Is Treachery and then took a ghostwriter, Paul Greengrass, to produce SpyCatcher in 1986. The government’s timid response to the first book, which was never the subject of any legal action against either the author or his source, encouraged Wright to take a second bite of the cherry, with catastrophic consequences for the Security Service—which was forced to travel to Sydney to seek an injunction enforcing the tort of breach of confidence in an Australian court against an Australian citizen, as Wright had taken up residence in Tasmania and acquired Australian nationality. Although the action failed in Australia, the House of Lords upheld the principle of “a lifelong duty of confidentiality,” but by then the genie was out of the bottle and SpyCatcher had become a worldwide best-seller, containing a wealth of highly classified information, including dozens of authentic code names. The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) had been caught up in the debacle because, among the many SIS operations referred to, the existence of the international Canadian, American, New Zealand, Australian, and British counterintelligence organization (CAZAB) was revealed, requiring it to be renamed and restructured. While the main damage of Wright’s disclosures was sustained by MI5, there was inevitably a considerable adverse impact on SIS as a sister service, and both organizations came belatedly to realize that disgruntled staff had the potential to wreak havoc, however compartmented the structure.

STAFF COUNSELOR. The 1989 Security Service Act provided for the appointment of a staff counselor to offer confidential advice to MI5 personnel who want an opportunity to express concerns about their duties. The objective was to provide a secure safety valve for officers such as Cathy Masiter who had no confidence in her management chain of command when she had reservations about the legitimacy of telephone intercept warrants being applied for. When David Shayler failed to air his grievances with the staff counselor, then Sir Phillip Woodfield, he claimed the confidentiality of his complaint would have been compromised and disadvantaged him. The current staff counselor is Sir John Chilton.

STAFFORD, SIR EDWARD. Appointed Queen Elizabeth I’s ambassador to France in 1583, Sir Edward Stafford sold political information to the Spanish, but his treason was discovered by her secretary of state, Sir Francis Walsingham, who placed Stafford under surveillance and used him as a conduit for deception. Walsingham monitored Stafford’s duplicity through an agent named Rogers, who received secret service funds, and allowed him to maintain contact with the Spanish. When he died in 1605, Stafford had not been charged with any crime, so he may have acted as a double agent controlled by Walsingham.

STAKE KNIFE. Code name for a very senior, long-term source within the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) run by the Force Research Unit (FRU) from 1976 to 2003. STAKE KNIFE was identified by a renegade FRU agent handler in May 1993 as Freddie Scappaticci, a Belfast builder with a reputation of having been a PIRA “enforcer” responsible for weeding out and eliminating informers within the organization’s ranks. According to the FRU source, Scappaticci originally had volunteered his services to the police after his brother had suffered a kneecapping. After he was named publicly, Scappaticci denied the allegation and brought an unsuccessful legal action against the Northern Ireland Office for a statement exonerating him.

According to Scappaticci’s police record, he had been charged in January 1990 with abduction and assault in connection with the interrogation of a suspected informer, Sandy Lynch, who was rescued by the Royal Ulster Constabulary from a house in Lenadoon, West Belfast. On that occasion Scappaticci had been acquitted for lack of evidence. In February 2004 a former FRU handler, “Martin Ingram,” collaborated with journalist Greg Harken to produce Stakeknife: Britain’s Secret Agents in Ireland.

STAY-BEHIND NETWORKS. Organizations of agents left in the path of an advancing enemy, briefed to commence clandestine operations once the area had come under occupation, are known as “stay-behind.” British Intelligence played an active part in the identification of German stay-behind networks following the invasion of Europe in June 1944, and during the Cold War participated in a NATO project to train and equip underground resistance movements in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy. NATO’s secret stay-behind group in Italy was known as GLADIO, that in Switzerland as P-27, and the one in Finland as STELLA POLARIS.

STB. See CZECH INTELLIGENCE SERVICE.

STEELE, FRANK. Born in India in February 1923, Frank Steele joined the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in 1951 after graduating in mechanical engineering from Emanuel College, Cambridge. He was posted to Basra and then served in Cyprus, Libya, London, and Beirut. Steele was head of station in Amman in 1965, and in 1968 went to Nairobi. Upon his return to England in 1971, he was transferred to Laneside, the quiet villa overlooking Belfast Lough, as deputy to the UK representative, Sir Howard Smith. After the imposition of direct rule from London in March 1972, Steele was assigned to the Northern Ireland Office. Steele’s task was to develop a line of communication to the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), so a truce could be negotiated, and this he achieved. The first secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Willie Whitelaw, wanted to speak directly to the PIRA leadership, and Steele arranged the meeting, first having obtained agreement to new conditions for the republican detainees in prison in the province, the so-called “special category status,” and the freedom for the PIRA delegation to choose its composition. In 1975 Steele retired from SIS and went to work for the City merchant bankers Kleinwort Benson. He died in November 1997.

STEPHENS, R. W. G. Colonel Robin Stephens, known as “Tin-eye” because of his monocle, was commandant of Camp 020 throughout World War II and was then transferred to Bad Nenndorf. Allegations of the maltreatment of prisoners made by his deputy, Major Short, resulted in Stephens facing a court-martial, which acquitted him. At the end of the war, Stephens was invited by the director-general, Sir David Petrie, to write a history of Camp 020, which he titled A Digest of Ham.

STEPHENSON, SIR WILLIAM. Born in Winnipeg in January 1897 to destitute immigrants from Iceland, William Stanger was adopted by neighbors, the Stephenson family, at the age of four. When he left school at 14, he worked in a timber yard and then as a telegram messenger. In January 1916 he enlisted in the Winnipeg Light Infantry and was sent to France, where he was wounded and gassed within a week of his arrival. He was evacuated to England and in April the following year, having convalesced near Oxford, Stephenson volunteered for pilot training with the Royal Flying Corps. In February 1918 he was assigned to the 73rd Squadron in France and won the Military Cross in April and the Distinguished Flying Cross in August, having shot down 12 enemy aircraft in his Sopwith Camel. However, in July he was accidentally wounded by a French aerial gunner, and his plane crashed on the wrong side of the German lines. He was captured and held at Holzminden, but escaped before the end of the war.

In 1919 Stephenson was back in Winnipeg in partnership with a businessman to exploit the patent of a can opener he had found in Holzminden, but the company filed for bankruptcy and in 1922 Stephenson returned to London, where he invested in a company manufacturing and distributing radio receivers and X-ray machines. Over the next 12 years he accumulated a sizeable fortune through shrewd investments and married the daughter of a wealthy family from Tennessee who was working in a tobacco shop.

By 1938 the successful Stephenson was on the board of the Pressed Steel Company, Shepperton Studios, and the huge Earls Court exhibition. He was also associated with Desmond Morton’s Industrial Intelligence Centre, apparently providing information about German acquisition of war materiel, and became involved in a disastrous scheme, codenamed STRIKE OX and planned by Section D, to sabotage the docks at the Swedish port of Oxelösund.

In April 1940 Stephenson was introduced to the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), J. Edgar Hoover, by a mutual friend, lawyer Ernest Cuneo, and by the middle of the next month he was back in London to be appointed the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) representative New York, under passport control officer cover. He took up his new post at the end of June 1940, accompanied by Dick Ellis and Walter Bell and quickly negotiated a lend-lease agreement for the immediate delivery of 50 elderly American destroyers to act as convoy escorts. By the following year Stephenson had abandoned the Passport Control Office in Wall Street and established British Security Coordination (BSC) in the Rockefeller Center, with the registered cable address of “Intrepid, New York,” and Special Training School 103 at Oshawa, near Toronto in Canada. He developed a close relationship with General Donovan of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, and a slightly more tense liaison with the FBI’s Hoover.

Over the next four years, BSC expanded to act as an umbrella for MI5, SIS, the Radio Security Service, and the Political Warfare Executive, posting representatives across the Western Hemisphere. Stephenson was director of BSC until 1945, when the organization was wound down and he was awarded a knighthood. Before his death in January 1989, he sponsored three biographies, two of which—The Quiet Canadian and the rather less accurate A Man Called Intrepid— were published. The original history British Security Coordination, written by Gilbert Highet with help from Roald Dahl and others in 1946, was released in 1998.

STERN GANG. Named after Abraham Stern, the Stern Gang was the British term for the “Freedom Fighters of Israel,” considered the most ruthless of the terrorist groups campaigning for a Jewish homeland in Palestine during the British Mandate. Stern himself was shot by a British police officer while being arrested in February 1942, but his organization, led by Avram Yellin and Stern’s sister Hannah, continued to commit atrocities for a further six years, among them the assassination of Lord Moyne, the British high commissioner in Cairo, in November 1944. Security Intelligence Middle East recruited a source within the Stern Gang, Israel Prizker, but he was murdered when he came under suspicion as an informant.

STEVENS, RICHARD. The son of a former British minister in Athens, Major Richard Stevens was fluent in German, French, and Russian when, in 1937, he was appointed the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) head of station in The Hague under passport control officer cover, his only previous intelligence experience having been in the North-West Frontier of India. Upon the outbreak of war, he combined his resources with Sigismund Best, his counterpart in the Z Organisation. Both men were abducted at Venlo by the Sicherheitsdienst in November 1939 as they waited to rendezvous with what they believed to be representatives of an anti-Nazi conspiracy.

Stevens survived the war but was criticized for having failed to resist his Nazi interrogators, and he was credited with having supplied much of the information about SIS found in Informationscheft GrossBritannien. Stevens blamed Best for having talked, and later found a post as an interpreter at NATO. After his death in Brighton in 1965, SIS learned that the German source had been Dick Ellis, and that they had played one prisoner off against the other with exceptional skill, leaving each believing that he had been betrayed by the other.

STEWART, BOB. A dour teetotal Scot and Communist activist, the three volumes of Bob Stewart’s MI5 file open in September 1920 with a report from the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) that identified him as a Communist and “a secret agent for England on behalf of the Third International.” Born in February 1877 in Eassie, in Angus, Stewart was trained as a ship’s carpenter, but never went to sea to practice his trade. Instead, he took up politics, became a member of the Dundee Town Council, and achieved some considerable notoriety locally before moving to London in 1929. Even then he did not sever all his connections with Dundee, standing for the city as the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) candidate in the June 1929 general election.

Stewart had been a founder member of the party when it was created in 1921, and the following year had been appointed the CPGB’s Scottish organizer. He remained a member of the Executive Committee until 1936, when he became secretary of the Control Commission, the party’s hard-line, disciplinary body; between 1925 and 1926, he served as acting general secretary. In 1924 Stewart had been appointed the British representative on the Comintern’s Executive Committee, and he visited Moscow often, attending the Fourth Congress of the Third International and being elected to the Praesidium of the Fifth Congress. All of this political activity was a matter of public record, and even the Times reported in June 1924 that Stewart had taken charge of the party’s propaganda section.

Stewart’s move to London marked his participation in the underground cells, and in March 1930 he made a visit to Germany that may have been significant because thereafter Moscow’s financial support for the party was channeled through him exclusively. Within a month of his return to England, Stewart was in Ireland to organize the party there, and by August he was writing articles in Pravda, under his own name, supposedly as a specialist in military affairs. This new role coincided with MI5 noting that he had approached a member of the party who lived in Crayford and worked at Vickers, asking for information about new weapon designs. Almost simultaneously, the Dublin Garda reported to MI5 the existence of “a prominent Soviet agent” living at Stewart’s North London address.

By June 1932 Stewart had been elected to the CPGB’s Central Committee, and it was in this capacity that his name became known to Walter Krivitsky, who mentioned him to MI5’s Jane Sissmore while being debriefed in London in February 1940. Meanwhile, Special Branch detectives were filing reports on his many visits to Ireland, to meet Communists and members of the Irish Republican Army, and over the following year the number of his trips abroad escalated considerably, with departures logged to Berlin in October 1932, to Paris in January 1933, to Zurich in March, and to Brussels in April and June, in addition to other trips to Esbjerg, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam. On each occasion, either SIS was alerted to monitor his movements, or the local police kept him under surveillance, but when he went to Moscow in June 1936 no such facilities were available and he was able to confer with his Soviet intelligence controllers in relative freedom. On this visit, Stewart may have been submitting a progress report on Percy Glading, with whom he had been in contact in May and June, immediately prior to his departure.

In contrast, Stewart’s activities were watched extremely closely in London, and a microphone, codenamed TABLE, picked up all his office conversations in King Street. Another, codenamed KASPAR, recorded sound from another CPGB building in Great Newport Street, but both sources were to be betrayed by Anthony Blunt in 1940 when he gained access to the relevant MI5 files in 1940. Instead of ripping out the wiring and maybe demonstrating the fact that the party had discovered the covert equipment, Stewart pretended he was unaware that his office contained a bug and carried on business as usual. This led MI5 to spend fruitless hours making transcripts of his exchanges with another Scottish Communist, Jimmy Shields, the long-serving head of the CPGB’s International Department, who held that post until his death in 1949. Shields was responsible for supervising Moscow’s financial support for the party, and much of what was heard over the microphones consisted of Shields counting thousands of U.S. dollar bills, donated by the Soviets. In addition, Stewart’s home telephone was tapped and all his mail was intercepted, photographed, and tested for secret writing.

Stewart was considered a target by both MI5 and SIS, and his Security Service file includes a memorandum, dated 20 December 1934, from a Special Branch detective in Folkestone who reported his departure for Boulogne to Major Valentine Vivian, then SIS’s director of counterespionage. Assisted by his wife Margaret, daughter Annie, and an assistant, Agnes Aitken, Stewart provided the link between the CPGB’s overt and legal political organization, and the clandestine cells run on behalf of the NKVD, taking instructions from Moscow. Blunt revealed Stewart’s pivotal role while under interrogation by MI5 in 1964 and revealed that in the absence of Anatoli Gorsky in 1940, Stewart had run Blunt, Kim Philby, and Guy Burgess.

STEWART, SIR FINDLATER. A member of the Wireless Board, Sir Findlater Stewart had spent his career in the India Office. On the outbreak of World War II, when he was permanent undersecretary of state for India (a post he had held since 1930), he was appointed director-general of the Ministry of Information. In November 1939 he moved to the Home Defence Security Executive, where he remained until the end of the war, representing the body on the Twenty Committee. In November 1945, assisted by John Drew, he completed a review of the British secret services and recommended that MIS and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) be amalgamated in one building in Horseferry Road. He retired in 1946, the proposal for amalgamation dying under opposition from MI5 and SIS.

STIRLING, WALTER. After passing out of Sandhurst in 1899 and receiving a commission in the 1st Royal Dublin Fusiliers, Walter Stirling was posted to South Africa with the Natal Field Force. After his arrival he transferred to the mounted infantry of Lord Dundonald’s Brigade, with whom he saw action during the siege of Ladysmith. He was highly decorated during the Boer War and at its conclusion served for six years with the Egyptian army, retiring in 1912 at the age of 32 with a chestful of medals, among them the DSO.

At the outbreak of the World War I Stirling joined the Royal Flying Corps as an observer, and the following year rejoined his old regiment for the ill-fated Gallipoli offensive. For the last two years of the war, Stirling, served on the General Staff, having acquired a Military Cross and a bar to his DSO. After the war, Stirling moved to Damascus, acting as an adviser to Emir Faisal, and later he was appointed deputy chief political officer for the Middle East. In 1920 he was attached to the Egyptian government as acting governor of the Sinai Peninsula, and then became governor of the Jaffa District in Palestine. In 1923 he went to Albania to reorganize and command King Zog’s gendarmerie, an assignment that was to last eight years.

When World War II broke out, Stirling was appointed the chief telephone censor for the Continent, and it was in June 1940, while he was in this post, that he was invited to join the Secret Intelligence Service. He flew to Athens to make contact with his chief in the Grande Bretagne Hotel and then embarked on a tour of the region, stopping at Salonika, Belgrade, and Bucharest, where he participated in the Iron Gates fiasco. When Stirling reached Istanbul, he was appointed assistant military attaché with the task of liaising with the Albanian expatriates.

At the conclusion of his service with Special Operations Executive, Stirling was placed in command of a large stretch of Syria, then under the Ninth Army’s occupation. When he retired, for the second time, he took up residence in Damascus but was forced to flee to Cairo following an assassination attempt in 1949. Two years later he was expelled by the Egyptian government and he moved to Tangier, where he died in February 1958. In his autobiography, published in 1953, Stirling gives a heavily sanitized account of his arrival by air in Athens on his first secret mission.

STRACHEY, JOHN. A minister of food and then secretary of state for war for the last year of Clement Attlee’s administration, John Strachey was a confirmed Marxist and had been recorded holding an “open code” telephone conversation with Donald Maclean shortly before the latter’s defection in 1951. According to a Central Intelligence Agency report dated February 1952, Strachey had also “been responsible for having the surveillance on Bruno Pontecorvo lifted, which reportedly made possible Pontecorvo’s escape to Russia” in 1950.

STRACHEY, OLIVER. A brilliant cryptographer, Oliver Strachey joined the Admiralty’s Room 40 during World War I and continued to serve in the Government Code and Cipher School as one of Alastair Denniston’s senior assistants. In 1940 his work on the Abwehr’s hand ciphers resulted in the circulation of ISOS decrypts, the source known internally as “Intelligence School Oliver Strachey.” He died in 1942.

STRAGGLE. Code name for the recovery of the Suez Canal Zone in November 1956. The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) had few resources in Egypt at that time, and when diplomatic relations were severed, the SIS station, headed by Freddie Stockwell, had to be withdrawn to Cyprus, leaving only SIS’s commercial cover organization, the Arab News Agency (ANA), but this too was closed down when its manager, James Swinburn, was arrested by the Mukhabarat. While the ANA had fulfilled a useful function as a conduit for British propaganda, it was too transparent as a cover for intelligence officers posing as journalists and certainly never fooled the Egyptians, who scooped up the entire structure, thereby leaving SIS dependent on intermittent reporting from neighboring stations, and incidentally isolating LUCKY BREAK, supposedly a source in General Abdel Nasser’s immediate entourage with access to documents.

The SIS chief, Sir Dick White, had been indoctrinated into Anthony Eden’s plan to invade Egypt by the Cabinet secretary, Sir Norman Brook, and was informed of the scheme to have Britain and France respond to a surprise Israeli attack on Egypt by demanding a withdrawal and a cease-fire. The Anglo-French intervention would thus be given the cloak of respectability and legality, using the cease-fire, which Nasser would be bound to reject, as a convenient pretext. White soon learned that Eden had taken Selwyn Lloyd into his confidence and had used the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Sir Patrick Dean, as an intermediary to negotiate with the French and Israelis in Paris. The Foreign Office permanent undersecretary, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, had also colluded to keep those in the know to a bare minimum. SIS’s intended role was to provide a secure communications channel between the SIS Israeli desk, manned by Nigel Clive and Cyril Rolo, to Tel Aviv, where Nicholas Elliott was running the station temporarily, and to Cyprus where Godfrey Paulson was supervising the military component at the Nicosia station that operated under cover supplied by the British Middle East Office.

The key figure in SIS’s contribution to STRAGGLE was Clive, who in 1953 had been placed in charge of the Special Political Action section assigned the task of removing Nasser before, as LUCKY BREAK predicted, Egypt fell under permanent Soviet influence. SIS’s choice for a replacement for Nasser, the deputy director of Egypt’s air force intelligence, General Khalil, turned out to have acted as a double agent, pocketing SIS’s bribe and reporting the attempt to the Mukhabarat. The invasion collapsed as soon as the Eisenhower administration threatened to withdraw its support for sterling and took seriously a Soviet threat to retaliate.

STRAIGHT, MICHAEL. A Soviet spy recruited at Trinity College, Cambridge, Michael Straight—who, according to KGB archives declassified in Moscow, operated under the code name NIGEL—was also, briefly, Anthony Blunt’s lover and identified him as a mole to MI5 in 1964. Immensely wealthy and something of a dilettante, Straight was born on 1 September 1916 in New York to a banker and an heiress, but was brought up in England by his mother and stepfather, Leonard Elmhirst, who founded Dartington Hall. After attending Dartington and the London School of Economics, Straight went up to Cambridge as a radical and was talent-spotted by Blunt, who passed him on to James Klugmann for recruitment into an underground cell of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).

In 1937 Straight was instructed by his Soviet controller to return to the United States and obtain a job in the European Division of the State Department, and he remained there as an unpaid volunteer until he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve in January 1943. During this period, as he admitted in his 1983 autobiography After Long Silence, he removed copies of confidential papers from the State Department and supplied them to his contact, whom he named as “Michael Green” but who was actually Iskhak Akhmerov, the NKVD illegal rezident. Straight trained as a B-17 pilot but never saw combat and was stationed in the Midwest throughout the war.

In 1946 Straight made a visit to London and learned that Blunt and Guy Burgess were still active Soviet spies. He made no protest and said nothing to anyone until in 1963 he confessed to William Sullivan of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in anticipation of an FBI background check on him following his nomination for a federal arts post in the Kennedy administration. Sullivan subsequently informed Arthur Martin, MI5’s principal mole hunter and the newly appointed head of the D1 counterespionage branch, of Straight’s confession in April 1964 as Martin passed through Washington, D.C., after interviewing John Cairncross in Cleveland, Ohio. Under interrogation Cairncross, then working as an academic, had admitted spying for the Soviets between 1934 and 1952 and had named Klugmann as his recruiter at Cambridge. During a lunch hosted by Sullivan, Straight confirmed that he too had been recruited by Klugmann, and he named Blunt, with whom he had conducted a brief homosexual affair, as a talent-spotter for the CPGB and a fellow spy. Armed with this information, Martin persuaded MI5 to approach the attorney-general, Sir John Hobson, to offer Blunt immunity from prosecution. Although Straight volunteered to confront Blunt, his evidence was considered insufficient to obtain a conviction, but Martin’s disclosure that Straight had talked encouraged him to accept the deal.

Straight’s account of his espionage, contained in his autobiography, was obviously self-serving and minimized the extent of his involvement, but he was dismayed when his KGB file was released in Moscow in 1999. Nevertheless, he gave a candid account of his sister Biddy’s stormy marriage to Louis Dolivet, a veteran Comintern agent whose real name was Ludwig Brecher.

In the postwar era, Straight had run his family’s journal, the New Republic, until 1955 and latterly published several novels and an attack on McCarthyism, Trial by Television. From 1969 to 1977 he was deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Straight, who died in January 2004 in Chicago, married thrice and is survived by his widows and five children from his first marriage to Belinda Crompton, from whom he was divorced in 1969.

STRIKE OX. Code name for an ill-fated World War II sabotage operation, also known as LUMPS, intended to blow up the port facilities at Oxelösund, Sweden, and thereby deny them to the Nazis, who relied upon Swedish iron ore. The Section D saboteurs led by Alexander Rickman who were deployed to complete the mission were arrested and imprisoned by the Swedish security police.

STRONG, SIR KENNETH. Born in 1900 and educated at Montrose and Sandhurst, Kenneth Strong was commissioned into the Royal Scots Fusiliers in 1920 and in 1937 was appointed assistant military attaché in Berlin, where he was a witness to the Munich Crisis of 1938. Fluent in German, French, Italian, and Spanish, he headed the German Section of the War Office’s military intelligence directorate upon his return to England at the end of August 1939 and then MI14. Strong was selected as General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s chief intelligence officer in February 1943. At the end of the war, he headed the Political Intelligence Department at the Foreign Office until his retirement from the army in 1947. The following year Strong founded the Joint Intelligence Bureau and remained head of it until 1964 when he was made the first director-general of intelligence at the new Ministry of Defence until his statutory retirement in 1966.

In 1968 Strong published his autobiography, Intelligence at the Top, followed by Men of Intelligence (1970). He died in January 1982. Always skeptical of the value of secret intelligence, he was fond of quoting Admiral Wemyss’s remark that the product of secret intelligence is “uncertain information from questionable people.”

STUART, SIR CAMPBELL. Appointed assistant military attaché in Washington, D.C., in 1917, Campbell Stuart had been educated at universities in Virginia and Melbourne. In 1918 he was appointed deputy director of propaganda in enemy countries. Between the wars he was a director of the Times and in 1920 published Secrets of Crewe House, an official history of British propaganda during World War I. Stuart was named director of propaganda in 1939.

SUEZ CANAL. The disastrous 1956 military intervention to recover the Suez Canal after it had been nationalized by Egypt’s Colonel Abdel Nasser was codenamed STRAGGLE. The Secret Intelligence Service and the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Sir Patrick Dean, played crucial roles.

SUFFOLK, EARL OF. The Ministry of Supply dispatched the 20th Earl of Suffolk to France in May 1940 to retrieve the College de France’s stocks of uranium and heavy water to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Nazis, and to recover France’s strategic reserves of industrial diamonds and specialist machine tools. The two leading researchers in Paris, Hans von Halban and Lev Kowarski, had escaped with the Collège de France’s stock of Norwegian heavy water in May, storing their precious cargo first in the Banque de France vaults in Clermont-Ferrand and then in the women’s prison at Mont Dore. Finally the dozen jerry cans were placed in the condemned cell at Riom prison, while von Halban, accompanied by his wife and baby daughter, set up a temporary research laboratory in the Clair Logis, a villa at Clermond-Ferrand.

The Collège de France’s plans to continue its work were interrupted by the swift German advance on Paris in June, and the decision was taken to evacuate von Halban and Kowalski to Bordeaux where a British coaler, the Broompark, would take them to England. Escorted by Suffolk, his secretary Miss Morden, and his chauffeur Fred Hards, the 25 College de France physicists disembarked at Falmouth and went by train to Paddington, where they were lodged at the Great Western Hotel before being invited by (Sir) Ben Locks-peiser and (Sir) Solly Zuckerman, on behalf of the Maud Committee, to be reunited with their heavy water at a small building just inside the Cavendish Laboratory’s compound in Cambridge. Lord Suffolk was killed in action in 1941.

SUMMER. MI5 code name for a Swedish journalist, Gösta Caroli, who arrived in Northamptonshire by parachute early in September 1940 and was arrested almost immediately by the Home Guard, alerted by local farm workers. He was escorted to Camp 020, where he was promised that if he cooperated fully, and disclosed the name of his friend, another Abwehr agent who was to follow him shortly, both their lives would be spared. SUMMER promptly named Wulf Schmidt (subsequently codenamed TATE) and arrangements were made for his reception.

SUMMER was transferred to an MI5 safe house in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, for Christmas 1940, but although he was accompanied by TATE, he suffered from depression and when he was returned to Camp 020 he slashed his wrists in a suicide attempt. When he was returned to Hinxton in January, he tried to escape and stole one of his guards’ motorcycles, heading for the coast. He was soon caught and spent the remainder of the war at Camp 020R, Huntercombe. After the war he was deported to Sweden, where he died in 1975 after spending the last years of his life in a wheelchair, failing to obtain a war disability pension from the German government on the grounds that he had been injured during his parachute landing.

SUB-COMMITTEE ON SECURITY SERVICE PRIORITIES AND PERFORMANCE (SOSSPP). Following the Security Commission report into the management lapses highlighted by the conviction of Michael Bettaney in 1983 and the inadequate explanations provided by the then director-general of the Security Service, Sir John Jones, this Cabinet subcommittee was created to task MI5 and monitor its performance. Chaired by an official from the Home Office (as the sponsoring department), it consists of representatives from the Foreign Office, Ministry of Defence, Treasury, Cabinet Office, Office of Public Service, Department of Health and Social Security, Scottish Office, Northern Ireland Office, GCHQ, and MI5.

SUNSHINE. MI5 code name for an operation approved by Prime Minister Anthony Eden to find, isolate, and if necessary assassinate Colonel George Grivas, the EOKA leader during the Cyprus Emergency. The plan hatched by MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) included the deployment of an SIS officer with a formidable record in the Special Air Service in Italy during the war, but in the event, his skills were not required, as a political settlement was reached before the target could be found.

SUPREME HEADQUARTERS ALLIED EXPEDITIONARY FORCE (SHAEF). As General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Allied headquarters moved across Europe, the 21st Army Group’s counterintelligence division, headed by Dick White, supervised the work of the Special Counterintelligence Units, which identified and turned members of the enemy’s stay-behind networks.

SWEET-ESCOTT, BICKHAM. After Winchester and Balliol, Bickham Sweet-Escott joined the British Overseas Bank and throughout the 1930s traveled constantly across Europe. He spoke German fluently, and his experiences in the Balkans led him to write a book for Chatham House, which brought him to the attention of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Although he was alerted to the fact that the intelligence services had earmarked him for special work in the event of war, Sweet-Escott heard nothing from SIS until his return in March 1940 from a business trip to Italy on behalf of Courtaulds’ financial directorate, the textile company he had recently joined.

Sweet-Escott’s entry into Section D’s Balkan subsection, with responsibility for Greece and Hungary, was the start of a five-year career in clandestine operations. He became a senior staff officer in Special Operations Executive (SOE) when that organization was formed in May 1940. Sweet-Escott’s first task was the denial of Romanian oil to the Nazis, and he handled the London end of two ill-fated schemes: the first, to buy up all the Danube’s oil barges, and the second, to blow up the river narrows known as the Iron Gates. The latter operation was abandoned when several key figures in the plot, including Merlin Minshall, were arrested by the local police.

Wartime service in SOE took Sweet-Escott to the Middle and Far East, where he held senior staff appointments. At the conclusion of hostilities he returned to banking and became general manager of the Ionian Bank. He completed the first draft of his war memoirs in the autumn of 1954 and submitted it to the War Office, but after a delay of six months was warned that publication would “render him liable to prosecution.” In November 1962 the frustrated author approached Dame Irene Ward, an indomitable campaigner on behalf of those seeking to research the truth about SOE’s activities, and largely due to her pressure, Sweet-Escott was allowed to release Baker Street Irregular (1965), a sanitized version of his original account. It is memorable for the extraordinary compromise reached with the authorities, which required all mention of SIS to be excised; accordingly, there are no references to an organization known as “Z,” nor are “MI6” and “SIS” to be found anywhere.

SYMONDS, JOHN. Detective Sergeant John Symonds of the Metropolitan Police’s Committee of Imperial Defence left England in 1972 to start a new life as a mercenary in Africa. A former army officer, he had been charged with corruptly receiving £150, and when two colleagues were given lengthy prison sentences for similar offenses, on equally dubious evidence, he went abroad and prepared a dossier on police corruption. This caught the attention of the KGB rezident in Tangier, who tried to interest him in assassinating a recent defector, Oleg Lyalin. Symonds’s affair with a German woman while on holiday in Bulgaria led to his recruitment by the KGB to undertake a mission that involved Gunter Guillaume, the spy inside German chancellor Willi Brandt’s private office. Later he was given sex training in Moscow as a Romeo spy and sent to India by Oleg Kalugin to seduce the wives of certain Central Intelligence Agency officers. However, when his girlfriend in Bulgaria was persecuted by the secret police, he abandoned his assignment to protect her. Symonds also undertook a mission to Australia to collect authentic passports for the use of KGB illegals.

After eight years working for the KGB, Symonds returned to London, where he still faced trial and was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for corruption. Upon his release he was granted immunity from prosecution for his evidence concerning corruption at Scotland Yard, although MI5 disbelieved his claims to have spied for the KGB.

In 1992 KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin identified Symonds as the KGB’s star British agent, prompting Symonds to write his autobiography. This proved to be an embarrassment for MI5, which had rejected his offers of information on advice from a Scotland Yard anxious to bury his allegations of widespread corruption. He was finally vindicated and was the subject of an inquiry conducted by the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee.

SYMONDS, RONALD. Born in June 1916, Ronald Symonds was educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford, where he read French and German, and joined the Intelligence Corps in 1939. By the end of World War II, he had been promoted to the rank of major and was engaged in training personnel for the British Control Commission for Germany. In 1951 he joined MI5 and spent five years in F Branch dealing with countersubversion, including a tour of duty in Malaya. Upon his return he was posted to the protective security branch and in 1961 transferred to the D1 counterespionage section, where he ran the investigation of Frank Bossard, a Soviet spy in the Air Ministry. In 1972 Symonds was appointed deputy director-general, running the organization between December 1973 and March 1974 when the director-general, Sir Michael Hanley, was ill. Upon his retirement in 1975, Symonds served on the Royal Commission on Gambling, and he died in 1997.

–T–

T SECTION. The Special Operations Executive (SOE) designation for the Belgium section was “T.” It was headed by Hardy Amies, but was handicapped by the requirement to liaise closely with the Belgian government-in-exile, which was opposed to any significant sabotage of Belgian economic assets. SOE’s enforced relationship with the exiled Prime Minister Hubert Pierlot’s administration virtually precluded it from developing any useful contact for a long period and instead of a strategy of wholesale sabotage, a campaign of minor pinpricks was adopted, albeit reluctantly.

In February 1942 an agreement was reached with Pierlot for SOE to liaise directly with Action, a subsection of the Deuxième Direction of the Ministry of Defence headed by Major Bernard. This arrangement broke down almost immediately, and it was not until October 1942, when Bernard had been replaced by Colonel Jean Marissal, that a new treaty of cooperation could be negotiated. Even then, the personalities still jarred, with Philip Johns observing that Marissal “had been too orthodox for him to adapt to this relatively newly constituted SOE.” The new document was signed in October 1942 and heralded a two-phase approach: a preparatory stage in which arms would be stockpiled and a “secret army” recruited, followed by a coordinated and disciplined general insurrection after the Allied invasion. This ambitious plan was never fully realized, partly because of political infighting and

the paranoiac suspicion and jealousy which existed between Lepage and his staff on the one hand and Marissal and the Deuxième Direction on the other.... The internecine struggle, though understandable up to a point, was deplorable.

In spite of the internal conflict, the difficulties experienced by T Section were mainly due to German penetration of its networks. As well as running a large number of Belgian collaborators, the Germans also exploited the few links that existed between the compromised Dutch networks and the Belgian escape lines. In one lengthy undercover operation in spring 1942, the Abwehr actually took control of the Secret Intelligence Service’s circuits, infiltrating their own surrogates into key positions, and rounded up all the related resistance groups, including an extensive one run by Major van Serveyt. During the course of the war, 250 agents were dispatched to Belgium, of whom 105 were arrested. Only 45 of those taken into German custody survived the experience.

TANGYE, DEREK. An Old Harrovian journalist, Derek Tangye is best known for his stories about his idyllic life on a flower farm in Cornwall, but at the beginning of the war he was appointed to the intelligence section of the War Office in charge of assessing the Chinese order of battle. Tangye’s somewhat esoteric appointment occurred as a result of a report he had written following his travels across the Far East. Shortly before the war broke out, he had enlisted in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry but his career as a private soldier was to be brief. He was summoned to Whitehall to take charge of an inadequate card index of military units in the Pacific, and then went on an intelligence course at Swanage where, among others, he met an old friend, the novelist Alec Waugh, who was destined for the Middle East.

Instead of returning to the War Office, Tangye was offered a job with MI5 and was posted to Newcastle as an assistant to the local regional security liaison officer. A month later, Tangye was placed in charge of his own section, with responsibility for not only liaising with Fleet Street but also handling the foreign journalists thronging London. His future wife was the Savoy Hotel’s public relations officer, where many of the American newspapermen were staying, and he was thus well placed to monitor their dispatches home and influence the stories they filed.

Tangye spent 10 years working for MI5, even when, after the war, he was first a gossip columnist on the Daily Express and later a cartoon writer on the Daily Mail. His job as William Hickey, the page made famous by Tom Driberg, lasted just three days because he “had not been waspish enough” about Waugh. On the Daily Mail his collaborator was Julian Phipps, a gifted artist who was later to marry Joan Miller, another MI5 agent.

At the end of Tangye’s service with MI5 in late 1949, he moved away from London and settled in Cornwall, where he wrote The Way to Minack. Tangye died in October 1996. In February 2000 an unidentified GRU general in Moscow claimed that Tangye had supplied information from inside MIS to a GRU contact in London.

TATE. MI5 code name for Wulf Schmidt, alias Harry Williamson, a Dane who parachuted into Cambridgeshire in September 1939 and was arrested the same day. Initially he had resisted interrogation at Camp 020, but details of his mission had been betrayed already by SUMMER, and eventually TATE agreed to cooperate. Wireless contact with Hamburg was established at Camp 020 under the supervision of Russell Lee, and TATE became one of B1(a)’s most effective double agents, maintaining his radio link until the end of World War II and even being awarded an Iron Cross. TATE was allowed considerable liberty and lived with Colonel T. A. Robertson and his family in Radlett, Hertfordshire. He eventually found a job as a press photographer on a Watford newspaper, which he retained until his retirement. He married a local woman who knew nothing of his past, nor of his experiences before the war on a banana plantation in West Africa. Later they were divorced and TATE, who kept the name Williamson, became an international judge at canary breeding competitions.

TEAGUE, JOHN. Commissioned into the Warwickshire regiment in World War I, Colonel John Teague earned a Military Cross in France and in 1936 was posted to Palestine as an intelligence officer. In 1942 he was appointed defence security officer in Iraq and in 1945 succeeded Teddy Smith-Ross as director of the Inter-Services Liaison Department. In 1953 Teague was the Secret Intelligence Service’ s controller, Middle East, and in his retirement was director of passport control.

TEAGUE-JONES, REGINALD. In 1917 Captain Reginald Teague-Jones was transferred from the Indian Police to GHQ in Delhi to head a section of military intelligence monitoring developments in the Persian Gulf. Although only 28, he was exceptionally well qualified, having been brought up and educated in St. Petersburg. He spoke several languages fluently, including Russian, French, German, and Hindi, and his assignment to General Malleson’s forces in Trans-Cas-pia would have been uncontroversial except for one incident. After the fall of Baku in September 1918, a group of 26 important Bolshevik prisoners was executed by the victorious socialist revolutionaries, and when the news of their deaths reached Moscow there was considerable anger among the Communist leadership. A lawyer, Vadim Chaikin, was appointed to investigate the affair and one of those he interviewed, a participant in the affair, named Teague-Jones as having instigated the murders.

For his part Teague-Jones denied complicity in the deaths but confirmed, in a detailed report written in November 1922 for the Foreign Office, that he had been present for part of a meeting at which the fate of the prisoners had been debated by their captors. He had been asked to accept the prisoners and escort them to internment in India, but when the request had been relayed to Malleson, it had been declined with the ominous suggestion that “the Trans-Caspian authorities find some other way of disposing of them. ”

Teague-Jones’s supposed involvement in the executions soured Anglo-Russian relations for many years, and it was a topic that Stalin would never drop. The bodies of the 26 were exhumed from their common grave beside a railway line and moved to a huge memorial square in the center of Baku. The Soviets followed in 1922 with a demand for an international tribunal to prosecute Teague-Jones, which prompted the British government to issue a rebuttal to the charges laid by Chaikin. In the formal British statement, it was alleged that Malleson’s intentions had been misrepresented to Teague-Jones and that in fact the British had wanted to take the 26 into custody, the implication being that alive they had a value as hostages to be exchanged for British officers held by Moscow. Furthermore, in a private account of the affair written by Teague-Jones in the mid-1920s entitled Adventures with Turkmen, Tatars, and Bolsheviks, the author leaves the impression that not only had he played no part in the executions but he had not even been present at the controversial meeting where the socialist revolutionaries had discussed what to do with their troublesome prisoners whose continued presence in the town was likely to spark an uprising.

Soon after it was announced from Moscow in May 1922 by Leon Trotsky that Teague-Jones had been sentenced to death for his involvement in the crime, Teague-Jones simply vanished. His name disappeared from all further official British documents and lists, and nothing more was heard of him—until the death in November 1988 in Plymouth of a certain Reginald Sinclair, formerly of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), then in his 100th year. Further inquiries about Sinclair revealed him to be Reginald Teague-Jones who, for nearly 70 years, had lived under a false identity. Intriguingly, he left behind a journal that was published posthumously and appears to contradict some of his previous assertions regarding the 26 Bolshevik commissars.

Little is known of Sinclair’s work for SIS and MI5 before the war, apart from the itinerary of journeys described in a travelogue, Adventures in Persia, but in 1941 he was posted to British Security Coordination in New York under consular cover. He retired to Miami soon after the war with his second wife and later moved with her to Spain and eventually England. When she died, Sinclair was contacted by his first wife, Valya, whom he had met in Baku, and they remained close for their declining years. After his death his autobiography, The Spy Who Disappeared, was published.

TEMPLER BARRACKS. Located on the outskirts of Ashford in Kent, Templer Barracks was the headquarters of the Intelligence Corps until 1996, when the site was closed and the organization moved to the Defence Intelligence and Security Centre at Chicksands Priory.

TEMPLE, CAPTAIN. A report in 1909 by Captain Temple of the Royal Navy, submitted to the Committee of Imperial Defence, noted that, while the Admiralty was not organized to investigate cases of espionage, it nevertheless had investigated certain cases that uncovered a suspect mail-forwarding organization in Brussels. Throughout 1908, advertisements had been placed in the Daily Mail suggesting that retired officers, engineers, and clerks seeking to augment their income by contributing to the American Naval Review should apply to a post office box number in Brussels. A letter to that address produced an offer to pay £50 for a report on artillery matters which, according to recent newspaper reports, had been mislaid in Portsmouth. There was no obvious link between the box number and the German government, but contact had been established with it and the result had been a questionnaire well-informed on artillery topics and Admiralty reports. The same spymaster gave his supposed agent several cover addresses in Basel and Ostend. As a consequence of this case, the Special Intelligence Bureau—the precursor of MI5—came into operation.

TEMPLER, SIR GERALD. Director of military intelligence from 1946 to 1948, Gerald Templer had been educated at Wellington and Sandhurst and joined the Royal Irish Fusiliers in 1916. He was injured in Italy in 1944, in collision with a piano that fell off a military truck as his jeep attempted to overtake it, and during his recuperation he was appointed head of Special Operations Executive’s X Section before heading the military government of 21st Army Group. In 1952 Templer went to Malaya as high commissioner and director of operations, earning a reputation as “the tiger of Malaya.” Upon his return to London in 1954, he became chief of the Imperial General Staff, a post he held until his retirement with the rank of field marshal in 1958. The consummate British intelligence officer, Templer was widely admired as an exceptionally bright and thoughtful soldier, always popular with brother officers and subordinates.

TER BRAAK, JAN. The body of Jan Ter Braak was discovered in a public air-raid shelter in Cambridge in April 1941, apparently a suicide victim. An Abwehr spy aged about 27, Ter Braak carried a Dutch passport and forged identity papers containing data supplied by SNOW. An investigation conducted by MI5’s Herbert Hart traced his movements in the area after his arrival the previous November. A parachute found at Haversham in Buckinghamshire six months earlier was presumed to be his. Hart reported that Ter Braak, thought to be a Dutchman named Englebertus Fukken, had been denounced by his English landlady (although the complaint had not been pursued) and concluded that when Ter Braak had run out of funds and ration coupons for food, he had shot himself in desperation. Examination of his wireless transmitter, recovered from the left-luggage office at the railway station where it had been deposited the previous March, suggested that he had failed to establish contact with Germany. A report on the apparent suicide was circulated to Special Operations Executive, which used it to teach agents how to avoid finding themselves in the same desperate circumstances.

TEUFELSBERG. Located in the British sector of West Berlin, on what had been the Third Reich’s military academy, the hill known as Teufelsberg was created from the rubble of 800,000 bombed buildings cleared from the city’s center in 1946. British and American signals intelligence organizations established an intercept facility on the summit, and during the Cold War it was manned by 13 Signal Regiment and the Royal Air Force’s 26 Signal Unit. The height of the antenna arrays allowed the operators to monitor Soviet radio traffic in East Germany and Warsaw Pact communications in Poland and Czechoslovakia throughout the Cold War. The station was closed down in 1998 and has been transformed into a museum.

THIRTY-ONE COMMITTEE. The coordinating interagency group that supervised double agent operations in the Middle East during World War II.

THOMPSON, SIR ROBERT. Educated at Marlborough and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, Robert Thompson joined the Malayan civil service in 1938 at age 22 and then joined the Royal Air Force in 1941. At the end of the war, Thompson returned to Perak in Malaya and was appointed civil assistant to the director of operations in 1950 and coordinating officer for security in 1955. When Malaya became independent in 1957, Thompson was deputy secretary for defense and in 1961, having been permanent secretary for defense for two years, headed the British Advisory Mission to Vietnam. His book, Defeating Communist Insurgency, based on his acknowledged experience during the Malaya Emergency, became the standard textbook on the subject, but his recommended strategy was not adopted in Vietnam.

THOMSON, SIR BASIL. Educated at Eton and New College, Oxford, Basil Thomson was called to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1890 and later served as prime minister of Tonga and the governor of Dartmoor Prison and Wormwood Scrubs. In 1913 he was appointed assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and in 1919 he styled himself director of intelligence. He was forced to resign in 1921 by the commissioner, General Sir William Horwood, when, in an egregious breach of security that had enraged the prime minister, the prime minister’s country home Chequers had been daubed with Irish republican graffiti. Thomson’s flamboyant career came to an end in December 1925 when he was arrested with a prostitute in Hyde Park and was convicted of gross indecency, despite character references from Admiral Reginald Hall and Reginald McKenna, the former home secretary who had appointed him in 1913.

Thomson’s colorful professional life came to a premature conclusion without him realizing his ambition of combining the Security Service with his organization, but he did have the opportunity to meet and interview Mata Hari. He became a successful author with The Secret Service in Greece and Queer People. Later he was to be a friend of Maundy Gregory and to contribute to his Whitehall Gazette. Thomson died in 1939.

THURLOE, JOHN. In December 1652 Oliver Cromwell appointed a 36-year-old lawyer, John Thurloe, as his secretary of state and granted him a budget of £70,000. Thurloe intercepted the mail of known royalists and placed a conspirator, John Hewitt, under surveillance in Paris and arranged for his arrest. The dispatch of an agent in Jamaica, reporting the departure of the Spanish fleet, also led to its destruction by the Royal Navy at Tenerife, and Thurloe was credited with saving Cromwell’s life by preventing him from opening a letter mailed from France containing poison. Thurloe retired soon after the accession of Charles II to the throne in 1660.

TISDALL, SARAH. A junior civil servant in the Foreign Office, Sarah Tisdall in October 1983 leaked to the Guardian two copies of highly classified documents concerning the security arrangements for the imminent deployment of cruise missiles to RAF Greenham Common. The newspaper published several stories based on the leak, and in March 1984 she pleaded guilty to offenses under the Official Secrets Act and was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment.

TOKAEV, GRIGORI. In 1947 the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) acquired its first postwar Soviet defector, Colonel Grigori Tokaev, a top aeronautical engineer, a graduate of the prestigious Zhukovsky Institute, and Moscow’s leading expert on jet propulsion and rockets. Tokaev had been co-opted by the GRU to supervise the abduction of key German scientists who could assist Soviet reconstruction and provide valuable technical information, but when he learned that Dr. Kurt Tank, the Focke-Wolf chief designer, had been selected as a target, he opted to escape to the West. He was welcomed by SIS, which exploited his propaganda value by arranging for the Information Research Department to publicize his book, Notes on Communism-Bolshevism. However, Tokaev leaked details of his book before the newspaper serialization could be published. He went on to write Betrayal of an Ideal, Comrade X, and Stalin Means War. He adopted the name Gregory Tokaty and continues to lecture at London University.

TOMLINSON, RICHARD. Born in New Zealand to English emigrant parents, Richard Tomlinson joined the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in September 1991 after graduating from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, with a first-class engineering degree and serving with the territorial 21st Special Air Service regiment. He spoke fluent Spanish and Russian and performed well in the required intelligence officer new entry course (IONEC), which lasts for six months, during which candidates are trained at Fort Monckton and assessed for their skills. Tomlinson rated highly in the 89th IONEC and was posted to Soviet operations at the Eastern Europe controllerate at Century House.

In June 1993 Tomlinson was sent to Belgrade under journalistic cover as a targets officer to recruit a source, followed by another similar assignment to Skopje, Yugoslavia. Then in September 1993 he was posted to a new station recently opened in Sarajevo. Tomlinson stayed in Bosnia under UN Protection Force cover until June 1994, when a station was established at the new British embassy. He then returned to London for a stint in the counterproliferation section, where he participated in a couple of operations, and in April 1995 flew to Rio de Janeiro to meet a source from Buenos Aires who had been reporting on the Argentine civil nuclear program.

Upon his return, Tomlinson was told by the director of personnel, Richard Dearlove, that as a probationer his staff performance assessments had been substandard, and there was no future for him in SIS. He was escorted out of the building and given three months’ pay and the promise of help to find a new job in the City. This news, coming soon after the death from cancer of his girlfriend, devastated Tomlinson, who protested that he had received nothing but praise from his line managers. However, his appeal direct to the Chief, Sir David Spedding, as was his right, was rejected. Frustrated, and constantly obstructed by John Scarlett, Tomlinson tried to bring an action for wrongful dismissal before an Employment Tribunal, but it was blocked by a Public Interest Immunity Certificate. Instead Tomlinson applied for a review of his case by the Intelligence Services Tribunal, an independent body chaired by Lord Justice Brown created by the new Intelligence Services Act in 1992, but the finding in March 1996 went against him. An approach to his MP, Kate Hoey, also failed, after she was invited to lunch with the Chief at Vauxhall Cross to discuss Tomlinson’s case and given Spedding’s assurance that he had been treated fairly.

Running low on funds and convinced he had been badly treated by SIS, Tomlinson left the country, using the alias passport he had been issued to travel to Brazil. He drove a motorcycle down to the south of Spain to write a book based on his experiences. This was a breach of the Official Secrets Act, as were his calls to the Sunday Times, which started publishing a series of stories about recent SIS operations intended to embarrass his former employers. The first, in May 1996, revealed that SIS had recruited a spy inside the French naval base at Brest, and a second disclosed the identity of a Conservative MP who had been run as a source on the activities of well-placed Bosnian Serb émigrés in London. These articles, including one suggesting SIS had run a source inside the German Bundesbank, prompted SIS’s personnel department to contact Tomlinson, who agreed to a meeting in Madrid in November. Over the next four months, three further meetings were held, resulting in an agreement signed in the British embassy in February 1997. In return for a guarantee that he would not be prosecuted for speaking to the Sunday Times, a loan of £60,000, and help in finding a job, Tomlinson agreed to surrender the hard drive of his laptop computer, erase his manuscript, and assign the publication rights for it to the Crown. Reluctantly accepting these terms, which included his future silence, Tomlinson returned to England but was disappointed by the offer of a job with the Jackie Stewart Grand Prix racing team that had been arranged by SIS. Instead he flew to Australia, determined to find work on the strength of his New Zealand dual nationality.

However, in May 1997 Tomlinson offered Transworld Publishers in Sydney a seven-page synopsis of his autobiography and returned to England, having decided to accept the job with the racing team. He also wrote to SIS seeking advice on how to apply for permission to write a book, an event that set off alarm bells at Vauxhall Cross. The SpyCatcher affair had demonstrated the problem of foreign publication, as SIS had learned from Leslie Nicholson, and SIS’s director of security, John Gerson, understood the implications of further leaks from Tomlinson, especially with the opportunity for instant, international dissemination offered by the Internet. A balance had to be struck between maintaining staff morale and discipline by cracking down hard on a breach of security, and undermining the authority and status of the service by opting for a full-scale public humiliation. What was probably not fully appreciated was the consequence of invoking criminal sanctions.

Tomlinson was arrested by Special Branch detectives at his parents’ home in Cumbria and charged with offenses under the Official Secrets Act, but SIS was virtually powerless to intervene to prevent a prosecution, short of persuading the attorney-general that such an action would not be in the public interest. Tomlinson in December 1997 pleaded guilty to breaches of the Official Secrets Act. He was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and served six months at Belmarsh top security prison before he was released on parole in April 1998, but broke the terms of his parole by driving to Paris shortly before the end of his sentence, which amounted to a further criminal offense.

While in Paris Tomlinson met up with another intelligence officer who was beginning to gain some notoriety, David Shayler, who had left MI5 in early 1997 after five years in the service. SIS’s interest in Shayler rested on his experiences while serving as a desk officer for Libya in G Branch, MI5’s counterterrorism division, which liaised closely with its SIS counterpart in the Global Issues Controllerate. According to Shayler, SIS had failed to recruit Khalifa Baazelya, the Libyan external intelligence service rezident in London, but had succeeded in pitching a source codenamed TUNWORTH who had been plotting to replace Colonel Moammar Gadhafi. He also claimed that one of his SIS contacts, David Wilson, designated PT16B, had told him that SIS had paid TUNWORTH more than £100,000 for information and that he had acted as an intermediary with the Islamic group that had tried to kill Gadhafi in Tripoli in February 1996. The substance of Shayler’s allegation was that this assassination attempt had been sanctioned within SIS but had never been approved by the foreign secretary.

Tomlinson exacerbated the situation by claiming that he had been consulted on a scheme to blow up Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in a Swiss road tunnel, a plot that he linked to the death of Princess Diana in a Paris underpass. The revelations were intended to create a political controversy, and they certainly succeeded in that objective. SIS’s public affairs director, Ian Mathewson, issued a public denial of any SIS assassination plot on behalf of the Foreign Office.

Tomlinson’s capacity for mischief-making was considerable, as demonstrated by his assertion that Princess Diana’s driver on the night she died, Henri Paul, had been a long-term SIS asset as well as director of the Ritz Hotel’s security. Tomlinson, testifying to the investigating judge in Paris, Hervé Stephan, claimed to have heard at Vauxhall Cross in 1992 from his immediate superior, Nick Fishwick, that Paul had been on SIS’s payroll. Furthermore, he claimed that Dearlove had been in Paris two weeks before the fatal accident and had held meetings there with the two senior officers based at the Paris station, Richard Spearman, formerly Spedding’s chief of staff, and Nicholas Langman. The proposition that SIS had conspired to assassinate the Princess of Wales was quite ludicrous, but it was taken sufficiently seriously to be retailed across the globe, to the point that MI5’s director-general, Stella Rimington, felt an obligation to make an unprecedented public denial and even include a formal statement rejecting the allegation in the official Security Service handbook produced by the Cabinet Office.

Tomlinson was obliged to keep on the move, flying between New Zealand, where he was served with an injunction, and Switzerland, which expelled him in May 1999 following the publication on the internet of a list of 115 serving or recently retired SIS officers. Although Tomlinson denied being the source of the information, claiming that all the names had been made public before or were retirees, the foreign secretary denounced him in the strongest terms. Now Tomlinson had nothing to lose and, after a spell in Rimini working in a bar, he settled in Cannes, where he completed his book, The Big Breach. The book was published in the English language in Moscow with an advance of £28,000 and gave a detailed account of his training and his assignments. Although Tomlinson altered the true names of several of his former colleagues, giving them semitransparent cover names, further material surfaced on the Internet, revealing their authentic identities. The Court of Appeal ruled that the book could be serialized in the Sunday Times. According to SIS, Tomlinson’s Russian publisher, Sergei Korovin, had no known previous experience in publishing, but had traveled to Switzerland and the United States using the alias Kirill V. Chashchin and was sponsored by Russian intelligence, the SVR, which was still smarting after the embarrassment of Vasili Mitrokhin’s disclosures.

SIS thought they detected the SVR’s distinctive handiwork in the published version of The Big Breach in its treatment of Platon Obukov, a junior Russian Foreign Ministry official who was arrested in April 1996 while meeting his SIS contact, Norman McSween, in Moscow. The son of a senior Russian diplomat, Obukov had been recruited while working as a consul in Sweden, and in his defense claimed that he had been collecting material for one of his spy novels. He was convicted of espionage, sentenced to 11 years’ imprisonment, and transferred to a psychiatric hospital, and McSween was expelled. However, Tomlinson had known nothing about Obukov, who was recruited after Tomlinson’s dismissal, and the author’s original draft had not mentioned the case at all. The insertion of the damaging passages about Obukov suggested either that Tomlinson had lost control over his manuscript, and the SVR had taken the opportunity to insert the additional material, or that he had actually switched sides and had to be regarded as an SVR adherent.

The Big Breach was reprinted in Scotland by Mainstream, giving wider circulation to the most comprehensive insider’s view of the modern SIS ever produced. As well as covering much of the ground published two years earlier by the Sunday Times, the book referred to numerous other operations and individuals, leaving the author vulnerable to arrest if he ever ventured back into British jurisdiction.

TOPOGRAPHICAL AND STATISTICAL DEPARTMENT (TSD). In 1855, following an acknowledgment that Lord Raglan’s troops had been deployed to the Crimea completely unprepared for what to expect, the War Office appointed Major Thomas Jervis to establish an intelligence branch as the Topographical and Statistical Department. In 1870 Captain Charles Wilson of the Royal Engineers was appointed the TSD’s executive officer. He was assigned a staff of three to conduct an ordnance survey of the strength, organization, and equipment of foreign armies. In 1873, following the Franco-Prussian War, the TSD became a proper intelligence department, headed by the first director of military intelligence, General Henry Brackenbury.

TRAFFIC ANALYSIS. One of the essential disciplines of signals intelligence, traffic analysis can extract useful information from an intercepted transmission even if the text itself resists cryptographic attack. The fact that a message of a certain length was broadcast from a particular station, at a specific time, and was acknowledged by a known callsign may have an intelligence value.

TREASURE. See LILY SERGUEIEV.

TREATY OF WESTMINSTER. A conference was held in London in 1931 to deliberate on the security of the empire. It was attended by 250 provincial chief constables, Sir Horace Williamson (of the Indian Political Intelligence Bureau), Sir Vernon Kell, Sir Eric Holt-Wilson (representing MI5), Scotland Yard’s assistant commissioner (crime), Norman Kendal, and the head of the Special Branch, Edward Parker. As a result of their deliberations, it was agreed that Special Branch would take sole responsibility for countering Irish republican terrorism, and that Scotland Yard’s civilian intelligence staff, among them Captain Guy Liddell, Millicent Bagot, Bunty Saunders, and Hugh Miller, would join MI5.

TRENCH, BERNARD. In May 1910 Major Bernard Trench of the Royal Marines, attached to the Naval Intelligence Division, was arrested on the German island of Borkum while studying the coastal defenses. He was sentenced to four years’ “fortress detention,” which he served at Glatz in Silesia with his companion, Captain Vivian Brandon. There they were joined by a French intelligence officer, Captain Luz, who had been caught spying on the Zeppelin airship works at Friedrichshafen. The two Britons remained in custody for 22 months before they were released in an amnesty, allowing Trench to acquire a fluency in German, which he used with skill against German PoWs held at Donnington Hall during World War I. Trench retained an interest in airships and in September 1916 recovered an important enemy codebook from the wreckage of the L-32 in Essex. He was also responsible for establishing a submarine plotting room for the Western Approaches at Queenstown (now Cobh), Ireland.

TREVOR ROPER, HUGH. Hugh Trevor Roper, Lord Dacre, is one of those rare individuals who has served in both MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). His initiation into the secret world took place when, at the beginning of World War II, he left Oxford and joined the Radio Security Service (RSS), a little known but vital offshoot of the Security Service. As well as monitoring the airwaves for illicit wireless transmissions, the RSS also fulfilled a vital cryptographic role, intercepting enemy radio signals and decoding messages exchanged between German agents and their controllers. Following the RSS’s success in decrypting enemy signals, Trevor Roper’s section was transferred in 1941 from RSS to SIS’s Section V, but its task remained the same, the study of the German intelligence service, the Abwehr, from a distance using intercepts.

At the end of hostilities Trevor Roper traveled to Berlin to report on Hitler’s fate, and his report formed the basis of his subsequent best-seller, The Last Days of Hitler. He also had hoped to publish a biography of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the Abwehr’s chief, but he was inhibited from doing so because his “knowledge came from unavowable experience.” However, he did contribute an article about Canaris to the Cornhill Magazine, which was published in 1950. Trevor Roper remained discreet on the subject of his wartime service until April 1968 when he wrote “The Philby Affair” for Encounter, and this led to the release of two monographs, on Kim Philby and Canaris, respectively. The publication of The Philby Affair was a milestone, not least because of the author’s candor about his own work for SIS, but also for his indiscreet reference to “the breaking of the ‘Enigma’ machine.” Although there had been an oblique comment in another book about Philby to GCHQ’s success at reading the German Kriegsmarine’s wireless signals, this was the first authoritative admission of SIS’s “accidental property in ‘Most Secret Sources.’” In his book Trevor Roper denounced Graham Greene for being Philby’s apologist, attacked John le Carré for his distorted view of SIS, and reminded Malcolm Muggeridge that “no man was a more zealous and persistent defender of Philby against the “Mc-Carthyite” suspicions of his critics. “Whether the British Secret Service was incompetent in wartime is a question, as Sir Thomas Browne would say, too sad to insist upon,” asserted Trevor Roper, taking to the role of SIS’s defender. His remarks, however, were not appreciated universally.

TRICYCL. See POPOV, DUSKO.

TRIPLE AGENT. Agents who are dispatched on a mission with the objective of having them be recruited by an adversary and played back by them as a double agent is a strategy known as a triple agent, a rare phenomenon. During World War II, British Intelligence enjoyed the advantage of the signals intelligence sources ISK and ISOS to check on the bona fides of their agents, and just such a review of TEAPOT’s traffic revealed him to be working under the enemy’s control.

TRIPLEX. The source codenamed TRIPLEX or XXX was intelligence derived from the interception and opening of diplomatic bags so the contents could be copied and distributed to MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). The unit responsible for undertaking this work was headed by David Boyle of SIS, but Anthony Blunt conducted a review of its activities in 1941.

TUBE ALLOYS. The Directorate of Tube Alloys was the innocuous cover name adopted by the Ministry of Supply for the British atomic weapon development project in 1941, following the War Cabinet’s decision to commission Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) to pursue nuclear fission and build a bomb. The Secret Intelligence Service assigned Commander Eric Welsh to liaise with Tube Alloys. His section, accommodated at 16 Queen Anne’s Gate, was designated “TAL.” Although the entire undertaking was surrounded with great secrecy, it was penetrated by several Soviet spies, among them Allan Nunn May, Klaus Fuchs, Melita Norwood, and several others as yet unidentified.

TUDOR HART, EDITH. An active member of the banned Austrian Communist party, Edith Tudor Hart was also a Soviet illegal who completed two undercover missions, to Paris and London, in 1929. As a talent-spotter in June 1934, she cultivated Kim Philby and introduced him to Arnold Deutsch for recruitment. The KGB archives contain a letter dated October 1936 from the London illegal rezidentura to Moscow Center noting:

Through EDITH we obtained SONNY [Philby]. In the attached report you will find details of a second SONNY who, in all probability, offers even greater possibilities than the first. Edith is of the opinion that [he] is more promising than SONNY. From the report you will see that he has very definite possibilities. We must make haste with these people before they start being active in university life.

Born in Vienna in 1908 to William Suschitsky, a radical socialist who advocated birth control and sex education and owned a bookshop in the working-class district of Petzvalgasse, Edith Suschitsky trained as a Montessori kindergarten teacher and in 1925 traveled to England to work as a teacher. Two years later she was back in Vienna, studying photography under Walter Peterhans at the Bauhaus in Dessau.

In 1933 Edith Suschitsky married Dr. Alex Tudor Hart, a left-wing medical practitioner, at the British consulate, and the couple moved to Brixton in South London and then to the Rhondda Valley in Wales. Upon their return from South Wales, her husband joined the republican forces in Spain as a surgeon, while Edith Tudor Hart opened a studio in Acre Lane in South London and began to specialize, after the birth of her son in 1936, in child portraits. During this period, she was active in the Workers Camera Club, contributed to Picture Post, and organized the Artists against Fascism and War exhibition. She also maintained contact with her friend from Vienna, Litzi Friedman, who was by then separated from Philby, and liaised closely with Bob Stewart of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The Tudor Harts divorced after his return from Spain.

In March 1938, a Leica camera originally purchased by Edith Tudor Hart was discovered in a police raid on the home of Percy Glading, who was subsequently convicted of organizing the Woolwich Arsenal spy ring, but when questioned by Special Branch detectives she simply denied any involvement. At that moment MI5 had no reason to be suspicious of her, nor any reason to suspect her role in the cultivation of Philby.

After the war Tudor Hart worked as a commercial photographer and briefly for the Ministry of Education, but her mental condition deteriorated and she suffered a breakdown, her son already having been institutionalized. She later opened a small antiques shop in Brighton and died of liver cancer in 1973.

Tudor Hart, who was directly responsible for the recruitment of both Philby and the mysterious SCOTT—who is believed by the KGB to have been alive as recently as 1995—was never interviewed by MI5. The only link established between Philby and Tudor Hart, apart from her former husband Alex having been his contemporary at Cambridge, was a telephone call to her home, intercepted in 1951, in which an unidentified caller advised her to destroy the negative of his picture that she had taken in Vienna in 1933. One of Philby’s favorites photographs, showing him posed pensively smoking a pipe, had been taken by Tudor Hart in Vienna and amounted to clear evidence of a connection between the Secret Intelligence Service officer, then under detailed investigation, and a Soviet spy suspect. In 1951 this would have been almost enough to seal Philby’s fate, but when asked, he denied ever having known Tudor Hart, and MI5 never traced her photograph.

TURING, ALAN. A mathematical genius, Alan Turing graduated from King’s College, Cambridge, in 1936 and two years later published a monograph, On Computable Numbers, foreseeing the possibility of developing a thinking machine that could be programmed to undertake repetitive tasks at high speed. Recruited to Bletchley Park in 1939, he played a leading role in the team of academics that drew the blueprints for COLOSSUS, the world’s first programmable analog computer. Turing remained in GCHQ after the war and worked at the research laboratory at Hanslope Park but took his own life in 1954, aged 42, when he was arrested in Manchester for soliciting a homosexual act in a public lavatory. His method of suicide, eating an apple laced with cyanide, is rumored to be reflected in the logo adopted by Apple Computers.

TWENTY COMMITTEE. The World War II coordinating group chaired by John Masterman created in January 1941 to supervise the activities of the double agents run by MI5’s B1(a) section. A direct successor to the Wireless Board, the Double Cross Committee was usually known by insiders by the roman numerals XX, thus “Twenty Committee.” It consisted of representatives from the director of military intelligence, the director of naval intelligence, the Security Executive, and the Secret Intelligence Service. The committee met weekly until the end of hostilities, with either John Marriott or Bill Luke acting as its secretary. After the war Masterman was invited by the director-general, Sir David Petrie, to write an account of its work, and he negotiated permission to publish this in 1972. The success of the Twenty Committee resulted in the creation of a similar group in the Middle East, and one for the 21st Army Group in Europe, designated the “212 Committee.”

–U–

U-2. The American aerial reconnaissance of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe using U-2 spy aircraft was initially dependent upon operations conducted from Lakenheath and Upper Heyford in England and at Episkopi and Akrotiri in Cyprus. The first U-2 deployment by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detachment A took place in April 1956 with the consent of the prime minister, Anthony Eden, under the cover of a U.S. Air force unit, the Weather Reconnaissance Squadron (Provisional). Soon afterward, Eden withdrew his permission and the aircraft were transferred to Giebelstadt in West Germany, with overflights of East Germany commencing in June 1956.

ULJANOV, VLADIMIR. In 1905 Detective Constable Herbert Fitch of Special Branch, who spoke German, Russian, and French, was assigned the task of monitoring a group of revolutionary exiles who booked rooms as the “Foreign Barbers of London.” Fitch hid in a cupboard in a pub in Islington to listen to the speeches and noted contributions from Vladimir Uljanov and Leib Bronstein who addressed an audience of about 20. Fitch later heard both men call for a general strike in Russia while speaking to another gathering in Great Portland Street, and he received a promotion to the rank of detective sergeant. Uljanov and Bronstein later adopted the noms de guerre “Lenin” and “Trotsky.”

ULTRA. See BONIFACE.

UNITED STATES. MI5 cooperation with the American authorities originated with the case of Gunther Rumrich, a spy caught as a result of Colonel Edward Hinchley-Cooke’s interception of mail sent to an address in Hamburg known to have been used by the local Abwehrstelle. That operation identified Mrs. Jessie Jordan’s mail drop in Scotland, and one of the letters described a plot to attack an American army officer to steal important documents in his possession. MI5 reported this to Colonel Lee, the U.S. military attaché in London, and as a consequence several Abwehr officers in Germany were indicted and others were convicted in the United States.

In March 1938 Captain Guy Liddell visited Washington, D.C., and met officials in the War Department and the State Department’s Political Relations Section and the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), J. Edgar Hoover, and an exchange of information on German and Italian (Nazi and Fascist) parties overseas was agreed. On his return to London in April 1938, Liddell established close links with Colonel Lee and Herschel Johnson, the U.S. charge d’affaires, and was asked for a general outline of what a new U.S. counterintelligence organization might look like. MI5 supplied a broad description of its own structure and stressed the importance of good relations with the armed forces and with industry to safeguard blueprints of new inventions and of equipment being manufactured in government and private munitions plants, which should be the subject of regular visits and inspections. Lee studied the whole question thoroughly and sent papers to the War Department, but no action was taken. He had emphasized the need for a counterintelligence service to be free of any political bias and criticized the FBI’s tendency to court favorable publicity.

During World War II, collaboration between the Office of Strategic Services and its British counterparts, the Secret Intelligence Service and Special Operations Executive, reached integration to the point where the organizations ran joint operations and manned war rooms in headquarters to supervise their personnel deployed overseas. In the field of signals intelligence, American cryptographers were posted to Bletchley Park, and this manifestation of mutual trust resulted in numerous interagency projects, including work on the VENONA traffic, which was conducted simultaneously by GCHQ and the U.S. National Security Agency. Postwar, this dual approach culminated in the UKUSA and BRUSA treaties, which formalized the exchange of highly classified cryptanalytical information.

UREN, ORMOND. A member of the Hungarian Section of Special Operations Executive (SOE), Captain Ormond Uren was convicted in June 1943 of passing classified documents to Douglas Springhall, formerly the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB)’s national organizer. Uren had joined SOE from his regiment, the Highland Light Infantry, in May 1942 and was selected for a drop into Hungary by the section’s head, Harold Perkins. The investigation into Uren by MI5’s F2(a) section was prompted by the discovery in Springhall’s notebook of the name of an Edinburgh Communist, Helen Grierson, apparently through whom he had met an important source. David Clark, MI5’s Russian counterespionage expert, traveled up to Scotland, befriended Grierson, and pretended to know Springhall’s contact. Impressed by Clark’s impressive knowledge of CPGB personalities, Grierson had let slip Uren’s name.

According to his confession, Uren had been introduced to Springhall in April 1943, and he had a further five meetings with him and was intending to see him at a further rendezvous. He was cashiered at a court-martial and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. Nobody at the embassy was implicated, although as Clark noted at the time, it was probably not a coincidence that a member of the Soviet military attaché’s staff, André Graur, who previously had been implicated in an espionage case in Sweden, left the country four days after Springhall’s arrest.

USTINOV, IONA VON. Known as “Klop,” Iona von Ustinov was a former press attaché at the German embassy in London before World War II. He was an important MI5 source, and when he resigned, he recruited a replacement, Wolfgang zu Putlitz, who copied documents he removed from Ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop’s office and supplied them to Dick White, who relayed them to Sir Robert Vansittart, the prime minister’s foreign policy adviser.

Klop was married to the artist Nadia Benoist, and his son Peter Ustinov became an actor. During World War II he was sent to Lisbon to cultivate anti-Nazis, and in 1946 participated in an MI5 operation to entrap the atom spy Dr. Allan Nunn May by masquerading as his Soviet contact. When Peter Wright met Klop at the end of his clandestine career, he was dismayed to find him abandoned by the Security Service and very short of money.

–V–

VANSITTART, SIR ROBERT. The chief diplomatic adviser to the foreign secretary between 1938 and 1941, Sir Robert Vansittart was educated at Eton and had been the permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office from 1930 to 1938. Known as “Van,” he was an enthusiastic consumer of intelligence and undertook a personal mission in his Bentley for Neville Chamberlain to the Sudetenland to assess Czech defenses in 1938. His inspection mistook the lax Czech frontier guards for regular troops and resulted in an adverse report to the prime minister, who was left with the false impression that the Czechs would be no match for the Nazi armored divisions he had seen.

Vansittart also encouraged Wolfgang zu Putlitz in his belief that he was directly influencing British foreign policy to take a hard line against the Nazis. He was a committed opponent of appeasement and regularly briefed Winston Churchill on German rearmament. His two stepsons, Cecil and Colville Barclay, joined the Secret Intelligence Service during World War II. Vansittart died in 1957.

VASSALL, JOHN. The son of a Church of England clergyman, John Vassall served in the Royal Air Force during the latter part of World War II and trained as a photographer. In 1954 he applied for a clerk’s post in the Admiralty and was sent to the British embassy in Moscow as secretary to the naval attaché. In Moscow he was befriended by a Pole named Mikhailski, who worked at the embassy as an interpreter. Mikhailski drew the hapless Vassall into a homosexual honeytrap, where he was photographed in bed with a young man. Hopelessly compromised, Vassall succumbed to the KGB’s blackmail and, in an attempt to prevent circulation of pictures of his indiscretion, started supplying classified material to his Russian contact.

In June 1956 Vassall’s tour of duty ended and he was posted back to the Admiralty, where he worked in the secretariat to the Naval Staff. His rendezvous with his KGB handlers continued until the arrest of Harry Houghton in January 1961, when he was told to temporarily discontinue his meetings. Despite being the victim of coercion, Vassall had developed a reliance and even friendship with his Soviet contacts, both of whom were later identified as skilled professionals masquerading as diplomats. Once the public furor about the Portland spy ring subsided, Vassall was activated again, and he held regular meetings with his KGB case officer until his arrest in September 1962.

After a lengthy MI5 investigation, initiated the previous April after the Central Intelligence Agency passed on information from a defector, Vassall was charged with offenses under the Official Secrets Act and sentenced to 18 years’ imprisonment. In October 1972, he was released from Maidstone Prison, which had also accommodated Houghton. After staying in a Catholic monastery, he wrote his autobiography, Vassall: The Autobiography of a Spy.

VAUXHALL CROSS. Sir David Spedding was the Secret Intelligence Service’s chief in 1994 when the headquarters moved from Century House to its flashy new headquarters at 85 Albert Embankment, Vauxhall Cross—known to those who work there as “Legoland” —designed by the avant-garde architect Terry Farrell and built at a cost of £230 million. The transfer was required because of the discovery of concrete cancer in the grim old building, which anyway was due for major renovation and was thought to be affecting the health of some staff. The new site proved a considerable embarrassment, however, because of the huge cost overruns incurred while converting the palatial structure into one suitable for the service’s 1,500 headquarters staff and its ostentatious design with terraces, marble-lined atriums, open-plan offices, and a even a gym and sports hall on the ground floor. The move attracted so much adverse publicity that, almost inevitably, one evening on 21 September 2000 it became the target of a terrorist attack. The Real Irish Republican Army launched a rocket-propelled grenade from a small park in Spring Gardens, a hundred yards away, into the screen protecting the eighth-floor personnel department. The Russian-made RPG-7 had been fired by a motorcycle pillion passenger, who was driven away from the scene at speed, abandoning the weapon. The building suffered minimal damage and there were no injuries among the hundred or so staff still at work.

VEMORK. Before and during World War II, the Norwegian hydroelectric plant at Vemork, some 75 miles west of Oslo, was a significant source of deuterium oxide, known as “heavy water,” which was believed by German scientists to be a useful moderator when attempting to create a nuclear chain reaction. Early in 1942 the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) station in Stockholm recruited a scientist at the university there to report on news seeping out of Germany, and that June a Professor Waller wrote from Sweden to a friend in London reporting that the leading German physicist, Professor Werner Heisenberg, was supervising experiments into atomic fission. A month later, Nobel laureate Leo Szilard, who was then working in the United States, heard from a friend in Switzerland that the Germans were building “a power machine” and might use the radioactive fission product as a weapon. This was confirmed in August by a German professor in Norway, who claimed that Heisenberg was engaged on developing a U-235 bomb and “a power machine.”

The focus of the British attention always centered on the Vemork plant, where SIS had acquired some very detailed information about the world’s principal source of heavy water. Initially SIS’s information about the performance of the Norsk Hydro under German occupation came from Professor Leif Tronstad, who had arrived in Britain in the autumn of 1941, but by March the following year SIS established contact, through Tronstad, with his friend Dr. Jomar Brun, the plant’s chief engineer, who was in charge of production and was willing to communicate with London via letters hidden in toothpaste tubes and smuggled into Sweden. In April 1942 the Directorate of Tube Alloys, based on Brun’s messages, reported that the Germans had doubled the number of electrolysis cells to 18 and recommended that the production of heavy water should be terminated, and by May Special Operations Executive (SOE) was examining the problem.

However, it was not until October 1942 that a small four-man SOE mission, codenamed SWALLOW and led by Jens Poulsson, parachuted into the area to guide in a larger force of commandos. This attempt ended in disaster in November when the two gliders carrying the raiders plunged into a mountain. One of the Halifax tow-aircraft was also lost, and the few survivors of the crash were murdered by the Nazi occupation troops. A further, less ambitious operation, GUNNERSIDE, landed safely in February 1943 to link up with the SWALLOW team, and together they launched a successful raid on Vemork 10 days later. After the successful destruction of the electrolysis cells, the entire party skied across Norway in an epic journey to safety in Sweden.

VENONA. The generic code name given in the 1960s to the signals intelligence source originally known as BRIDE. Based on pages of one-time pads (OTP) that inexplicably had been reprinted by the Soviets and reused, GCHQ participated in an Anglo-American project, lasting from 1944 to 1979, to trace Soviet cable traffic exchanged with Moscow during World War II. Where British and American cryptanalysts could find a transmission of innocuous lend-lease cargo lists—which were recorded elsewhere in plain text—that had been encrypted using a duplicated OTP page, they were able to read some of the other material. Altogether 2,900 messages were decrypted, some of which proved to be NKVD, GRU, and Naval GRU traffic that was of immense interest and value to MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service. Information gleaned from the often fragmentary decrypts incriminated Klaus Fuchs, Donald Maclean, Ivor Montagu, J. B. S. Haldane, Cedric Belfrage, and Ian Milner, among many others. References were later found to Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby, but too late for the information to be used against them. The only texts solved almost contemporaneously were intercepted in 1948 to and from the Canberra rezidentura. The VENONA texts were declassified in July 1996 by the U.S. National Security Agency over the opposition of GCHQ.

VERNON, WILFRED. A Soviet spy convicted of unauthorized possession of classified information in October 1937, Major Wilfred Vernon had been an official in the Air Ministry, and in 1945 was elected the Labour MP for Dulwich. Vernon had commanded a Royal Naval Air Service Squadron during World War I and in 1923 was appointed chief draftsman of the Bristol Aeroplane Company. At the time of his arrest, MI5 did not realize he had been an active GRU agent for years and accepted his assertion that he had overlooked the documents he had brought home from the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, where he had worked since 1925. Vernon was found to have accumulated a quantity of classified documents, and this led to his prosecution and dismissal in October on a charge of unauthorized possession of government papers. At his trial, Vernon’s counsel was another GRU agent, Denis Pritt.

VERSCHOYLE, DEREK. Born in County Sligo and educated at Malvern and Trinity College, Dublin, Derek Verschoyle was for eight years before the war the literary editor of the Spectator. He was close to Archie Lyall, Goronwy Rees, and Graham Greene, all of whom contributed to the magazine and later gravitated toward the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). In 1939 Verschoyle joined the Royal Air Force and spent much of the war in Bomber Command. Later he flew in the Mediterranean theater, and this brought him into contact with SIS.

In 1946 Verschoyle was appointed to the SIS station in Rome under diplomatic cover, with the status of first secretary, but his principal task was to help a team led by Harold Perkins, which included David Smiley, prevent Jewish illegal immigrants from traveling to Palestine. The mandate authorities had placed strict limits on the number of refugees allowed to settle in the territory and, in desperation, the British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, had authorized a ruthless and highly secret scheme to prevent the illicit movement of immigrants. Part of the operation was a clandestine reconnaissance of the route prepared by the Haganah to move thousands of Holocaust survivors through Austria and Italy to ships in Yugoslav ports, but the more controversial aspect was the attachment of limpet mines onto the hulls of the freighters. One of those disabled after explosives ripped through its empty hold was the Pan Crescent, which had been chartered in Greece and was awaiting a cargo of refugees. Posing as cigarette smugglers ferrying contraband across the Adriatic, Verschoyle and Smiley were never detected.

During this period of intense activity, Verschoyle found time to write a novel, The Balcony, which was released in 1949. He had already written a volume of poetry in 1931 and edited The English Novelists (1936). After his retirement from SIS, Verschoyle edited the Grower and ran a bookshop in Ipswich. He died in December 1973.

VIVIAN, VALENTINE. A veteran Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer, Valentine Vivian was the son of the Victorian portrait painter Comley Vivian and had joined the Indian police in 1906 at the age of 20. During World War I, he saw action in Palestine and Turkey with the Indian army. In 1923 Vivian was recruited into SIS and appointed the head of Section V, SIS’s counterintelligence branch. He conducted investigations into the suicide of Major Hugh Dalton in The Hague in September 1936 and into the leakage of information from the British embassy in Rome in February 1937, which identified Francisco Costantini as a spy. In January 1941 Vivian was made vice chief of SIS, and he retired in 1951.

VOIGHT, FREDERICK. Recruited by Valentine Williams to work at Woburn Abbey for the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) in 1940, Frederick Voight had been the Berlin correspondent of the Manchester Guardian and had enjoyed a long association with Claude Dansey’s Z Organisation. He was placed in charge of anti-Nazi propaganda but always disapproved of PWE’s “black” (clandestine) strategy.

VOLUNTARY INTERCEPTORS (VI). The highly skilled work of wireless intercept was undertaken during World War II by amateur license holders, sometimes known as “radio hams,” who monitored the airwaves for illicit signals traffic. Headed by Lord Sandhurst, the organization responsible for the recruitment, vetting, and training these volunteers was the Radio Security Service with a headquarters located at Arkley View in Barnet. The VIs operated from home, and when it became clear in 1940 that there were no undetected enemy wireless transmissions in Britain, they began concentrating on other German signals and enabled the cryptographers at Bletchley Park to solve many of the hand ciphers used across Europe. At the end of World War II, the Radio Security Service was absorbed into the Diplomatic Wireless Service, based at Hanslope Park.

VON DER GOLTZ, HORST. Early in November 1914 Horst Von der Goltz, newly arrived at Tilbury from Rotterdam, called at the Foreign Office in London, using the alias “Bridgeman Taylor,” and asked to see “the head of the British Secret Service.” He was interviewed by a Secret Intelligence Service officer, Major Cecil Cameron, and volunteered the information that he was an officer of the Mexican army and was in a position to supply information about future Zeppelin raids. Baffled, Cameron passed the visitor to Basil Thompson, who interrogated him at Scotland Yard and extracted the admission that his American passport was a forgery. Von der Goltz declared his true identity and was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and deportation.

In January the following year, while Von der Goltz was serving his sentence in Reading Gaol, the German military attaché in Washington, D.C., Franz von Papen, was expelled from the United States on suspicion of having organized widespread sabotage on the East Coast. When von Papen’s ship docked at Falmouth, his luggage was searched and, despite his protests of diplomatic immunity, his financial records seized. Among them was a canceled check that had been paid to “Bridgeman Taylor,” and Von der Goltz was challenged with this new evidence. Under cross-examination at Scotland Yard by Basil Thompson, Vernon Kell, and the director of naval intelligence, Admiral Reginald Hall, Von der Goltz confessed to having participated in a campaign of sabotage in Canada and the United States, orchestrated by von Papen. Von der Goltz was granted an immunity from further prosecution in England and deported to America, where he gave evidence to a grand jury investigating von Papen’s secretary, von Igel, and another agent, Hans Tauscher. Von der Goltz’s testimony received wide publicity and formed the basis of a British government White Paper published in April 1916, as well as his own book, My Adventures as a German Secret Agent, which was published in New York in September 1917.

–W–

WALKER, DAVID. As a Daily Mirror sports reporter with six years’ experience, David Walker was not an obvious choice as a saboteur, but in August 1938 he was invited to lunch at the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall, and the first suggestion was put to him that he might like to undertake some interesting work abroad for the government. He had been abroad a few times to help out the paper’s foreign correspondents and had a limited grasp of German and French. In preparation for his mission to Switzerland, Walker recalls that he “reread Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden.” Like Ashenden, Walker’s cover was that he was a novelist writing a book, but he was warned that his rendezvous with a potential agent had compromised him in the eyes of the Swiss authorities, so he quickly moved to Bucharest. There he was drawn into the fringes of the Iron Gates fiasco and the ill-fated attempt to sabotage the Ploesti oilfields, forcing him in October 1940 to flee to Athens.

In Greece Walker’s connections with the British government became more overt and, on one occasion, he was sent to Belgrade as a king’s messenger to deliver dispatches to Archie Lyall. Over the following months, Walker flitted across the Balkans, from Sofia to Bucharest, from Belgrade to Tirana. After the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia, he joined up with the remainder of the British Legation, which included John Ennals, another veteran of Section D, and was evacuated to Rome until arrangements could be made for their repatriation.

Once back in London, Walker was transferred to Special Operations Executive and then posted to Lisbon under journalistic cover, where he remained until June 1944. After D-Day, he was brought back to London and then attached to the U.S. 9th Army as a liaison officer. This brought him, after the Ardennes offensive, to Berlin and the end of his career with the Secret Intelligence Service, which had lasted seven years. His autobiography, Lunch with a Stranger, was published 11 years before his death in October 1968.

WALKER, SIR PATRICK. Director-general of the Security Service from 1988 to 1992, Patrick Walker was the first Roman Catholic director-general. Born in February 1932, the son of the chief accountant of the East African Railways, Walker was educated at the King’s School, Canterbury, and Trinity College, Oxford. After graduating, he joined the Ugandan civil service but in 1963 transferred to the Security Service.

WALSALL BOMB FACTORY. In January 1892 Inspector William Melville of Special Branch led a raid on premises in Walsall and arrested five anarchists, who were sent for trial at Stafford Assizes. All were members of the notorious Autonomy Club in London and had been under surveillance after they were spotted associating with a well-known bomb maker, Joseph Deakin. At their trial, the defendants claimed that their bombs were intended to be used in Russia against the czar, but they were convicted. Frederick Charles, Jean Battola, and Victor Cailes were sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment.

WALSINGHAM, SIR FRANCIS. Educated at King’s College, Cambridge, Francis Walsingham was secretary to the English ambassador in Paris and was himself appointed ambassador by Queen Elizabeth in 1570. Upon his return to London in 1573, he disbursed secret service funds and his own money to acquire information and is credited with building up a large network of sources across Europe that learned of Spanish plans for an armada. He wrote a paper entitled “Plot for Intelligence out of Spain” in 1587. When made secretary of state and a privy councilor, he was instructed “to have care to the intelligence abroad.” Among his achievements was his persuasion of the bankers of Genoa to delay their financial support for King Philip of Spain and his discovery that the ambassador in Paris, Sir Edward Stafford, was in the pay of the Spanish. An amateur cryptographer, his interception of private correspondence of Mary, Queen of Scots, resulted in her trial and execution in 1587. He died three years later, in debt, having expended his considerable fortune on his many agents, among them his daughter, Lady Sidney, her steward Robert Poley, and the playwright Christopher Marlowe.

WAR OFFICE Y GROUP (WOYG). Military signal interception during World War II was conducted by the War Office Y Group, which maintained large sites at Chicksands Priory, Harpenden, Sandridge, Grove Park, Denmark Hill, Cupar, and Wymondham. The network overseas extended to Alexandria and Heliopolis, Egypt; Sarafand, Palestine; Malta; and Gibraltar. The WOYG’s headquarters were initially at Fort Bridgewoods, Chatham, but when this area came under attack by the Luftwaffe, it moved to Beaumanor Hall. When the Russian Front opened in June 1941 and the enemy’s signal traffic increased, the WOYG expanded and established intercept sites at Forest Moor in Yorkshire, Keddleston Hall in Derbyshire, and Shenley in Hertfordshire.

WARNER, SIR GERALD. Vice chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and director of counterintelligence from 1988, Gerald Warner was later appointed intelligence coordinator to the Cabinet in 1991. He joined SIS in 1954, after graduating from Oxford, and in 1956 was posted to Beijing. Warner later served in Rangoon, Warsaw, Geneva, and Kuala Lumpur. Upon his retirement from SIS in 1990, he was briefly a member of the Police Complaints Authority.

WATCHER SERVICE. The MI5 section responsible for keeping suspects under observation has always been known as the Watcher Service, although its internal designation—B6 during World War II, when it was headed by Harry Hunter, and then A4 under Jim Skardon —has changed whenever the Security Service has undergone reorganization. Before 1939 the unit consisted of just three people, but subsequently it expanded dramatically, relying on retired army noncommissioned officers and members of the MI5 families to provide the personnel whose skill is considered exceptional.

WATSON, ALISTER. Educated at King’s College, Cambridge, where he had been an ardent Marxist, twice secretary of the Apostles, and a friend of Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, Dr. Alister Watson was a mathematician who had joined the Admiralty’s Radar and Signals Establishment before moving to the Admiralty Research Laboratory at Teddington, where he had been promoted to head of the Submarine Detection Research Section. In 1965 Blunt identified Watson to MI5 as a covert Communist who had spied for the Soviets. The MI5 officer responsible for investigating Watson was Peter Wright, who had worked alongside him during World War II in the Admiralty Research Laboratory; in a further coincidence, Watson had lodged in Bristol for two years with Wright’s brother. Under interrogation, Watson denied that he had ever been a spy, but Blunt attended one interview, conducted at Brown’s Hotel, and remained convinced that he had been. All that Watson would admit to was having been in contact with three different Soviet diplomats, all of whom were identified as members of the KGB’s rezidentura. As a result of MI5’s suspension of Watson’s security clearance, he was transferred to unclassified work at the National Institute of Oceanography.

WATTS, STEPHEN. At the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, Stephen Watts, previously the film and drama critic of the Sunday Express, was the spotter in a battery of Royal Engineers searchlights with the rank of lance corporal. A year later he had been commissioned and was appointed editor of War, the broadsheet of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs. Watts stayed with this rather obscure branch of Army Education until early in 1943, when he was invited to lunch by Sir David Petrie and invited to join the Security Service.

Watts’s work in MIS began with routine port security, vetting recent arrivals from the Continent and checking their credentials. In March 1944 he was assigned to a liaison role with the deception staff at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force and participated in COPPERHEAD. After the liberation of France, Watts was sent to Paris to trace the source of an indiscreet newspaper article that bore a resemblance to a classified Army Council document and then was returned to civilian life in October 1945. He was later to become the London film correspondent of the New York Times and in 1953 was elected the president of the London Critics Circle. He now lives in Chelsea. His war memoirs, Moonlight on a Lake in Bond Street (1961), do not directly identify MI5 as the branch of intelligence for which he worked, nor does the author name Petrie as his director-general, although his description of him as “a big, heavily-built slow-moving man” with “a trace of a Scots accent” is unmistakable.

WAUGH, ALEC. The elder brother of author Evelyn Waugh, Alec Waugh joined the army straight from Sherbourne, a school he left under something of a cloud. After graduating from Sandhurst, he was posted to the France in July 1917 and attached to the Machine Gun Corps. After nine months on the Western Front, Waugh’s emplacement near Arras was encircled by the enemy, and in March 1918, aged 19, he became a prisoner of war, incarcerated in a barracks above Mainz.

Waugh had intended to remain a regular army officer after his release from Germany, but instead he chose to capitalize on the success of his first novel The Loom of Youth, which was published shortly before he was sent to Flanders and caused a minor controversy because of its unusually frank treatment of homosexuality in English public schools. His old school was particularly embarrassed by the book and removed his name from the roll of old boys. Upon his return to London, Waugh pursued a literary career and embarked on a disastrous marriage that was never to be consummated. He joined his father’s publishing firm, Chapman & Hall, which included Somerset Maugham on its list of authors, but after eight years abandoned his desk to travel extensively and gain a worldwide reputation as a travel writer. His first marriage having been annulled in 1921, Waugh married his second wife in 1932; she bore him two sons and a daughter. After the death of his wealthy Australian father-in-law, Waugh inherited a country house at Silchester but continued to spend much of the year wandering overseas, accumulating material for more than 40 books.

At the outbreak of World War II, Waugh was a reserve officer and was called up for military service in France with his regiment, the Dorsets. A year later he was transferred to intelligence duties and posted to Security Intelligence Middle East, first in Lebanon and then in Baghdad. At the end of the war, with the rank of major, he joined the Secret Intelligence Service and was posted to Germany, but he soon returned to writing and travel. In 1956 his torrid novel set in the Caribbean, Island in the Sun, which dealt with another sensitive topic, interracial sex, became a best-seller and a highly successful film. Thereafter, according to Evelyn, Alec “never drew another sober breath.” He moved to Tangier, appearing occasionally in London to entertain his friends and at a Midwestern university where he was a writer-in-residence.

Waugh’s second wife, who had moved to Australia with their children, died in 1969, and in that year he married his third wife, Virginia. He released what he termed an “erotic comedy,” A Spy in the Family, the following year, the explicit sex scenes describing fellatio and cunnilingus, which caused a considerable storm. He died in Tampa, Florida, in September 1981.

WEEDING. The process of eliminating redundant files to make room for new ones is a process known in the British civil service as “weeding” and is conducted within the terms of the Public Records Act, which requires departmental papers to be lodged at the National Archive at Kew. MI5, the Secret Intelligence Service, and GCHQ are exempt from the act under the direction of the lord chancellor, who is advised by a committee on declassification issues. The agencies routinely conduct weeding exercises to reduce the burden of keeping records, employing retirees to undertake the work. In 1866 a retiree, Dick Ellis, confessed, while engaged as a weeder, to having betrayed SIS’s secrets before the war.

WEISS, ERNEST. A key figure in what became known as the British branch of the ROTE KAPELLE, Ernest D. Weiss was born in Breslau in 1902 and was recruited into the GRU by a former university contemporary. He agreed to travel to England on a long-term mission in May 1932 and was supervised by an illegal support officer codenamed HARRY I, who arranged for him to meet two seamen that subsequently acted as his couriers. This mysterious controller has never been identified, but it is believed that he went to the United States for a brief visit in December 1932, returning in time to introduce Weiss to Robert Switz in September 1933 in Kensington Gardens. Two months later Switz and his wife Marjorie were arrested in Paris and, according to Weiss’s subsequent statement to MI5, he had supported himself by playing the piano, and this had been the first moment he had realized that he was involved in Soviet espionage.

Weiss was undeterred by the newspaper reports from France of Switz’s arrest, and in 1935 he went to Enge, Switzerland, to meet his new controller, HARRY II. This meeting resulted in Weiss handling British secrets stolen by two Soviet agents, Major Wilfred Vernon of the Air Ministry and an Irishman, Frederick Meredith. Both were Communist Party of Great Britain members working at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough who had visited Russia in a group of eight tourists in May 1932. Weiss, who had by now adopted the identity “Walter Lock,” ran Vernon and Meredith until August 1937, when during his absence on holiday Vernon’s home was ransacked by burglars.

After Vernon’s arrest, Weiss was assigned a new controller, a man he knew as ANDRE and was later identified as a GRU illegal named Henri Robinson. Weiss’s cover was so good that, when he was called up for military service in England, he went undetected and was granted a commission. After the war he worked as a concert pianist, and his first encounter with MI5 occurred when he was interviewed by Jim Skardon at the end of a recital he had given in the Albert Hall. He cooperated fully with the Security Service and was never prosecuted. He died in 1982 without disclosing to any of his friends his secret role as a GRU agent.

According to Weiss’s statement to MI5, he had received scientific information from a German refugee named Hans Lubszynski, a former Telefunken radio engineer who had come to England in 1934. Lubszynski was in turn in contact with an unconscious source, a physicist from Berlin named Dr. Heinz Kallmann, then working as a researcher pioneering television technology for EMI. However, Kallmann moved to the United States in February 1939 thus reducing Lubszynski’s usefulness. Weiss’s other contacts included André Labarthe, a scientist who had worked for the French Ministry of Air until 1938; Professor Marcel Prenant of the Sorbonne, a leading French biologist and prominent Communist; and Jacques Soustelle, another academic who was to rise high in Charles de Gaulle’s intelligence service.

WELCHMAN, GORDON. One of the pioneers of research at the Government Code and Cipher School into the cryptographic secrets of the Enigma machine, Gordon Welchman was a mathematician from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, who collaborated with Alan Turing and John Jeffreys to solve many of the enemy’s cipher keys. Welchman spent the war in Hut 6 at Bletchley Park and in October 1941 joined Hugh Alexander and Stuart Milner-Barry in writing to the prime minister to complain about the lack of resources available to the cryptanalysts.

After the war Welchman moved to Massachusetts and became an American citizen, but when he published his memoirs, The Hut Six Story, in 1982, GCHQ protested and the U.S. National Security Agency withdrew his security clearance to undertake classified work at the MITRE Corporation, where he worked.

WELDON, L. B. When World War I broke out, L. B. Weldon was working for the survey department of the Egyptian government, and he was quickly transferred to the intelligence branch of the General Staff as a map officer with responsibility for the preparation and distribution to British forces of accurate maps of the Middle East. His direct superior was Colonel Gilbert Clayton, the regional chief of MI1(c), then Secret Intelligence Service’s military cover title. Gradually Weldon’s post changed into one of liaison, and in January 1915 he was appointed intelligence officer aboard the Aenne Rickmers, a confiscated German cargo vessel that had been converted into a spy ship equipped with a pair of French Nieuport seaplanes. Weldon’s assignment, which was to last two years, consisted of cruising off the Syrian coast and launching reconnaissance flights inland over the Turkish lines to report on troop movements. In addition, the Aenne Rickmers carried British agents from Port Said and dropped them ashore on short-term missions to infiltrate enemy positions.

Initially Weldon started his mission under the auspices of the Egyptian Ports and Lights Administration, acting for the GOC Egypt, which would have left him vulnerable as a civilian if he were ever captured by the Turks. The solution was to make the Aenne Rickmers a Royal Fleet Auxiliary and give Weldon a commission in the Royal Naval Reserve. He operated in the Eastern Mediterranean, and in January 1917 he joined the Managem, a smaller, less conspicuous steam yacht that routinely infiltrated agents, and carrier pigeons, into enemy territory.

Weldon’s memoirs, Hard Lying, were published in 1925, after the special allowance paid to naval personnel serving on destroyers and torpedo boats. After the war Weldon became surveyor-general of Egypt and retired to England, where he relied upon his diaries to recall his service with MI1(c).

WELLINGTON, DUKE OF. Throughout the Peninsula War, the Duke of Wellington benefited from an impressive intelligence organization headed by Major Colquohoun Grant and later boasted that he “knew everything the enemy was doing, and planning to do.” Grant had mobilized the Spanish peasantry into a force of irregulars against the French, and both intercepted and read many of Napoleon’s enciphered dispatches. During the Waterloo campaign, Wellington relied on Colonel Hardinge in Brussels, who had recruited at least two sources inside the French War Ministry and was able to relay regular reports on French intentions, morale, and Napoleon’s order of battle, correctly identifying the relative weakness of the National Guard that would be exploited to great advantage in what the Duke would later describe as “a dam’ close run thing.”

WELSH, ERIC. Transferred from the Naval Intelligence Division to the Norwegian Section of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in 1940, as a deputy to Frank Foley, Commander Eric Welsh was the first SIS officer with a scientific degree. He had strong Norwegian connections, having managed a paint factory outside Oslo before the war and married a Norwegian. Later in World War II, Welsh was attached to the Tube Alloys project to monitor the enemy’s nuclear development program. He relied on three sources of information: advice from recently arrived refugee scientists, articles published in academic journals, and secret information derived from SIS channels. With help from Rudolf Peierls, Welsh compiled a list of 16 German scientists who were either known to be researching the subject or considered good candidates. At the end of the war Welsh searched Germany for evidence of Nazi atomic research, found a primitive reactor, and learned that apart from Gustav Hertz, who had been dropped because of his Jewish origins, all the scientists were shown to have participated in the German project. Welsh remained SIS’s liaison with Scientific Intelligence after the war and worked from an office in the Shell-Mex building on the Strand.

WHADDON HALL. The headquarters in Buckinghamshire during World War II of Section VIII of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), responsible for communications and headed by Brigadier Richard Gambier-Parry and his deputy, Major Ted Maltby. Designated Specials Signals Unit 1 and then Special Communications Unit 1 (SCU 1), and located near the estates of Bletchley Park and Hanslope Park, Whaddon Hall provided an operations center and, in the outbuildings at the rear, workshops for the development of experimental radio equipment. Although the senior management were SIS officers, the remainder of the staff were either civilians or seconded from the Royal Corps of Signals, and some were accommodated in nearby houses, including Little Horwood and The Chase.

Whaddon Hall’s extensive stables were converted into stores and workshops, and here a group of up to 20 technicians produced radio transmitters for the use of agents, including the powerful but bulky Mark III, and converted vehicles for use as mobile SCUs. The specialists were led by Ewart Holden, the proprietor of a radio shop in Twickenham before the war, and Alex Polland, a former salesman in radio parts. The only casualty during the war, Major Jack Saunders, was killed in 1944 returning from a mission to enemy-occupied territory in a Lysander aircraft.

As SCU 1, Whaddon was linked to outstations in the Middle East and India and provided a secure wireless link to military commands over which ULTRA material was disseminated. In 1945 Whaddon Hall was relinquished by SIS and most of the technicians were transferred to the Diplomatic Wireless Service at Hanslope Park.

WHARTON-TIGAR, EDWARD. An accountant from Chester Beatty’s Trepca Mine, Edward Wharton-Tigar joined Section D in 1938 and transferred to Special Operations Executive (SOE) in 1940. In June 1941 he was posted to Tangier and in February 1942 participated in Operation FALAISE to destroy an enemy infrared detection system overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar. While in North Africa, Wharton-Tigar, himself something of a financial genius, found various ways to exploit the local foreign currency markets and made some large profits for SOE. In 1943 he was transferred to China to work with (Sir) Walter Fletcher on MICKLEHAM, turning smuggled diamonds, rubies, Swiss watches, and gold into national Chinese dollars in Kunming, which was then used to buy hard currency at the local rate. By the end of the war Wharton-Tigar, who became an immensely successful businessman in London, had accumulated £80 million for SOE, as he later recounted in his 1987 autobiography, Burning Bright. Wharton-Tigar died in June 1995.

WHEATLEY, DENNIS. It was only when Dennis Wheatley’s liquor business failed in 1931 that he attempted to write a novel, and his first, The Forbidden Territory, was an instant success. He was a popular, Bohemian character, constantly in demand at parties, and it was in the Chelsea flat of Sir Charles Birkin, then regarded as London’s most eligible bachelor, that he was introduced to Max Knight, MI5’s star agent-runner. Both had been cadets aboard HMS Worcester, and from this common bond was formed a lifelong friendship.

Knight frequently used Wheatley for various clandestine purposes, among the first being the provision of cover to one of his agents, Friedle Gaertner, who had become a talented double agent. Gaertner, who was to acquire the code name GELATINE in MI5, ostensibly worked for Wheatley as his secretary, but in reality her salary was paid by Knight.

Wheatley undertook other tasks for Knight, one of which was to provide background information about the traitor William Joyce, later known as “Lord Haw-Haw.” Joyce had been a guest at one of Wheatley’s literary parties, and after Joyce fled to Germany, Wheatley’s name was found among his papers by MI5. Pro-fascist, but not pro-Nazi, Wheatley had been recommended by Joyce as a suitable candidate for the position of gauleiter of Northwest London after a German invasion.

Based on his reputation as the successful biographer of Marshal Voroshilov, Wheatley approached the Soviet embassy in 1942 on Knight’s instructions with the intention of cultivating the press attache. The contact led to a single dinner at the famous Hungaria Restaurant, but although Wheatley was later to write an article for the Daily Mail about Stalingrad’s defender, nothing more was achieved.

Although his wife Joan Wheatley, stepson, and stepdaughter were employed by MI5, Wheatley was never formally employed as an officer of the Security Service, although, through the intervention of his wife, he later joined the War Planning Staff, where he worked closely with Colonel Gilbert Lennox, one of MI5’s experts on strategic deception.

After the war Wheatley resumed his literary career and achieved phenomenal success as a writer and, before his death in November 1977, finished more than 60 books. In the third volume of his memoirs, The Time Has Come: Pen and Ink, Wheatley recalls an episode when “Uncle Max” Knight sought out his help to watch a suspected Nazi agent. The person concerned is unnamed but Wheatley’s description of her would appear to fit Judith, Countess of Listowel. She was born in Hungary, the daughter of a diplomat, and married the Labour peer Lord Listowel in 1933; they were divorced in 1945, two years after the release of her autobiography, This I Have Seen.

WHEATLEY, JOAN. When Joan Johnstone met Dennis Wheatley in 1929 she had five children and had been both divorced and widowed. Her marriage to William Younger had resulted in separation, and her subsequent marriage to Hubert Pelham Burn had ended when he was killed in a car accident. Wheatley, who was then virtually a bankrupt after his wine business had collapsed, obtained a divorce from his wife in 1931 and then married Joan.

In 1935 Joan Wheatley adopted the pen name Eve Chaucer and wrote her first novel, No Ordinary Virgin. This was followed by Life as Carola, Return to Elysium (using the name Joan Grant), Winged Pharaoh, Eyes of Horus, Lord of the Horizon, Scarlet Feather, and finally Silksheets and Breadcrumbs. She also wrote two books for children, The Scarlet Fish and Other Stories and Redskin Morning, as well as the travelogue Vague Vacation.

On the outbreak of World War II, at the invitation of Max Knight, she joined MI5, where her son and daughter, William and Diana Younger, both already worked. She started as a driver, carrying senior personnel around London in her own car, but later she was put in charge of the allocation of petrol coupons, a post of some importance at a time when fuel was subject to strict rationing. At the end of the war she left the Security Service and took up painting and sculpting, acquiring an impressive reputation.

WHEELWRIGHT. One of the largest and most significant of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) circuits in occupied France, WHEELWRIGHT employed some 20 SOE-trained agents under the command of George Starr (codenamed HILAIRE). The network covered a huge territory in the southwest and was very effective at isolating the Wehrmacht Army Group G, garrisoned near Toulouse, by cutting its power and telephone lines. Starr had landed by felucca in November 1942 and had originally been intended for SPRUCE in Lyons, but that circuit collapsed just before his arrival. Instead, he adopted the cover of a wealthy retired Belgian mining engineer from the Congo (which explained his awful accent) and took up residence in Castelnau-sous-l’Avignon, where he was so popular that he was elected the town’s deputy mayor.

WHINNEY, PATRICK. Patrick Whinney’s introduction to unorthodox warfare came in 1940 when he was transferred to the Naval Intelligence subsection known as DDOD(I), which, based in the Helford estuary, ran clandestine operations across the Channel in fishing boats and fast motor launches. A year later he was undertaking similar missions in the Mediterranean, first from Algiers and then from Sardinia. In 1943 he was in command of a flotilla of boats at La Maddalena, Sardinia’s most northerly port, transporting Special Operations Executive and American Office of Strategic Services agents to the Italian coast.

After the war Whinney remained in the Secret Intelligence Service and in 1949 participated, as its head of station in Athens, in the infiltration of guerrillas into Communist Albania, a task in which he was assisted by David Smiley and Robert Zaehner. Whinney wrote Corsican Command, an account of his war experiences, but it was to be more than half a century before the book was published. He now lives in the Channel Islands.

WHITE, SIR DICK. Director-general of the Security Service from 1953 to 1956 and chief of the Secret Intelligence Service from 1956 to 1968, Dick White was the only person to have headed both organizations, despite Kim Philby’s acerbic comment that “he was a nice and modest character, who would have been the first to admit that he lacked outstanding qualities. His most obvious fault was a tendency to agree with the last person he spoke to.”

Educated at Bishop’s Stortford College, Christ Church, Oxford, and the Universities of Michigan and California, White had been an outstanding runner and the captain of rugby, cricket, and athletics in his last year at school. Initially set for a career as a schoolmaster at the Whitgift School in Croydon, in 1936 White had been persuaded by Malcolm Cumming to be one of the first, if not the first, university graduate to join MI5. White had been accompanying a group of his pupils to Australia, and by coincidence Cumming was a passenger on the same ship, traveling to attend some army exercises in the Far East. The two men became friends, and upon his return to London, Cumming had recommended White to his director-general, Sir Vernon Kell. At that time, the Security Service was a tiny organization, run from a suite of offices in Thames House, on the Embankment, still headed by Kell and his faithful deputy, Sir Eric Holt-Wilson, who had been with him since December 1912.

White achieved success quickly through his work as case officer for Wolfgang zu Putlitz, an anti-Nazi homosexual German diplomat who had been recruited by Iona von Ustinov. With his shrewd handling of zu Putlitz, White gained a reputation with the Security Service for quiet, thoughtful efficiency. In 1940 he averted a crisis when an anonymous staff officer attached to the British Expeditionary Force published A Staff Officer’s Diary, including an indiscreet reference to the use of wireless intercepts. White simply called his older brother Alan, then working for Methuen, which had published the offending book, identified the author as a Major Gribble, and arranged for the problem passages to be removed from all future copies. White became Guy Liddell’s protégé, and in 1944 was posted to Montgomery’s 21st Army Group to run a continental version of the double cross system, designated the 212 Committee.

At the end of World War II, the incoming Labour administration appointed former chief constable Sir Percy Sillitoe as director-general, but he was completely out of his depth. MI5 was run by the triumvirate of Sillitoe’s deputy Liddell, White, and the plodding bureaucrat Roger Hollis, a member of the prewar intake who had made himself an expert on Communism. The three even persuaded Sillitoe to lie to the prime minister when M15’s competence was challenged in the aftermath of the Klaus Fuchs affair. M15’s triumph in identifying Fuchs and persuading him to confess and plead guilty to breaches of the Official Secrets Act, for which he was sentenced to 14 years’ imprisonment, turned to ashes when MI5 was criticized for not having caught him earlier. When M15’s original Fuchs file was examined, it was found to contain an entry from 1945 that suggested he was probably a spy and merited an immediate investigation. This embarrassment was reported to Sillitoe, who reluctantly agreed under pressure from Liddell, White, and Hollis, to conceal the true facts “for the good of the Service” from Clement Attlee, who then assured the Commons, based on a briefing from the director-general, that there had been no slipup and that MI5 had followed up every lead diligently. Appalled at his own behavior, Sillitoe then gathered MI5’s senior management together in the canteen on the top of Leconfield House, MI5’s postwar headquarters, and explained what had happened, vowing never to mislead a prime minister ever again. Stung by this very public rebuke, White contemplated resigning, but was persuaded that he would find it hard to find another job. Still smarting with indignation and guilt, White succeeded Liddell as deputy director-general when the latter moved to head the Atomic Energy Authority’s security division.

When VENONA revealed in May 1951 that the spy codenamed HOMER was almost certainly the head of the Foreign Office’s American Department, Donald Maclean, and the foreign secretary gave his consent for Maclean to be interviewed, MI5 held a conference of case officers on Friday afternoon to discuss how the interrogation, set for Monday, 31 May, should be handled. Just as the meeting was breaking up, shortly before midnight, the night duty officer, Russell Lee, reported that an alert immigration officer at Southampton had spotted Maclean embarking on the Falaise, due to sail at any moment for St. Malo. Instant action was required, and those assembled agreed that White should fly to France and intercept Maclean in the hope of persuading him to return home, but when White reached the airport to catch the first flight, he discovered his passport had expired. Despite frantic efforts to revalidate it, White failed to make his flight and Maclean was able to escape unhindered. Embarrassed by this monumental blunder, White and his colleagues pretended that nothing had happened, and when Mrs. Maclean telephoned on Monday morning to report the disappearance of her husband, they all acted as though this was the first MI5 knew of his departure two days earlier.

White was appointed director-general when Sillitoe went into retirement in 1953. Just three years later, however, White was invited to replace Sir John Sinclair as chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Told by the permanent undersecretary at the Home Office, Sir Frank Newsam, that his duty lay with whatever the prime minister requested, White accepted the appointment and transferred to Broadway in the middle of July 1956, becoming the fifth Chief and the first with a degree. James Easton stayed on as his vice chief.

White’s appointment proved to be a highly controversial one. Over the next 12 years, White would have to deal with the treachery of George Blake, whose trial at the Old Bailey he attended, as well as his wartime friends Philby and Anthony Blunt. He also participated in STRAGGLE, Anthony Eden’s ill-fated attempt to recover the Suez Canal from Egyptian Colonel Abdel Nasser. When White finally retired from Whitehall in 1972, he lived in a modern, timber-frame house he had built himself at Burpham, near Arundel in Sussex, with his wife Kate, leading a vegetarian existence and writing poetry. White died on 22 February 1993, of cancer, and at his memorial service held at the Guards Chapel, Wellington Barracks, the lessons were read by the current heads of the two services he had led: Dame Stella Rimington for MI5 and Sir Colin McColl for SIS.

WHITE LADY. Secret Intelligence Service code name for a large train-watching network in German-occupied Belgium during World War I. WHITE LADY grew out of two other organizations that had been penetrated by the enemy. According to Henry Landau, who took control of it in July 1917, it amounted to 90 observation posts. In 1918 Mansfield Smith-Cumming congratulated the WHITE LADY leaders and credited them with having produced 70 percent of the intelligence reaching the Allies and being responsible for saving thousands of Allied lives.

WIGG, GEORGE. A soldier from 1919 to 1937 and elected to the House of Commons in 1940, George Wigg was appointed paymaster-general in 1964 to monitor the security and intelligence services on behalf of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who was anxious to avoid the scandals that had bedeviled Harold Macmillan’s administration. Wigg had joined Richard Crossman to make maximum political capital out of the Profumo affair, and together they had pressed for the independent judicial inquiry that was subsequently conducted by Lord Denning. Wigg was kept in the post for three years until he was elevated to the House of Lords and later was arrested for curb-crawling (solicitation).

WILKINSON, SIR PETER. Educated at Rugby and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Peter Wilkinson was commissioned into the Royal Fusiliers in 1935. In 1939 he accompanied Colonel Colin Gubbins on a military mission to Poland on behalf of MI(R), During the French collapse, he was sent on a mission to Bicarosse Plage, south of Bordeaux, to rescue General Sikorski and the remnants of the Polish General Staff. Upon his return to London, he was transferred to Special Operations Executive, where he headed the Polish Section. In 1943 Wilkinson was dropped into Bosnia to negotiate with Tito, accompanied by Alfgar Hesketh-Pritchard, who was later to disappear, presumably killed in an encounter with the Germans. Wilkinson then led the Czech Section, designated MY, and after the war joined the Foreign Office, serving in Vienna, Washington, D.C., and Bonn. He was appointed ambassador to Vietnam in 1966 and Austria in 1970.

WILLIAMS, SINCLAIR. Ostensibly appointed a clerk in the Receiver’s Office at Scotland Yard in 1936 at the age of 24, C. L. Sinclair Williams really worked for a secret unit headed by Commander Harold Kenworthy that managed a wireless intercept station at Grove Park, Denmark Hill, and became a section of Government Code and Cipher School in 1939. Williams was assistant to Leslie Lambert and when he died in 1942 Williams replaced him at Bletchley Park. At the end of the war, Williams remained at GCHQ, first at Eastcote and then at Cheltenham, and in 1954 he was appointed to liaise with the Secret Intelligence Service on the Soviet cable traffic intercepted in Operation GOLD, the Berlin tunnel. While SIS ran a translation center in Regent’s Park staffed by Russian émigrés, Williams established a GCHQ office at Smithfield Market with the innocuous name of the London Processing Centre.

Williams retired from GCHQ in 1972 to pursue his interests in art and music, and he restored a medieval hall in East Malling Kent. He wrote several scholarly monographs on medieval agricultural history and moved to Puddletown in Dorset, where he published Puddletown House: Street and Family for the Dorset Record Society. Williams died in 1999.

WILLIAMS, VALENTINE. The eldest son of the chief editor at Reuter’s News Agency, Valentine Williams was to make his reputation as a journalist before turning to writing thrillers. He went to Berlin first as a correspondent for his father’s agency and then to Paris for the Daily Mail. Williams covered the 1910 revolution in Portugal and was in the Balkans when World War I broke out in 1914. In March 1915 he was accredited to GHQ in Flanders but joined the Irish Guards in December 1915 and won the Military Cross. Two books of nonfiction document his experiences: With Our Army in Flanders and Adventures of an Ensign.

After the war, Williams traveled the world to file reports from the Versailles Peace Conference and from the expedition that discovered the tomb of King Tutankhamen. Numerous assignments in America and North Africa followed, but his fame was achieved as the author of such classics as The Man with the Clubfoot, The Secret Hand, The Return of Clubfoot, and The Three of Clubs. Aged 56 when Hitler invaded Poland, Williams was too old for military service, so just as his novel The Fox Prowls was released, he joined the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), where he checked the credentials of new recruits. One of the aspiring intelligence officers he interviewed was Malcolm Muggeridge, who had worked with Williams’s younger brother Douglas on the Daily Telegraph. Muggeridge later recalled the encounter in which “Williams spoke darkly of the dangers involved in a service which, by the nature of the case, a blown agent had to be discarded.” Williams’s gloomy strictures failed to deter Muggeridge, who subsequently “disappeared into the limbo of MI6, the wartime version of the Secret Service.” In his autobiography, Kim Philby recalls a visit to the secret propaganda center at Woburn Abbey accompanied by Williams, who lunched well and slept for the entire drive back to London in SIS’s Rolls-Royce.

In 1941 Williams was transferred to the British embassy in Washington, D.C., but soon afterward, he moved to Hollywood to work as a scriptwriter. He wrote screenplays for Twentieth Century–Fox and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for the remainder of the war and published two further novels, Courier to Marrakech (1945) and Skeleton Out of the Cupboard (1946), which was released shortly before his death in November 1946.

WILSON, CHARLES. On 1 April 1873 Major Charles Wilson was appointed head of the War Office’s Topographical and Statistical Department and a separate Intelligence Branch was established as a branch of the Army Staff. A Royal Engineers officer, Wilson had surveyed the entire unmarked border between Canada and the United States and had been sponsored by the philanthropist Miss Burdett Coutts to conduct the first survey of Jerusalem so the city could be supplied with water. Initially accommodated in New Street, Wilson moved his small group of three officers and 10 clerks to Adair House in St. James’s Square in January 1874. Wilson was responsible for briefing Captain Redvers Buller before the Ashanti Campaign and played a key role in encouraging a subordinate, Captain A. B. Tutloch, to complete a detailed study of foreign intelligence organizations.

Wilson also collaborated with Captain Collen of the Royal Artillery, who produced a report in 1878 that advocated the creation of an Intelligence Branch in India, where the army had been disadvantaged by the Indian Mutiny in spite of the wealth of information available concerning discontent among the Sepoys. As a consequence, the Indian Intelligence Branch was established with three officers, three draftsmen, and a Persian Moonshee.

WILSON, HAROLD. Prime minister from 1964 to 1970 and again from 1974 to 1976, and an MP since 1945, Harold Wilson was the subject of a highly controversial investigation conducted by the Security Service in response to allegations from a KGB defector that a Soviet asset had taken control of a European opposition party following the sudden death of its leader. At the time Anatoli Golitsyn made the claim, the only person who fit the description was Hugh Gaitskell, who had died of lupus.

Research by MI5 suggested that Gaitskell’s death might not have been accidental. He had contracted lupus soon after visiting the Soviet consulate in London to obtain a visa, and his doctor had been sufficiently suspicious to report his concerns. M15’s dilemma was whether to pursue an investigation, and the director-general, Sir Martin Furnival Jones, authorized discreet inquiries to be made by Harry Wharton and Tony Brooks under the alias “Henry Worthington.”

While superficially there was a circumstantial case to be made against Wilson, there was absolutely no proof that he had ever engaged in espionage. There was a period, known as “the lost weeks,” when he had been in the Soviet Union negotiating for the timber magnate Montague Meyer and his exact whereabouts could not be traced, which seemed curious. Furthermore, his social circle, which included many dubious Eastern Europeans such as Joseph Kagan and Rudy Steinberg, was certainly unwise. Kagan, for instance, had developed a friendship based on chess with Rikardas Vaygauskas, a member of the KGB’s London rezidentura.

The Worthington inquiry was shelved and the file remained in the director-general’s private safe until Peter Wright alleged in 1985 that Wilson had been the victim of a plot to remove him, orchestrated by his MI5 colleagues. In a further interview, Wright admitted that the conspiracy had consisted of an approach he had made to Brooks to leak damaging parts of the Worthington file, but Brooks had regarded the suggestion as wholly improper so nothing had come of it.

WINTERBOTHAM, FRED. During World War I Fred Winterbotham served as a fighter pilot in the Royal Flying Corps. In July 1917 his Nieuport was shot down over the German trenches in France. He survived the crash and the subsequent captivity in a prisoner of war camp in Silesia, from which he was not released until January 1919. Upon his return to England, Winterbotham went up to Christ Church, Oxford, where he was coached in tennis by John Masterman. After university, he tried farming but when this venture failed he was persuaded in January 1930 to join the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and head its new Air Section, which was intended to liaise closely with several of his old colleagues in the Air Ministry’s tiny intelligence branch. During the next eight years, Winterbotham made numerous visits to Germany, often piloting himself, recruiting sources, and making clandestine photographic reconnaissance flights over sensitive airfields. In 1939 he commissioned another pilot, Sidney Cotton, to undertake to verify the Siegfried Line for the Deuxième Bureau, and Wilhelmshaven for the Admiralty.

After the outbreak of World War II, Winterbotham’s section took over responsibility for the secure distribution of the signals intelligence product that, in 1941, was to become known as ULTRA. Winterbotham’s task was to ensure summaries of the decrypts were conveyed from Bletchley Park to selected military commanders using a dedicated communications channel of specially indoctrinated liaison officers equipped with one-time pads and the latest cryptographic technology. These three-man teams, discreetly attached to individual theater staffs, were known as Special Liaison Units, but very few knew their true function.

Winterbotham’s achievement in obtaining interservice cooperation at Bletchley Park was not without its pitfalls. The director of naval intelligence (DNI), for one, proved awkward to deal with, the blame for which Winterbotham placed on the DNI’s assistant, Ian Fleming. But if he was critical of Fleming, he was full of praise for the colleague he described as his “scientific assistant,” R. V. Jones.

The security surrounding the Allied codebreakers was such that no word of the success they achieved leaked until an American journalist, Anthony Cave Brown, discovered in 1972 that Bletchley’s boffins had accomplished far more than had hitherto been suspected or hinted at. While a few participants had known of their particular contribution, only a relative handful of the 10,000 employed by GCHQ gained an overall view of ULTRA’s astonishing scope. One of those was Winterbotham, who, when challenged by Cave Brown to disclose what he knew, approached the authorities for permission to publish his own recollections.

Winterbotham had at this stage already released a suitably sanitized account of his experiences, Secret and Personal, published in 1969, which carefully omitted any reference to ULTRA. The author’s announcement that he proposed to release a comprehensive version of Bletchley’s work, to preempt Cave Brown, was greeted with dismay in Whitehall, but the decision was taken not to place any legal obstacle in his path—or, in the words of Admiral Farnhill, then secretary of the D Notice Committee, “Objections to publication on the grounds of security were not sufficient to warrant his advice that publication would contravene D Notices.”

Winterbotham’s authoritative revelation that much of the enemy’s cipher traffic had been intercepted and decrypted astonished the public and led to a dramatic revision of previously published histories, particularly those of the great military strategists such as Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and General Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose own memoirs had neglected to mention the “most secret source” of intelligence they had relied upon. Understandably, SIS was especially anxious about Winterbotham’s breach of security, even though he had returned to civilian life in 1945. Certainly the organization was aware of every stage of the book’s production process, for his editor was herself closely connected to SIS, her sister being married to Michael Wrigley, one of SIS’s senior directors.

The publication of The Ultra Secret eventually forced the government to agree to the release of relevant material to the Public Record Office and led to a radical reappraisal of the Allied prosecution of the war. It also made the author deeply unpopular with his former colleagues, especially those he had himself reprimanded for minor breaches of wartime security. Winterbotham shrugged off the criticism and went on to publish two further volumes of memoirs, The Nazi Connection and The Ultra Spy, before he died in January 1990.

WISEMAN, SIR WILLIAM. Educated at Winchester and Jesus College, Cambridge, William Wiseman was the 10th baronet, having succeeded his father in 1893 at the age of eight. A partner in the New York brokers Kuhn, Loeb & Co. on the outbreak of World War I, he was commissioned into the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry and was gassed in Flanders. After a convalescence, he was posted to Washington, D.C., ostensibly attached to the British Purchasing Commission, to liaise with Colonel Edward M. House, President Woodrow Wilson’s influential special adviser. In reality he represented the Secret Intelligence Service in the United States and employed Somerset Maugham as a courier to support the Kerensky government in Moscow.

WOBURN ABBEY. The ancestral home of the Duke of Bedford, Woburn Abbey accommodated the Political Warfare Executive during World War II, with buildings on the estate being converted into radio studios for black broadcasts to Europe. See also DELMER, SEFTON; ELECTRA HOUSE; SOLDATENSENDER CALAIS.

WODEHOUSE, P. G. The outcry that followed P. G. Wodehouse’s broadcast on German radio in June 1941 was orchestrated by Duff Cooper, MP, then minister of information in Winston Churchill’s war cabinet. Although very few people heard the original talks, entitled “How to Be an Internee without Previous Training” and all five written by Wodehouse himself, the publicity generated by the protestors ensured that his public in America and Britain was outraged.

Wodehouse had been living at his villa in Le Touquet when war had broken out, and he and his wife Ethel attempted to return to London by car when the Germans invaded, but they had broken down. Obligingly, the Royal Air Force offered the best-selling author a single seat on an aircraft, but he had declined because there was no room for his wife or his dogs. Instead, Wodehouse spent three not entirely disagreeable months under German occupation. He was obliged to report once a day to the local Kommandantur, but this was no inconvenience as Wodehouse enjoyed the walk. However, in July 1940 he was informed that all British citizens were to be interned, and he was placed on a bus and driven to Loos prison.

By international convention, enemy aliens aged 60 were eligible for repatriation but Wodehouse, being a few months short of 59, was interned at an ancient fortress near the Belgian town of Huy. Eventually he was transferred to Poland, to a commandeered lunatic asylum in Tost, Upper Silesia, where he remained for nine months until June 1941 when, without explanation, he was moved to the Adlon Hotel in Berlin. This luxurious establishment was reserved for the use of guests of the German Foreign Ministry, and Wodehouse’s release from Tost, where he was reunited with Ethel who had remained in France, was odd for there was still a further four months before his 60th birthday. Equally difficult to explain was his decision, within a few days of taking up residence in the Adlon, to give a series of talks on the radio.

The talks were intended to be entertaining and humorous, and so they were, narrated in typical Wodehousian style, but this very act of collaboration, rather that the content, caused the novelist to be denounced as a traitor. William Connor, who wrote the Cassandra column in the Daily Mirror, railed against Wodehouse on the BBC, and indignant letters were published by the Times from A. A. Milne, among many others. He was expelled by his London club, the Beefsteak; Oxford University was petitioned to rescind his honorary degree; and his beloved old school, Dulwich College, removed his name from its roll of honor.

Wodehouse himself could not understand what offense he had caused and assured his friends that his loyalty to Britain was never in doubt. Late in 1943 Wodehouse and his wife were moved to Paris where they were installed in the Hotel Bristol, and he was living there when he was visited by Malcolm Muggeridge on behalf of the British authorities.

The task of dealing with Wodehouse and what he himself would subsequently refer to as his “indiscretion” had been assigned to Colonel A. G. Trevor-Wilson, a senior Secret Intelligence Service officer who before the war had been a bank manager in France. Trevor-Wilson delegated the matter to his subordinate, Muggeridge, who was a great admirer of Wodehouse and was not unsympathetic to his cause. He spent hours with the author, dissecting every detail of his period in German hands and concluded that Wodehouse had been foolish, but not a traitor. He established that Wodehouse’s release from Tost had come about as a result of pleas from influential American friends in Berlin and not some discreditable pact in which a degree of freedom was granted in return for the broadcasts. Another allegation, without foundation, was the charge that a bargain had been made to allow his wife to join him in Berlin after the last broadcast. Muggeridge’s verdict was later endorsed by the distinguished barrister (Sir) Edward Cussen who, on behalf of MI5, interrogated Wodehouse at length, completed a detailed report and advised the author not to return to England. However, he was taken into custody briefly by the French police in November, and after four days moved to a maternity hospital, but was released without charge after Muggeridge intervened.

Early the following year the foreign secretary, Sir Anthony Eden, announced in London in response to questions tabled by Quintin Hogg, MP, that Wodehouse would not face charges, and George Orwell published an essay, “In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse,” after he was introduced to the creator of Wooster, Jeeves, and Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps in Paris by Muggeridge. Wodehouse moved to St. Germain-en-Laye, and in 1947 took up residence in New York, later moving to Long Island. Wodehouse’s genius was eventually to receive official recognition in the New Year’s honors list of January 1975 when, aged 94, he was awarded a knighthood. Barely six weeks later, he was dead.

WOLFE, JAMES. In September 1759 at the age of 32 and a veteran of Culloden, General James Wolfe captured the French fortress of Quebec by conducting his own reconnaissance mission, alone and in disguise, by boat down the St. Lawrence River. Combining his own observations with reports from intercepted letters, spies, French deserters, native scouts, and his own force of rangers, Wolfe landed troops at the Anse on Foulon, where he knew the commander of the local regiment had been disciplined, and seized the fortress with only 1,700 men.

WOLKOFF, ANNA. The 38-year-old daughter of the last czarist naval attaché in London, Anna Wolkoff was the subject of an MI5 investigation in 1940 when she was involved in the preparation and distribution of pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic literature. Wolkoff had become a naturalized British subject in 1935 and was an active member of the Right Club, as well as the proprietor of the Russian Tea Room in South Kensington. She was seen visiting the Italian assistant naval attaché, Colonel Francesco Maringliano, and Tyler Kent, a code clerk at the U.S. embassy. Arrested in May 1940 and convicted of two offenses under the Official Secrets Act, Wolkoff was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment.

WOODHOUSE, MONTY. After a brilliant war career operating with Greek guerrillas in enemy-occupied territory for Special Operations Executive (SOE), Monty Woodhouse reopened the Athens Station of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and later joined SIS’s postwar War Planning Directorate, preparing stay-behind networks across Eastern Europe in anticipation of a Soviet invasion. The younger son of Lord Terrington, he was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, where he was awarded a double first. Commissioned as a gunner in 1939, he was recruited into SOE to train agents at the Special Training School at Haifa, but was then selected to join Operation HARLING, a daring scheme to blow up a strategically important viaduct on the railway line used by the Germans to resupply General Erwin Rommel. The plan was executed in November 1942 and Woodhouse remained in Greece to reorganize local partisans.

After World War II, Woodhouse was appointed secretary-general of the international commission supervising the Greek general election, and in 1946 he returned home to work in industry. In 1951 Woodhouse moved to the SIS station in Iran to supervise an ambitious scheme to remove Prime Minister Mohammed Mussadeq from power. Codenamed Operation BOOT, the plan was given Anthony Eden’s approval after Woodhouse, accompanied by Robert Zaehner and George Young, briefed him. Based in Cyprus because of broken diplomatic relations, Woodhouse masterminded the coup in August 1953 and paved the way for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to replace Mussadeq. One unforeseen development was the sudden flight of the young shah, but he was quickly persuaded to return home from his refuge in Rome.

After Woodhouse’s retirement from SIS, he was elected to the House of Commons as the Tory MP for Oxford; he lost his seat in 1966, but recovered it in 1970. Woodhouse attained ministerial office in the Ministry of Aviation and the Home Office and retired from Parliament in September 1974. He has written extensively on Greece and his own account of his behind-the-lines adventures, Apple of Discord, was published in 1948. In 1982 Woodhouse released his memoirs, Something Ventured, in which he recalled candidly his role in BOOT and gave an entertaining account of how he had delayed relaying a signal from Tehran to Washington so as to give the CIA’s revolution crucial additional time to rally their forces on the street in the face of stiff resistance from Mussadeq’s Communist supporters.

WOOLWICH ARSENAL. In 1938 the Royal Ordinance factory at Woolwich Arsenal was the target of Soviet espionage, with blueprints and other data removed from the premises and copied by a spy ring headed by Percy Glading, formerly the Communist Party of Great Britain’s national organizer and previously an engineer employed as an examiner at the arsenal’s Naval Department. In February 1938, after an MI5 surveillance operation lasting seven years, Glading was arrested and charged under the Official Secrets Act, together with Charles Munday, Albert Williams, and George Whomack. Only Munday was acquitted when the four defendants were tried at the Old Bailey in May 1938.

WRIGHT, PETER. A radio technician recruited from Marconi in 1955, Peter Wright had attracted MI5’s attention when he had discovered the secrets of the Soviet SATYR microphone and transmitter recovered from the U.S. embassy in Moscow and demonstrated how it worked. This was a considerable accomplishment for someone who had left Bishop’s Stortford College without a qualification at the age of 15. During World War II he had talked his way into a job at the Admiralty Research Laboratory.

Wright worked in A Branch until 1963, when he participated in the surveillance of Graham Mitchell, a suspected mole for the KGB. The following year, after the PETERS investigation had concluded, he was appointed head of D3, the research section in the Soviet counterespionage branch. Here, he became increasingly convinced that MI5’s considerable losses over the years could only be explained by Soviet penetration at a high level. In April 1964, after Arthur Martin had extracted a confession from Anthony Blunt, Wright replaced him as M15’s interrogator and pursued dozens of leads to undetected Soviet spies. He interviewed Leo Long, Jenifer Hart, Alister Watson, and dozens of other spy suspects, although none were ever prosecuted.

When he reached his official retirement, Wright was retained as a consultant on a part-time basis by the director-general, Sir Michael Hanley, and he commuted up to London from his stud farm at Blisland, near Bodmin in Cornwall. When he left MI5 completely in January 1976, Wright moved to Tasmania but failed to obtain the full pension to which he believed he was entitled. When Margaret Thatcher publicly exposed Blunt in November 1979, he was dismayed by her assertion that all M15’s losses could be explained by Soviet penetration during World War II, and he embarked on a series of disclosures—first to journalist Chapman Pincher, who documented them in Their Trade Is Treachery, and then to television producer Paul Greengrass in SpyCatcher. Both books were best-sellers, but the British government’s fruitless, counterproductive attempts to prevent the release of SpyCatcher, on the grounds that Wright had broken his lifelong duty of confidentiality, made his book a worldwide sensation, although his subsequent publication, The SpyCatcher’s Encyclopedia of Espionage, did not enjoy the same notoriety or financial success. Wright died in Australia in April 1995, aged 78.

–X–

X GROUP. GRU code name for a high-level spy ring active in London in 1940 and 1941, as disclosed by numerous VENONA decrypts. Headed by INTELLIGENSIA, the other members of the network were BARON, NOBILITY, and RESERVIST, and together they supplied large quantities of valuable, mainly military information from good sources to their contacts at the rezidentura at the Soviet embassy.

XX COMMITTEE. See TWENTY COMMITTEE.

XXX. See TRIPLEX.

XXXI COMMITTEE. See THIRTY-ONE COMMITTEE.

–Y–

YAK. Special Operations Executive (SOE) code name for an overambitious scheme dreamed up to screen Italian prisoners of war and recruit those anti-Fascists among them into SOE. The project was developed by Peter Fleming, formerly of MI(R), and Colonel Cudbert Thornhill, a veteran intelligence officer who had been military attaché in Petrograd during the Russian Revolution. A large number of Jews of Italian origin were recruited in Palestine for the vetting process and a start was made at four Italian PoW camps: Mustafa near Alexandria, Helwan, Ganfieh, and Ajami. In addition, a newspaper, the Corriere d’Italia was printed locally and circulated in the camps under SOE’s sponsorship.

Unfortunately for Thornhill and Fleming—whose brother Ian Fleming was to invent James Bond—not a single Italian volunteered to join YAK and become a saboteur. Worse still, the SOE officer in charge of the Italian desk in SOE’s psychological warfare division, John de Salis, discovered that the paper was carrying articles that, if not actually Communist inspired, could certainly be interpreted as very anti-British. One offending item, entitled Perfidious Albion, had already been rejected by the censor but was published anyway, lending weight to the prevalent view that, in its naivete, SOE had allowed itself to be hijacked by socialists who used SOE’s facilities to disseminate Communist propaganda. The row that followed led to the dismissal of the Corriere’s editorial board, headed by Professor Umberto Calosso, and the arrest by the Egyptian police of Enzo Sereni, one of the Corriere’s editors and a key SOE agent. Following an 11-day hunger strike and Moshe Sharrett’s intervention, Sereni was released from jail and sent on a secret mission to Baghdad.

YOUNG, COURTNEY. MI5’s Far East expert during World War II, Courtney Young was a former Reuter’s News Agency correspondent in France who was fluent in Japanese and headed B1(f). After the war, he investigated Soviet espionage and interrogated the GRU defector Allan Foote. The result was a lengthy statement that subsequently was published as Foote’s autobiography, A Handbook for Spies. In February 1949 Young was appointed M15’s first security liaison officer to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, a post he held until March 1951. Following the defections of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in May 1951, Young, as the D1, pressed Anthony Blunt, but he made no admissions. Young was then transferred to Kuala Lumpur to advise the Malay Special Branch, but died soon after his return to England.

YOUNG, GEORGE. George Kennedy Young was a big bear of a Scot with a gruff manner that belied his intellectual prowess. After graduating from St. Andrew’s University, he studied at Giessen, Dijon, and Yale and went to work as a reporter on the Glasgow Herald. In 1940 he received a commission in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers and saw action in East Africa, where he was mentioned in dispatches. Thereafter his proficiency in languages, which had won him a double first at St. Andrew’s, brought him into the Secret Intelligence Service, which, after the invasion of Italy, opened a small branch in Bari to oversee its operations into Yugoslavia and Poland.

At the end of the war, Young was posted to Vienna, where he became the first postwar Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) head of station in the quadripartite city, liaising closely with his SIS colleagues at the British military base in Klagenfurt. It was in Austria that Young saw the Cold War at close quarters, handling Soviet defectors and the other flotsam of the intelligence conflict. After a three-year tour in Vienna, Young returned to Broadway to head an economic intelligence unit, designated R8 and known as Economic Requirements, the principal objective of which was to identify certain industrial commodities needed by Soviets that they were obliged to purchase on the world market. The intention was to monitor their production and, if it became necessary, intervene to deny them to the Eastern Bloc. This was a contingency plan that had failed to work against the Nazis, who had continued to receive Swedish iron ore and Romanian oil after war had been declared in 1939. Young’s plan was to ensure that in the event of hostilities, key minerals would be denied to the Kremlin, thereby handicapping the Soviet military machine.

Two years later, upon the retirement of John Teague, Young was appointed controller, Middle East, and took a central role in the planning of Operation BUCCANEER, a plan to seize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s assets that Mohammed Mussadeq had nationalized in 1951. Although the foreign secretary, Herbert Morrison, had endorsed the scheme, it had been rejected by the Cabinet, but within a few months the conditions had changed: Young had been promoted to vice chief by Sir John Sinclair, and Britain had elected a new administration. The discarded Operation BUCCANEER now became BOOT and, with help from the Central Intelligence Agency, was to prove a tremendous success—but only just. At a vital moment, the U.S. State Department lost its nerve and decided to abandon the project in mid-coup. However, all the CIA’s communications to Tehran were being routed through the SIS station in Cyprus, and Young engineered a delay so the recall signal reached the agents in Iran only after Mussadeq had been overthrown and the shah reestablished.

Young always believed he was destined for the top, especially as his Chief, Sinclair, had asked Anthony Eden for permission to take early retirement. Young’s hopes of succeeding him were dashed by the Buster Crabb affair, in which a freelance diver was killed while on a clandestine mission that had been specifically prohibited by the prime minister. A secret inquiry was conducted into the fiasco and it laid the blame on an unfortunate set of coincidences but, for the sake of the politicians, Sinclair agreed to at least appear to be a scapegoat. However, instead of appointing Young, Eden moved Sir Dick White from the Security Service into the Chief’s office. Even though he was five years younger than White, Young realized that he would be unlikely to take the helm, and that in any event White would probably veto him. Disillusioned, he moved into merchant banking in 1961 and joined Kleinwort Benson.

Significantly, Young’s first book was entitled Masters of Indecision: An Inquiry into the Political Process, but he also wrote what is widely regarded as the standard textbook on merchant banking in London. Young also moved into the political arena, considerably influenced by his wife Geryke, who had come from the Dutch East Indies and held strongly right-wing views. Although he stood for Parliament in 1974 and was active in the Monday Club, he never held elected office.

YOUNG, SIR GEORGE. Educated at Eton and universities in France, Germany, and Russia, George Young joined the staff of the British embassy in Washington, D.C., in 1896 and later had served in Athens, Constantinople (where he learned Turkish and became an expert in Ottoman law), Madrid, and Belgrade. At the outbreak of World War I, he was serving in Lisbon, but he returned to London to head Room 40’s Diplomatic Section, which achieved the unsurpassed coup of solving the cipher used by the German Foreign Ministry to encrypt the Zimmermann Telegram in January 1917. In March 1918 he was appointed professor of Portuguese at London University, and after he had inherited his father’s baronetcy, he was adopted as a Labour party parliamentary candidate.

YOUNGER, SIR KENNETH. The second son of Viscount Younger of Leckie, Kenneth Younger was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, before being called to the bar by the Inner Temple in 1932. He was practicing as a barrister when, in 1940, he was drafted into the Security Service, where he headed the French country section. Younger’s tenure in what was then known as E Division, or Alien Control, is memorable for his participation in a major diplomatic incident—the arrest in 1941 of Admiral Emile Muselier, Charles de Gaulle’s deputy, who was suspected of having sold out to Vichy. He was detained in prison until de Gaulle lodged a vigorous protest with Winston Churchill, and a subsequent investigation revealed that Muselier had been the victim of an elaborate conspiracy. Despite this embarrassing episode, Younger continued to liaise with the Free French authorities and later was appointed director of E Division, the MI5 branch responsible for dealing with aliens.

In 1945 Younger stood for Parliament and was elected the Labour MP for Grimsby, a seat he represented for the next 14 years. After his retirement from the House of Commons, he was appointed to Lord Radcliffe’s security tribunal, which looked into the case of John Vassall, the Soviet spy jailed for betraying Admiralty secrets to the KGB. Knighted in 1972, Younger contributed to several political publications and wrote The Public Service in New States in 1960. He died in May 1976. See also YOUNGER, WILLIAM.

YOUNGER, WILLIAM. The Younger family, long a member of “the beerage,” has always enjoyed close links with the Security Service. Bill Younger’s mother Joan, who married Dennis Wheatley, was assigned to MI5’s motor pool as a driver, while his cousin Kenneth Younger, later a Labour MP, headed MI5’s French country section. Bill’s sister Diana also worked in “the office” as a secretary.

Younger’s intelligence career began at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was taught by John Masterman, when he started reporting on suspected Communist Party of Great Britain members for Max Knight. As his stepfather Wheatley recalled, “MI5 were anxious to learn which out of the silly idealistic youngsters were really dangerous agitators, secretly paid by Moscow or the Nazis.” A polio victim while still a child, Younger suffered from restricted growth and a withered arm and was therefore medically unfit to join the army, so instead he worked for Knight, first as an agent and later as a full-time case officer. Younger was so secretive about his work for the Security Service that his family nicknamed him “the bearded oyster.”

As “William Mole,” Younger wrote several detective thrillers, the best of which was The Hammersmith Maggot. His first novel, Trample an Empire, released in 1952, was described by the publishers as “above all a protest against earnestness and an assertion of the small man’s rights to laugh at his ruler,” perhaps a surprisingly iconoclastic approach for a serving MI5 officer. The same book was praised by Wheatley (who neglected to mention that Mole was his stepson) as “quite out of the ordinary and exceptionally good.” In his murder mystery The Skin Trap, Younger described the anguish of a murderer handicapped with a humpback, a result of spinal tuberculosis as a child.

Younger finally retired from MI5 in the late 1950s, having inherited a fortune and being determined to devote himself to writing. He originally concentrated in poetry, and his first book of verse, Madonna and Other Poems, was praised by the critics. Howard Spring wrote that he “is writing better poetry than Byron did at his age.” During the war he had married Nancy Brassey, the widow of Wing Commander Reginald Leslie who was killed in the Mediterranean in 1943. She also wrote some novels, and together they produced Blue Moon in Portugal, a travelogue of their experiences in that country. Younger died suddenly in early 1961 while on a visit to Sicily, where he contracted Asiatic influenza, having recently completed Gods, Men, and Wine, which was published posthumously.

YUGOSLAV SECTION. The Special Operations Executive (SOE) section coordinating operations in Yugoslavia during World War II, also designated DH. The campaign in Yugoslavia was one of contradictions. Most of the missions, particularly to Draza Mihailovic’s s liaison officers, were dreadfully ill equipped and ill prepared, and the choice of personnel was quite eccentric. When, for example, there was a determined effort to send in reinforcements during the spring of 1943, the majority of SOE’s Serbo-Croat speakers were Canadians and members of the Communist party. Two of FUNGUS’S three agents had fought in the Spanish Civil War, and HOATHLEY I consisted entirely of miners from Quebec. About 28 Canadian or American immigrants returned to fight in their homeland, of whom five disappeared, and at least three chose to remain in Yugoslavia after the war, taking jobs in the Communist regime, evidently undeterred by the appalling massacres that followed Tito’s takeover.

Several of those who fought with the Cetniks and Partisans have written accounts of their experiences, with varying degrees of bitterness. Certainly many of the SOE personnel who managed to return to Bari held strong views on what was perceived to be mismanagement in Cairo, if not ruthless political manipulation. Occasionally the high feelings reached Castellani, where Force 266 was accommodated, and sometimes those who had backed the Cetniks, and thought they had been betrayed, had to be separated from the rest. A few of the survivors have recounted their adventures. Jasper Rootham, who liaised with Mihailovic’s forces wrote Miss Fire in 1946, while William Deakin (The Embattled Mountain), Donald Hamilton-Hill (SOE Assignment), Lindsay Rogers (Guerilla Surgeon), Michael Lees (The Rape of Serbia), and Basil Davidson (Partisan Picture) have described their experiences fighting with the Partisans. Together they provide an epic picture of disjointed supplies, atrocious weather, inadequate shelter, and poor food, but an indomitable spirit among the native population that, regrettably, rarely set aside the complexities of local politics to combine against the common enemy. Against a backdrop of spasmodic communications, insufficient air support, and a headquarters staff that could never be completely up to date with the latest developments in the field, the liaison personnel often felt isolated if not ignored. All those who experienced the Yugoslav scene at first hand found it both harrowing and rewarding. Another common strand, highlighted by Deakin and based on his own acute observation while leading TYPICAL, SOE’s pathfinding mission to Tito in May 1943, was the “lack of vital and accurate intelligence of events within Yugoslavia at crucial moments.” The fact that TYPICAL’S mission was officially concluded in September 1943, but its survivors were unable to reach Italy until early December is itself evidence of some of the other difficulties encountered by SOE’s men in the field that they regarded as avoidable.

YUGOSLAVIA. Section D of the Secret Intelligence Service used the British embassy in Belgrade as a regional base until it was evacuated in April 1941 when the Axis occupied the country. Contact was established with the resistance forces led by General Draza Mihailovic, but the British government concluded—based on the faulty

interpretation of some ULTRA material and misleading reports from the field—to switch support to the Communist leader of the partisans, Josip Broz, known as Tito. By September 1943 Fitzroy Mac-lean had been attached to Tito’s headquarters as the British liaison officer, and links were established to Special Operations Executive’s forward base in Bari. The decision to abandon Mihailovic and consign Yugoslavia to a postwar Communist dictatorship remains one of the most controversial of the war, influenced in Cairo by the covert activities of prominent Communists, among them James Klugmann. See also YUGOSLAV SECTION.

Z

Z ORGANISATION. In recognition of the vulnerability of his passport control officers, the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), Admiral Hugh Sinclair, authorized Claude Dansey in 1937 to develop a parallel SIS network in Europe under a variety of business covers—some authentic, others created specially to accommodate the agents. The fundamental attraction of this “Z Organisation” was, of course, its isolation from the Passport Control Offices, which was known to have been compromised.

Dansey had no qualms about recruiting journalists, and among his first agents was Frederick Voight, formerly the Berlin correspondent of the Manchester Guardian. Like Eric Gedye of the Times, his colleague John Evans in Prague, and the Daily Express correspondent in Vienna, (Sir) Geoffrey Cox, Voight was approached informally by Dansey.

Dansey, himself a colorful character with quite a checkered past of business failures in the United States, specialized in exploiting commercial fronts, and among them were Sir Alexander Korda’s London Films, a Highgate travel firm named Lammin Tours, and the General Steamship Trading Company. However, it was Dansey’s network of patriotic journalists that proved the real worth of his organization, many supplying material for not much more than the privilege of being invited by him to lunch at the Jockey Club in Paris. Usually they restricted their activities to compiling reports, probably not going much further than they were for Fleet Street, but it seems likely that Ralph Izzard and Cox may have been serving more than one master when they undertook a hazardous journey to the Dutch frontier with Germany in November 1939.

ZAEHNER, ROBERT. A brilliant linguist with a talent for picking up obscure Middle Eastern dialects, Zaehner was initially recruited by Special Operations Executive out of Oxford in 1940, but he transferred to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and in 1943 was posted to Tehran under press attaché cover. In reality, he was to spend two years living among the tribes of northern Persia, crossing over the frontier into Soviet territory and developing networks of saboteurs in a harsh, mountainous territory filled with hostile enemy agents.

After the war, Zaehner remained in SIS and was posted to Malta to assist in the training of Albanian émigrés destined to return to their country in a fruitless attempt, codenamed VALUABLE, to topple the Communist regime. Although Zaehner knew no Albanian, he soon learned the language and later, in 1950, transferred to Greece to supervise the teams of guerrillas infiltrated over the border from Macedonia.

Once it became clear that the Albanian operation had failed, Zaehner was moved back to Tehran to help run a brilliant scheme designed to replace the anti-Western prime minister, Dr. Mohammed Mussadeq. Zaehner boasted many useful contacts in Iran, dating back to the networks he had recruited during the war, and they were to be of critical importance when the coup was eventually mounted, by which time Zaehner and the rest of Monty Woodhouse’s SIS station had been evacuated.

When Zaehner retired from SIS, he returned to academic life at Oxford, where he taught Persian. He also lectured at Columbia University and the University of London and was a prolific author on the subject of comparative religions. He converted to Catholicism in 1946, and among his many publications are Dialectical Christianity and Christian Materialism, Evolution in Religion, and The Catholic Church and World Religions.

Shortly before his death in November 1974, at the age of 61, Zaehner was interviewed by Peter Wright, the mole hunter at MI5 who was on the trail of a Soviet spy that had been partially identified by a defector. Some of the clues pointed to an SIS officer who had operated in Persia during the war and Zaehner was deeply wounded by the idea that his own loyalty should have come under suspicion.

ZBYTEK, KAREL. A clerk in the émigré Czech Intelligence Office (CIO) in London, which was funded by the Secret Intelligence Service, Karel Zbytek was recruited by the Czech Intelligence Service (StB) in 1955 and was codenamed LIGHT. In return for large sums of money, he betrayed CIO personnel in Belgium, Holland, Scandinavia, Switzerland, the Middle East, West Germany, and Austria. In addition, he revealed the identities of 120 anticommunist CIO staff and 300 talent-spotter reports, thus enabling the StB to develop a double agent operation. Although the CIO’s British liaison contacts concluded the entire network had been penetrated, Zbytek escaped detection, and with £13,000 he had received from the StB, he bought a small hotel in Folkestone.

ZEPPELINS. In an air raid on King’s Lynn in January 1915, two German airships dropped 25 bombs and killed four people, transforming modern warfare and making the enemy’s fleet of airships a target of intense interest to British Naval Intelligence. Further raids were mounted on England’s east coast and during 1916 eight Zeppelins were shot down, five by aircraft. Naval Intelligence monitored the enemy’s wireless traffic, broke the Handelsverkehrsbuch code, and provided a primitive early-warning system. When the L-32 was destroyed over Essex in September 1916, a copy of the new codebook, the Allgemeinefunkspruchbuch, was recovered from the wreckage by Major Bernard Trench, and all further raids were predicted and intercepted.

ZIMMERMANN TELEGRAM. In January 1917 the German foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, sent a secret telegram to his ambassador in Washington, D.C., Count Bernstorff, by three different routes, all encrypted in the same code: one was transmitted by radio from Nauen to Sayville, Long Island; the second went via the Swedish transatlantic cable from Stockholm; and the third was delivered to the U.S. Embassy in Berlin for transmission on the American cable via Copenhagen. The text announced an intention to engage in unrestricted U-boat warfare as of 1 February and directed the ambassador to approach the Mexican government with an offer of support if it attacked the United States to recover “lost territory in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.”

The intercepted text was decrypted in Room 40 by the Reverend William Montgomery and Nigel de Grey and was passed to the U.S. Embassy in London by the director of naval intelligence, Admiral Hall, before being made public in March 1917. Surprisingly, when challenged, Count Bernstorff confirmed the authenticity of the telegram. As a direct consequence, President Woodrow Wilson told Congress in April 1917 that America’s neutrality in World War I would cease.

ZINOVIEV LETTER. In September 1924 Colonel Ronald Meiklejohn at the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) station in Riga acquired a copy of a Comintern directive, typed in Cyrillic and dated 15 September 1924, from a source with access to files in Moscow. Meiklejohn’s secretary translated what turned out to be a letter signed by Grigori Zinoviev, Vladimir Lenin’s president of the Third International, and addressed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). It advocated sedition on a grand scale and agitation within the armed forces, all eloquent proof that the Soviets deliberately had reneged on the terms of the recent Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement that had opened diplomatic relations between the two countries, although it remained to be ratified by Parliament.

The translated letter was received in London by SIS’s chief of production, Major Desmond Morton, and was circulated routinely to the services, MI5, and the Foreign Office, although as was customary there was no indication of how or where SIS had acquired it. Morton later claimed that he had not appreciated the political potential of the text, just as the country was preparing for a general election, and when asked for verification of its authenticity, he confirmed that an SIS source inside the CPGB had reported that the CPGB’s Central Committee had met recently to discuss Zinoviev’s instructions. While nobody quibbled with the general sentiments expressed in the directive, which were entirely in conformity with the Comintern’s policy of exporting Soviet-style Communism, there were immediate demands for assurances of its provenance.

On 25 October, four days before polling day, the entire content of the letter was published in the Daily Mail. As a consequence, Ramsay MacDonald’s first Labour administration, which had already lost a vote of confidence in the Commons and was losing its Liberal support, was portrayed as having been willing to tolerate the Kremlin’s subversion, and Stanley Baldwin was swept into office in a landslide victory. The fact that Zinoviev protested that he had never sent any such letter, and the CPGB denied ever having received it, was dismissed as typically, predictably duplicitous and spurious.

SIS’s involvement in the Zinoviev Letter affair, and the Labour party’s preoccupation with the scandal, survived into 1998 when Tony Blair’s administration commissioned an investigation of SIS’s files to establish once and for all whether the letter was a forgery, as the left had maintained for the previous seven decades, and if so, who had been culpable. The investigation was conducted by the Foreign Office’s chief historian, Gill Bennett, and her subsequent report, which drew on an earlier investigation conducted by Millicent Bagot of MI5, established the sequence of events that had followed safe receipt of the document from Riga.

Recently retired from MI5, Bagot was commissioned to write a report on the affair following the publication in 1967 of The Zinoviev Letter by three Sunday Times journalists, in which they claimed that the letter had been forged in Berlin. She took three years to complete her task and her report, submitted to the director-general, Sir Martin Furnival Jones, which remains closed to the public, was devastating. Morton had circulated the three-page letter to the usual recipients, any number of whom could have had a motive for leaking it first to Conservative Central Office and then to the newspapers. Among the suspects, apart from Morton himself, was the former director of naval intelligence (DNI), Admiral Reginald Hall, who had been elected to the Commons as a Conservative MP in 1922; Mansfield Smith-Cumming’s former deputy Freddie Browning, who died in 1929, at the age of 56, of cirrhosis of the liver; the head of SIS’s army section, Stewart Menzies, who allegedly later acknowledged to Morton that he had sent a copy to the Daily Mail; Donald im Thurn, a well-connected former MI5 officer who had been actively lobbying for the letter’s publication but had not actually seen it for himself; C’s aide Bertie Maw; and Colonel W. A. Alexander, an MI5 officer close to Vernon Kell.

Im Thurn’s diary reveals that he was in touch with the new DNI, Admiral Sir Alan Hotham, who had put him in touch with Maw, and that he was already talking to MI5’s Colonel Alexander and to Bunty Saunders of Scotland Yard, in what now appears to be a race to see who would publish the Zinoviev Letter first. As for the intermediaries at Central Office, there was any number of possibilities, including Joseph Ball, the MI5 officer who in 1929 was to be appointed director of Central Office’s Research Department, and the party’s chairman, Lord Davidson, who later may have paid im Thurn £5,000.

When the document was first circulated the Foreign Office’s Northern Department contacted Captain Hugh Miller, Scotland Yard’s expert on Communism, and he confirmed that the content was similar in tone to what he read in the Comintern’s regular journal, International Press Correspondence. The final proof, as presented by SIS, was Morton’s assertion that he had met his spy inside the CPGB, Jim Finney, on the evening of 10 October, who had corroborated receipt in London of Zinoviev’s directive, and he had written a memorandum recording the fact on 11 October. However, close scrutiny of Morton’s minute revealed that Finney had not made any direct reference to a specific letter from Zinoviev, and MI5 and Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, both surprised and dismayed to learn that Morton had been running an agent inside the CPGB without sharing that knowledge with them, expressed reservations about the strength of this meeting as corroboration. It also seemed that Finney, who had used the alias Finlay, had previously worked briefly for MI5, but had not proved reliable.

The problem that emerged for Sir Hugh Sinclair as various investigations were conducted into the origins and authenticity of the Zinoviev Letter was that SIS found it hard to refute Labour accusations of SIS collusion with the Conservative party and interference and manipulation during the general election campaign. As Bennett eventually concluded, the letter itself was undoubtedly a forgery, although its composition was sufficiently skillful to persuade those who read it of its intrinsic authenticity. No blame could be attached to Meiklejohn for acquiring this tantalizing item and sending it to headquarters, and Morton acted quite properly by circulating it to SIS’s clients.

As for who actually peddled the original Russian document in Riga, the Soviets, who were as interested as anyone else in who had been counterfeiting Comintern directives, concluded that it was a notorious White Russian forger, Vladimir Orlov, who had been General Piotr Wrangel’s chief of intelligence. Orlov had made a good living fabricating ostensibly plausible Soviet documents, mainly for propaganda purposes, and when SIS contacted Meiklejohn to conduct investigations into his source, yet more supporting evidence conveniently materialized, including a record of the minutes of an emergency meeting of the Sovnarkom, the Council of People’s Commissars, convened on 25 October 1924 to discuss the crisis in England and supposedly chaired by Leo Kamenev. This second document, containing admissions that the Zinoviev directive was genuine, was sent to London on 6 November and was seized on by Sinclair as empirical proof, but this too had been forged by Orlov.

The issue of the letter’s authenticity was to be decided by a Cabinet committee, chaired by the foreign secretary, Austen Chamberlain, who conducted a secret inquiry and issued no concluding report. Sinclair supplied a five-point memorandum to prove the case for authenticity and claimed that the source run by the Riga station worked for the Comintern secretariat in Moscow and had access to the Comintern’s secret files, whereas Meiklejohn had only ever claimed to have run an agent in Riga who in turn was in touch with such an individual (whose identity was unknown to him). Sinclair also claimed that the letter’s content was entirely consistent with what was known to be the Comintern’s policies, but his fifth and final argument, that if the document had been a forgery, it would have been uncovered as such, seems bizarre and even desperate. Nevertheless, the committee reported to the full Cabinet on 19 November that they “were unanimously of the opinion that there was no doubt as to the authenticity of the Letter.” Clearly Sinclair’s evidence had swayed a committee of Tory politicians, who must have been predisposed to accept his assurances, but if there was any weight in Sinclair’s belief that a forgery would surely have been discovered, it perhaps follows that he had indeed made just such a determination. Significantly, Assistant Commissioner Sir Wyndham Childs, the head of the Special Branch, who had declined repeatedly to offer an opinion on the letter’s authenticity, insisted that “the document was secured by the Foreign Office organization and their opinion must outweigh that of any other living person, otherwise the Secret Service would be an impossibility.”

While Sinclair’s original error may have been made in good faith, his subsequent cover-up made him all the more culpable. Equally, it must have seemed to him that further lies were more attractive than the grave constitutional crisis into which the country would have fallen, knowing that SIS’s intervention during a general election campaign was certainly believed by the Labour party to have helped change history.

ZIRCON. GCHQ code name for a satellite system designed to intercept Soviet signals while in geostationary orbit. Although planned for many years, as a successor to the U.S. National Security Agency’s RHYOLITE program, it failed to win treasury backing until the Falklands conflict of 1982 served to highlight British dependency on signals intelligence and GCHQ’s lack of resources. The true cost of the highly secret and expensive project, amounting to $700 million, had been concealed within the Ministry of Defence’s budget, and when details leaked in January 1978 the BBC offices in Glasgow were raided and an injunction issued to prevent publication. The project was later scrapped on grounds of cost, and GCHQ agreed to participate in an NSA alternative, codenamed MAGNUM.

ZU PUTLITZ, WOLFGANG. The son of a famous aristocratic family from Potsdam, Wolfgang zu Putlitz sought to join the German diplomatic corps after his service in a Uhlan Guards regiment in Finland during the World War I. He already had a knowledge of French, but to improve his grasp of English the Prussian nobleman traveled to England in 1924 with an introduction to Iona von Ustinov, better known simply as “Klop,” who was then the London correspondent of a German newspaper and fulfilled the role of a press attaché at the embassy. Zu Putlitz stayed with the Ustinovs and spent several weeks at Oxford, where he became friendly with several undergraduates, including a young Graham Greene.

Upon his return to Berlin, zu Putlitz passed the Foreign Ministry examinations and was posted to the German embassy in Washington, D.C. He spent five years in America, latterly as chargé d’affaires in Haiti, before he returned to Berlin to be put in charge of the press section dealing with British and American journalists.

When in June 1934 zu Putlitz was appointed to the post of press attaché in Joachim von Ribbentrop’s embassy in London, it was hoped by his British hosts that he might cooperate with the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in much the same way his predecessor had. Klop, whose son Peter Ustinov was to become a famous actor, had been a valued source for MI5 and had later worked as an agent-runner for SIS. After his defection and adoption of British citizenship, Klop became a key figure in the recruitment of Germans disenchanted with the Nazi regime.

The appointment of the aristocratic zu Putlitz, who was an active homosexual, was to prove a significant development for MI5 and SIS, for very soon he was being debriefed on a weekly basis. As he said in his memoirs, “I would unburden myself of all the dirty schemes and secrets which I encountered as part of my normal daily routine at the Embassy.” Zu Putlitz’s MI5 case officer was the young Dick White, a future head of both MI5 and SIS, who had himself only recently been recruited into the Security Service. As a window into the German regime’s diplomatic maneuvering, zu Putlitz was highly regarded and often held secret meetings with Sir Robert Vansittart of the Foreign Office.

Zu Putlitz eventually came under suspicion as a traitor after he had been switched from London to The Hague in May 1938 and the Gestapo began to accumulate evidence of a highly placed leak. Tipped off to the investigation in October, zu Putlitz demanded to be exfiltrated and Klop supervised the escape with Richard Stevens, the local SIS representative, flying him and his valet to England. However, wartime London was no place for the defector, who no longer had any value to the intelligence services and whose proposals for creating a German opposition among the Social Democrats exiled in Britain were politely ignored. One of the Cabinet ministers who received zu Putlitz, but rejected his ideas, was Sir Sam Hoare.

After a period of frustration, arrangements were made for him to be resettled with a new identity in Jamaica, but the temperamental German loathed the Caribbean and turned up in New York where the U.S. Office of Strategic Services hired him to compile a comprehensive Who’s Who of prominent figures in German politics. Having completed his task, zu Putlitz returned to London in January 1944 where he was befriended by Anthony Blunt of MI5 and for the remainder of the war he helped in the preparation of propaganda broadcasts to Germany.

At the end of the war, zu Putlitz returned briefly to Germany but discovered that he was no longer welcome in his own country. His family estates were in ruins and there were no jobs for a man widely regarded by his contemporaries as a turncoat. Instead he returned to England to lecture German prisoners of war about democratic politics. In January 1948 White helped him acquire British citizenship, and later in the year he gave evidence for the prosecution at the Nuremberg war crimes trial.

Zu Putlitz revealed his Communist sympathies when, in 1952, he went to live in East Germany. As he was to reveal in his autobiography—which also included an acknowledgment to the kindness of Blunt, much to the latter’s embarrassment—zu Putlitz had been in touch with the Soviets since 1943. Zu Putlitz was also a close friend of Guy Burgess, whom he had first met at a party at Cambridge in 1932. When Burgess defected to Moscow, zu Putlitz felt compelled to follow, and in January 1952 he crossed into East Berlin. This was an odd move, considering that his brother had died in an East German prison in 1948, but zu Putlitz never gave a complete account of his motives. He died in September 1975. In his autobiography, which had been published in England in 1957, he disguised the identities of Dick White (whom he referred to as “Tom Allen”), Klop (“Paul X”), Klop’s wife Nadia Benoist (“Gabrielle X”), and their son Peter (“Hugo X”).

ZULULAND. In March 1879 the Honourable William Drummond was appointed intelligence officer to Lord Chelmsford’s force as it marched into the Transvaal to engage King Cetewayo’s army. The son of Lord Strathallan, Drummond was a Natal civil servant and spoke the local language. He was able to identify Cetewayo’s headquarters at Ulundi, which was attacked by the Royal Scots Fusiliers and the 17th Lancers. The Zulu Impi was decimated, but Drummond was killed as he searched for the Royal Kraal.

Bibliography

CONTENTS

Introduction
Reference and Academic
Pre-World War I
World War I
World War II
The Cold War
The 21st Century
British Security Coordination
Naval Intelligence Division
Scientific Intelligence
Special Operations Executive

Albania
Belgium
The Far East
France
Greece
Scandinavia
Yugoslavia

Secret Intelligence Service
British Intelligence Personnel
Military Intelligence
MI5
MI9
GCHQ
Brixmis
Defectors
Double Agents
Northern Ireland
Postwar Counterinsurgency Operations
Websites

INTRODUCTION

One of the many paradoxes at the heart of British Intelligence is the enormous amount that has been published on a topic that supposedly is top secret. How can a “Secret Service” really be secret when details of its history, operations, and personnel are so widely available, and have been for years? Disclosures about Britain’s clandestine agencies date back to the 19th century when Thomas Beach, alias “Major Henri le Caron,” released Twenty-Five Years in the Secret Service: The Recollections of a Spy (1893). However, it was probably the inspirational creator of the Boy Scout movement, Sir Robert Baden-Powell, who made the subject appealing to a wider readership with My Adventures as a Spy in 1915. The following year, in 1916, the former Liberal MP Trebitsch Lincoln caused a furor in New York with Revelations of an International Spy, purporting to be an account of his work as an agent, initially for the Germans and then for the British. Sixteen years later his appropriately titled memoirs, published in Germany, The Autobiography of an Adventurer, were translated and published in the United States.

Following World War I, there were further revelations, falling into two broad categories: the memoirs of participants who gave accounts of their adventures, and more general books written by journalists anxious to capitalize on the enduring popularity of the second oldest profession—and often none too scrupulous with their facts.

Books by the authentic intelligence officers who went into print include J. C. Lawson’s Tales of Aegean Intrigue, Sir Campbell Stuart’s The Secrets of Crewe House, Captain L. B. Weldon’s Hard Lying: Eastern Mediterranean 1914–1919, and I Was a Spy! by Marthe McKenna, a book remarkable for an endorsement with a foreword from Winston Churchill. There was also Who Goes There? by Henry de Halsalle, who described his book as “an account of the Secret Service Adventures of ‘Ex-Intelligence’ during the Great War of 1914–1918”; Sam Hoare with The Fourth Seal; William Gibson in Wild Career; and Strange Intelligence: Memoirs of Naval Secret Service by Hector Bywater. Sir Paul Dukes, the author of Red Dusk and the Morrow: Adventures and Investigations in Soviet Russia, returned to his theme of his own involvement in espionage in 1938 with The Story of ST-25. Similarly, George Hill, who was also operating in Russia during and after the Bolshevik Revolution, wrote Go Spy the Land in 1932 and tapped the same vein in 1936 with Dreaded Hour. Whereas Hill wrote about his own assignment, Henry Landau set a precedent in 1934 by making more general revelations with All’s Fair, which he followed soon afterward with three other titles, all describing his wartime activities for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) on the continent, and all published from the safety of the United States where he could not be threatened with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act.

That the authorities took the confidentiality that was supposed to surround SIS seriously had been demonstrated in 1932 when Compton Mackenzie was convicted and fined at the Old Bailey for indiscretions contained in his memoirs, Greek Memories, in which the author recalled his participation in SIS’s wartime operations in the Eastern Mediterranean. Others in not dissimilar positions published memoirs apparently without incurring the wrath of Whitehall. For example, Edwin Woodhall, one of a handful of Metropolitan Police Special Branch officers seconded to France on counterintelligence duties in 1914, wrote Detective and Secret Service Days in 1932, followed soon afterward by Spies of the Great War.

Within this first category should be included those authors who wrote what they claimed to be firsthand accounts of their exploits that did not always bear close scrutiny. The tone was set with My Secret Service, by “The Man Who Dined with the Kaiser.” This was followed by I Spy! Sensational Disclosures of a British Secret Service Agent by “Baroness Carla Jenssen”—actually Mrs. Stafford Lewis, famously described by MI5’s Guy Liddell as “a bankrupt and an adventuress”—which is among the first in the genre that was to become especially prevalent after World War II. Similarly, Marthe McKenna wrote no less than three other works of nonfiction about espionage after the success of I Was a Spy!, and also produced eight spy novels. The gray area between fact and fiction, which in later years was to become even more blurred, was exemplified by Sidney Reilly’s wife Pepita who, eight years after his mysterious disappearance over the Soviet frontier in 1925, published Sidney Reilly: Britain’s Master Spy. How much of her tale was really true? Only a few of the cognoscenti knew, and their lips were sealed. Similarly, Allan Monkhouse, who had been accused of espionage in Russia, released Moscow, 1911–1933 without ever acknowledging that he had indeed been working in the Soviet capital for years as an SIS agent.

The second broad group of books published during the interwar years was, with few exceptions, of a more sensational nature, claiming to describe covert operations conducted by undercover operators. Into this category falls Nicholas Everitt’s British Secret Service during the Great War, among several others that fail most tests of reliability.

Rather different was Secret Service by Sir George Aston, which offered a detailed study of intelligence operations conducted during World War I. Major General Aston’s contribution to the literature was a milestone, for as a Royal Marines officer he had been a member of the Admiralty’s Foreign Intelligence Committee in 1883 and later had served in the Naval Intelligence Division. Far from a work of sensational disclosure, Aston’s analytical work can properly be considered as establishing a third category of intelligence publication—that of the serious, almost academic, approach to a topic that hitherto had been the preserve of self-publicists and Fleet Street hacks.

World War II gave a further boost to British intelligence literature, although the emphasis was on missions undertaken by Special Operations Executive and escapes from prison camps, usually devoid of any reference to the assistance of MI9. From the end of the war until 1974 and the publication of Fred Winterbotham’s The Ultra Secret, only two SIS veterans wrote books about their wartime role: Leslie Nicholson, calling himself “John Whitwell,” and Kim Philby. Nothing, of course, had been divulged about GCHQ, although MI5’s postwar director-general, Sir Percy Sillitoe, had been given approval by his successor to produce an autobiography, Cloak without Dagger in 1955, and the Security Service had authorized Stephens Watts’s Moonlight on a Lake in Bond Street. Two other books had met resistance: Eddie Chapman’s attempt to exploit his wartime role as a double agent ended at the Old Bailey in 1945 with an injunction on The Eddie Chapman Story, which was not released for another 10 years, and Lily Sergueiev’s Secret Service Rendered was originally published in Paris in 1966 as Seule Face à l’Abwehr.

With the certainty, following the publication in 1968 of Philby’s My Silent War, that the author had betrayed to the Soviets every SIS secret with which he had been entrusted, and the reluctant consent given in 1972 to Sir John Masterman to let Yale University Press print an abridged version of The Double Cross System in the War of 1939–1945, the floodgates opened, prompting the double agents Dusko Popov (TRICYCLE), Juan Pujol (GARBO), and John Moe (MUTT) to pen their memoirs. The revisionists, confident that the true history of World War II was hidden in classified archives, embarked on a massive historical exercise that continues to this day, but the three fundamental groups of books still apply: the firsthand exposes, the biographies and case studies, and finally the more academic, analytical histories.

To choose six authors representative of the postwar era, the obvious choices would be Peter Wright and Joan Miller from MIS, Anthony Cavendish and George Blake from SIS, Gordon Welchman and Peter Calvocoressi from GCHQ. As for the historians, Whitehall preferred to commission Professor Harry Hinsley to head a Cabinet Office-approved team to sift through the intercepts and classified material to provide a fuller picture of the intelligence dimension to World War II.

In the modern era, with wider acknowledgment of the vital role played by intelligence in the formulation of policy and the prosecution of wars, the same three groups of books remain relevant: the rather personal disclosures made by the practitioners, such as Oleg Gordievsky, Richard Tomlinson, and Stella Rimington; the wider work of Christopher Andrew, Richard Aldrich, and Peter Hennessy; and the more concentrated studies of specialist journalists, among them Michael Smith, Tom Bower, Barrie Penrose, Chapman Pincher, David Leigh, and Stephen Dorril.

The end of the Cold War and the defeat of the Provisional IRA brought the new challenges of global terrorism and another plethora of books, although as yet the criteria of the three distinct groups remain unfulfilled because of the tightening of the ban, reinforced by legislation following the restrictions confirmed in the House of Lords ruling on the lengthy SpyCatcher litigation, on personal accounts written by either serving British intelligence personnel or retirees. Thus the field has been left to the journalists and academics, although doubtless the balance will be redressed in due course.

Another of the paradoxes surrounding the plentiful literature on the subject of British Intelligence, and the numerous websites offering information, is the relative paucity of reliable information available either in print, from the Internet, or from archives. Indeed, the KGB archive in Moscow and the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, contain far more British Intelligence documentation than anything available from the Public Record Office at Kew in England. Thus, in something approaching a historical vacuum, with only a minimal number of original papers declassified and released in Britain, researchers have become increasingly dependent on memoirs and other books purporting to recount accurately the operations of the country’s myriad clandestine organizations.

Unfortunately, there are probably rather more misleading data available from electronic sources than there is authentic material, but the titles listed here can be regarded as accurate. Articles from the two principal academic journals, Intelligence and National Security and the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, are abbreviated as INS and IJIC, respectively.

REFERENCE AND ACADEMIC

Aitken, Jonathan. Officially Secret. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971.

Bruce Lockhart, John. British and American Approaches to Intelligence. London: Macmillan, 1987.

Bunyan, Tony. The History and Practice of the Political Police in Britain. London: Quartet, 1983.

Buranelli, Vincent, and Nan Buranelli. Spy/Counterspy. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983.

Carew-Hunt, Robert. The Theory and Practice of Communism. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1950.

Cawelti, John G. The Spy Story. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Davies, Philip H. J. The British Secret Services. London: ABC-Clio, 1996.

De Mowbray, Stephen. Key Facts in Soviet History. London: Pinter, 1990.

Deacon, Richard. Spyclopaedia. London: Macdonald, 1987.

Dobson, Christopher, and Ronald Payne. The Dictionary of Espionage. London: Harrap, 1984.

Hart, H. L. A. Law, Liberty, and Morality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963.

Henderson, Robert. Brassey’s International Intelligence Yearbook. London: Brassey’s, 2002.

Herman, Michael. Intelligence Power in Peace and War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

———. Intelligence Services in the Information Age. London: Frank Cass, 2001.

Lloyd, Mark. The Guinness Book of Espionage. London: Guinness, 1994.

May, Ernest. Knowing One’s Enemies. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Richelson, Jeffrey. Foreign Intelligence Organizations. Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1988.

PRE-WORLD WAR I

Baden-Powell, Robert. My Adventures as a Spy. London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1915.

Childers, Erskine. Riddle of the Sands. London: Blackie, 1961.

Chisholm, Roderick. Ladysmith. London: Osprey, 1979.

Hopkirk, Peter. The Great Game. London: John Murray, 1990.

WORLD WAR I

Agar, Augustus. Baltic Episode. London: Conway Maritime Press, 1963.

———. Footprints in the Sea. London: Evans Bros., 1959.

———. Showing the Flag. London: Evans Bros., 1962.

Aston, Sir George. Secret Service. London: Faber & Faber, 1930.

Brook-Shepherd, Gordon. Iron Maze: The Western Secret Services and the Bolsheviks. London: Macmillan, 1998.

Bywater, Hector. Strange Intelligence. London: Constable, 1931.

Cook, Andrew. On His Majesty’s Secret Service: Sidney Reilly Codename ST1. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2002.

Dukes, Sir Paul. Come Hammer, Come Sickle. London: Cassell, 1947.

———. Epic of the Gestapo. London: Cassell, 1940.

———. Red Dusk and the Morrow. New York: Doubleday, 1922.

———. The Story of ST-25. London: Cassell, 1938.

Everitt, Nicholas. British Secret Service during the Great War. London: Hutchinson, 1920.

Fisher, John. Gentleman Spies: Intelligence Agents in the British Empire and Beyond. Phoenix Mill, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2002.

Gibson, William. Wild Career. London: Harrap, 1935.

Halsalle, Henry de. Who Goes There? London: Hutchinson, 1927.

Haswell, Jock. British Military Intelligence. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973.

Hill, George. Dreaded Hour. London: Cassell, 1936.

———. Go Spy the Land. London: Cassell, 1932.

Hoare, Samuel [Lord Templewood]. The Fourth Seal. London: Heinemann, 1930.

Household, Geoffrey. Against the Wind. London: Michael Joseph, 1958.

Howarth, Patrick. Intelligence Chief Extraordinary. London: Bodley Head, 1986.

Jenssen, Baroness Carla. I Spy! London: Jarrolds, 1930.

Judd, Alan. The Quest for C. London: HarperCollins, 1999.

Knoblock, Edward. Round the Room. London: Chapman & Hall, 1939.

Landau, Henry. All’s Fair. New York: Putnam’s, 1934.

———. The Enemy Within. New York: Putnam’s, 1937.

———. Secret of the White Lady. New York: Putnam’s, 1935.

———. Spreading the Spy Net. London: Jarrolds, 1938.

Lawson, J. C. Tales of Aegean Intrigue. London: Chatto & Windus, 1920.

Leggett, George. The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Lincoln, Trebitsch. The Autobiography of an Adventurer. New York: Henry Holt, 1932.

———. Revelations of an International Spy. New York: Robert McBride, 1916. McKenna, Marthe. I Was a Spy! London: Jarrolds, 1923.

Mackenzie, Compton. Greek Memories. London: Cassell, 1932.

———. Greek Memories. Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1987.

———. Water on the Brain. London: Chatto & Windus, 1933.

The Man Who Dined with the Kaiser. My Secret Service. London: Herbert Jenkins, 1916.

Mason, A. E. W. The Four Corners of the World. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1925.

Maugham, W. Somerset. Ashenden. London: Heinemann, 1928.

Popplewell, Richard. “The Surveillance of Indian Revolutionaries in Great Britain and on the Continent, 1903–1914.” INS 3, no. 1.

Reilly, Sidney. Sidney Reilly: Britain’s Master Spy. London: Dorset Press, 1985.

Sheffy, Yigal. “British Intelligence and the Middle East, 1900–1918: How Much Do We Know?” INS 17, no. 1.

Stuart, Sir Campbell. The Secrets of Crewe House. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1920.

Weldon, L. B. Hard Lying. London: Herbert Jenkins, 1925.

West, William J. Spymaster. London: Wynwood Press, 1989.

Williams, Valentine. The World of Action. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1938.

Woodhall, Edwin. Detective and Secret Service Days. London: Mellifont Press, 1932.

———. Spies of the Great War. London: Mellifont Press, 1933.

WORLD WAR II

Alanbrooke, Field Marshal Lord. War Diaries, 1939–1945. London: Weidenfeld, 2001.

Andrew, Christopher. Secret Service. London: Heinemann, 1985.

Ayer, A. J. Part of My Life. London: Collins, 1977.

Bazna, Elyesa. I Was Cicero. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.

Best, Antony. “‘This Probably Over-Valued Military Power’: British Intelligence and Whitehall’s Perception of Japan, 1939–1941.” INS 12, no. 3.

Buckton, Henry. Politicians at War. London: Leo Cooper, 2003.

Clarke, Dudley. Seven Assignments. London: Jonathan Cape, 1948.

Dovey, H. O. “The Middle East Intelligence Centre.” INS 4, no. 4.

Elwell, Charles. Corsican Excursion. London: Bodley Head, 1954.

Fletcher, Reginald [Lord Winster]. The Air Defence of Britain. London: Harmondsworth Press, 1938.

Footman, David. Civil War in Russia. London: Faber & Faber, 1961.

———. Dead Yesterday. London: White Lion, 1974.

———. In Memoriam Archie, 1904–1964. London: Mrs. W. S. Clarke, 1967.

———. Red Prelude. London: Cresset Press, 1944.

Fulford, Roger. Queen Victoria. London: Collins, 1951.

Garby-Czerniawski, Roman. The Big Network. London: George Ronald, 1961.

Garnett, David, The Secret History of the Political Warfare Executive. London: St. Ermin’s Press, 2002.

Handel, Michael, ed., Strategic and Operational Deception in the Second World War. London: Frank Cass, 1987.

Harcup, Guy. Camouflage. Exeter: David & Charles, 1979.

Hastings, Stephen. The Drums of Memory. London: Leo Cooper, 1994.

Haswell, Jock. The Tangled Web. London: John Goodchild, 1985.

Hesketh, Roger. Fortitude: The D-Day Deception Campaign. London: St. Ermin’s Press, 1999.

Hills, R. J. Phantom Was There. London: Edward Arnold, 1951.

Hinsley, Sir Harry, with E. E. Thomas, C. F. G. Ransom, and R. C. Knight. British Intelligence in the Second World War. 5 vols. London: HMSO, 1990.

Holt, Thadeus. The Deceivers. London: Simon & Schuster, 2004.

Home, Alastair. Macmillan. London: Macmillan, 1991.

Ind, Alison. A History of Modern Espionage. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1965.

Johns, Philip. Within Two Cloaks. London: William Kimber, 1979.

Jones, Aubrey. The Pendulum of Politics. Faber & Faber, 1946.

Jones, R. V Reflections on Intelligence. London: Heinemann, 1989.

Kross, Peter. The-Encyclopedia of World War II Spies. Fort Lee, N.J.: Barricade Books, 2001.

Liddell, Guy. The Guy Liddell Diaries. London: Routledge, 2005.

Lycett, Andrew. Ian Fleming. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995.

McCall, Gibb. Flight Most Secret. London: William Kimber, 1981.

Magan, William. Middle Eastern Approaches. Michael Russell, 2001.

Maschwitz, Eric. No Chip on My Shoulder. London: Herbert Jenkins, 1957.

Masters, Anthony. Literary Agents. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.

Merrick, K. A. Flights of the Forgetten. London: Arms & Armour, 1989.

Moyszich, L. C. Operation Cicero. London: Allan Wingate, 1950.

Mure, David. Practise to Deceive. London: William Kimber, 1977.

Pantcheff, Theodore. Fortress Island. London: Phillimore, 1981.

Sansom, A. W. I Spied Spies. London: Harrap, 1965.

Stafford, David. Churchill and Secret Service. London: John Murray, 1997.

Strong, Sir Kenneth. Intelligence at the Top. London: Cassell, 1968.

———. Men of Intelligence. London: Cassell, 1970.

Wark, Wesley. “British Intelligence and Small Wars in the 1930s.” INS 2, no. 4.

———. The Ultimate Enemy. London: I. B. Tauris, 1985.

Warner, Philip. The Secret Forces of World War II. London: Granada, 1985.

Waugh, Alec. A Spy in the Family. London: W. H. Allen, 1970.

Wheatley, Dennis. The Deception Planners. London: Hutchinson, 1980.

Whinney, Patrick. Corsican Command. London: Patrick Stephens, 1989.

THE COLD WAR

Aldrich, Richard. The Hidden Hand. London: John Murray, 2001.

Blake, George. No Other Choice. London: Jonathan Cape, 1990.

Bloch, Jonathan, and Patrick Fitzgerald. British Intelligence and Covert Action. London: Junction Books, 1983.

Bower, Tom. Red Web. London: Aurum Press, 1989.

Cavendish, Anthony. Inside Intelligence. London: Collins, 1990.

Cecil, Robert. A Divided Life. London: Bodley Head, 1988.

Cloake, John. Templer: Tiger of Malaya. London: Harrap, 1985.

Clive, Nigel. “From War to Peace in SIS.” INS 10, no. 3.

Cockerill, A. W. Sir Percy Sillitoe. London: W. H. Allen, 1975.

Colvin, John. Twice around the World. London: Leo Cooper, 1991.

Cookridge, E. H. Secrets of the British Secret Service. London: Sampson, Low, 1947.

———. The Third Man. London: Arthur Barker, 1968.

Costello, John. Mask of Treachery, New York: William Morrow, 1988.

Cradock, Percy. In Pursuit of British Interests. London: John Murray, 1997.

———. Know Your Enemy. London: John Murray, 2001.

Deacon, Richard. The British Connection: Russia’s Manipulation of British Individuals and Institutions. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979.

———. A History of the British Secret Service. London: Frederick Muller, 1969.

Dear, Ian. Sabotage and Subversion. London: Arms & Armour, 1996.

Dorril, Stephen. MI6. London: Fourth Estate, 2000.

Dorril, Stephen, and Robin Ramsay. Smear!: Wilson and the Secret State. London: Fourth Estate, 1991.

Driberg, Tom. Guy Burgess. London: Weidenfeld, 1956.

———. Ruling Passions. London: Jonathan Cape, 1977.

Dzhirkvelov, Ilya. Secret Servant. London: Collins, 1987.

Elliott, Nicholas. Never Judge a Man by His Umbrella. Stroud, Wiltshire: Michael Russell, 1991.

Ellis, C. H. Dick. Transcaspian Episode. London: Hutchinson, 1963.

Glees, Anthony. Secrets of the Service. London: Jonathan Cape, 1987.

Golitsyn, Anatoli. New Lies for Old. London: Bodley Head, 1984.

Henderson, Paul. An Unlikely Spy. London: Bloomsbury, 1993.

Hennessy, Peter. The Secret State. London: Penguin, 2002.

Hurd, Douglas. Memoirs. London: Little, Brown, 2003.

Knightley, Philip. The Second Oldest Profession. London: André Deutsch, 1986.

Kyle, Keith. Suez. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991.

Lancaster, Donald. The Emancipation of French Indochina. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961.

Leigh, David. The Frontiers of Secrecy. London: Junction, 1980.

McDermott, Geoffrey. The Eden Legacy. London: Leslie Frewin, 1969.

Milne, Seamus. The Enemy Within. London: Verso, 1994.

Minnick, Wendell. Spies and Provocateurs. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1992.

Monkhouse, Allan. Moscow 1911–1933. London: Victor Gollancz, 1933.

Montgomery, Brian. A Field Marshal in the Family. London: Constable, 1973.

Moorehead, Alan. The Traitors. New York: Harper & Row, 1952.

Moss, Robert. Carnival of Spies. New York: Villard, 1987.

Nelson, Michael. War of the Black Heavens. London: Brassey’s, 1997.

Owen, David. Time to Declare. London: Michael Joseph, 2001.

Paine, Lauran. Britain’s Intelligence Service. London: Robert Hale, 1979.

Penrose, Barrie, and Simon Freeman. Conspiracy of Silence. London: Grafton Books, 1986.

Peskett, John. Strange Intelligence. London: Robert Hale, 1981.

Philby, Kim. My Silent War. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968.

Philby, Rufina, and Hayden Peake. The Private Life of Kim Philby. London: St. Ermin’s Press, 1999.

Pincher, Chapman. Their Trade Is Treachery. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1981.

Porter, Bernard. The Origins of the Vigilant State. London: Weidenfeld, 1987.

————. Plots and Paranoia. London: Unwin Hyman, 1980.

Rees, Goronwy. A Chapter of Accidents. London: Chatto & Windus, 1972.

Rusbridger, James. The Intelligence Game. London: Bodley Head, 1989.

Sampson, Anthony. The Changing Anatomy of Britain. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1982.

Schecter, Jerrold. The Spy Who Saved the World. New York: Charles Scribner’s, 2002.

Seton-Watson, Hugh. Neither War nor Peace. London: Methuen, 1960.

Stafford, David. Spies beneath Berlin. London: John Murray, 2002.

Summers, Anthony, and Stephen Dorril. Honeytrap. London: Weidenfeld, 1987.

Teague-Jones, Reginald. The Spy Who Disappeared. London: Victor Gollancz, 1990.

Thomas, Rosamund. Espionage and Secrecy: The Official Secrets Acts 1911–1989 of the United Kingdom. London: Routledge, 1991.

Thurloe, Richard. The Secret State. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994.

Tomlinson, Richard. The Big Breach. Moscow: Narodny Variant, 2000.

Trevor Roper, Hugh. The Philby Affair. London: William Kimber, 1968.

Urban, Mark. UK Eyes Alpha. London: Faber & Faber, 1996.

Verrier, Anthony. Through the Looking-Glass. London: Jonathan Cape, 1983.

West, Rebecca. The New Meaning of Treason. New York: Viking Press, 1967.

Wynne, Greville. The Man from Moscow. London: Hutchinson, 1967.

———. The Man from Odessa. London: Robert Hale, 1981.

Wright, Peter. The Encyclopedia of Espionage. London: Heinemann, 1990.

———. SpyCatcher. New York: Doubleday, 1987.

Young, George K. Subversion and the British Riposte. London: Ossian, 1984.

———. Who Is My Liege? London: Gentry Books, 1972.

Younger, Kenneth. Changing Perspectives in British Foreign Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964.

THE 21ST CENTURY

Adams, James. The New Spies. London: Hutchinson, 1994.

Smith, Michael. New Cloak, Old Dagger. London: Cassell, 1996.

BRITISH SECURITY COORDINATION

Hyde, Harford Montgomery. Secret Intelligence Agent. London: Constable, 1982.

Macdonald, Bill. The True Intrepid. Surrey, B.C.: Timberholme Books, 1998.

Mahl, Thomas E. Desperate Deception. London: Brassey’s, 1998.

Stafford, David. Camp X. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1986.

Stephenson, William. British Security Coordination. London: St. Ermin’s Press, 1998.

NAVAL INTELLIGENCE DIVISION

Beesley, Patrick. Very Special Admiral. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1980.

Deacon, Richard. The Silent Service. Exeter: David & Charles, 1978.

Denham, Henry. Inside the Nazi Ring, London: John Murray, 1984.

Hampshire, A. Cecil. The Phantom Fleet. London: William Kimber, 1960.

Hiley, Nicholas. “The Strategic Origins of Room 40.” INS 2, no. 2.

Maclaren, John, and Nicholas Hiley. “Nearer the Truth: The Search for Alexander Szek.” INS 4, no. 4.

Maiolo, Joseph. “‘I Believe the Hun Is Cheating’: British Admiralty Technical Intelligence and the German Navy, 1936–1939.” INS 11, no. 1.

Montagu, Ewen. Beyond Top Secret U. London: Peter Davies, 1977.

Richards, Brooks. The Secret Flotillas. London: HMSO, 1999.

SCIENTIFIC INTELLIGENCE

Operation Epsilon: The Farm Hall Transcripts. Introduced by Sir Charles Frank. Bristol: Institute of Physics Publishing, 1993.

Zimmerman, David. Top Secret Exchange. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1996.

SPECIAL OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE

Beevor, J. G. SOE: Recollections and Reflections. London: Bodley Head, 1981.

Boyce, Frederic, and Douglas Everett. SOE: The Scientific Secrets. Thrupp, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2004.

Cookridge, E. H. Inside SOE. London: Arthur Baker, 1966.

Dalton, Hugh. The Fateful Years. London: Frederick Muller, 1957.

Dodds-Parker, Douglas. Setting Europe Ablaze. London: Springwood, 1983.

Howarth, Patrick. Undercover. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.

Mackenzie, William. The Secret History of SOE. London: St. Ermin’s Press, 2000.

Marks, Leo. Between Silk and Cyanide. London: HarperCollins, 1998.

Rigden, Denis. SOE Syllabus. London: PRO, 2001.

Seaman, Mark. Operation Foxley. London: PRO, 1998.

Stafford, David. British and European Resistance. London: Macmillan, 1980.

Sweet-Escott, Bickham. Baker Street Irregular. London: Methuen, 1965.

Walker, David E. Lunch with a Stranger. London: W. W. Norton, 1957.

Wilkinson, Peter, and Joan Bright Astley. Gubbins and SOE. London: Leo Cooper, 1993.

Albania

Amery, Julian. Approach March. London: Hutchinson, 1973.

Kemp, Peter. The Thorns of Memory. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990.

Smiley, David. Albanian Assignment. London: Chatto & Windus, 1984.

Stirling, Walter. Safety Last. London: Hollis & Carter, 1953.

Belgium

Amies, Hardy. Just So Far. London: Collins, 1954.

Foot, M. R. D. SOE in the Low Countries. London: St. Ermin’s Press, 2001.

The Far East

Chapman, F. Spencer. The Jungle Is Neutral. London: Chatto & Windus, 1949.

Cruickshank, Charles. SOE in the Far East. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Gough, Richard. SOE Singapore, 1941–1942. London: William Kimber, 1985.

O’Brien, Terence. The Moonlight War. London: Collins, 1987.

France

Foot, M. R. D. SOE in France. London: HMSO, 1966.

Fuller, Jean Overton. Déricourt: The Chequered Spy. Wilton, Wiltshire: Michael Russell, 1989.

Greece

Clive, Nigel. A Greek Experience, 1943–1948. Winchester: Michael Russell, 1985.

Fielding, Xan. Hide and Seek. London: Secker & Warburg, 1954.

———. One Man in His Time. London: Macmillan, 1990.

Gallegos, Adrian. From Capri to Oblivion. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1959.

Hammond, Nicholas. Venture into Greece. London: William Kimber, 1983.

Myers, E. C. W. Greek Entanglement. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1955.

Seligman, Adrian. War in the Islands. Thrupp, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1996.

Woodhouse, C. M. Apple of Discord. London: Hutchinson, 1948.

———. Something Ventured. London: Granada, 1982.

Scandinavia

Cruickshank, Charles. SOE in Scandinavia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Manus, Max. Underwater Saboteur. London: William Kimber, 1983.

Wiggan, William. Operation Freshman. London: William Kimber, 1986.

Yugoslavia

Auty, Phyllis, and Richard Clogg. British Policy towards Wartime Resistance in Yugoslavia and Greece. London: Macmillan, 1975.

Davidson, Basil. Partisan Picture. London: Bedford Books, 1946.

———. Special Operations Europe. London: Victor Gollancz, 1980.

Deakin, William. The Embattled Mountain. London: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Hamilton-Hill, Donald. SOE Assignment. London: William Kimber, 1973.

Lees, Michael. Special Operations Executed. London: William Kimber, 1986.

SECRET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE

Barker, Ralph. Aviator Extraordinary. London: Chatto & Windus, 1969.

Best, Sigismund Payne. The Venlo Incident. London: Hutchinson, 1950.

Bower, Tom. The Perfect English Spy. London: Heinemann, 1995.

Bristow, Desmond. A Game of Moles. London: Little, Brown, 1993.

Brown, John. In Durance Vile. London: Robert Hale, 1981.

Cave Brown, Anthony. “C”: The Biography of Sir Stewart Menzies. London: Macmillan, 1987. •

Cecil, Robert. “C’s War.” INS 1, no. 2.

———. “Five of Six at War.” INS 9, no. 2.

Cross, John. Red Jungle. London: Robert Hale, 1957.

Crozier, Brian. Free Agent. London: HarperCollins, 1993.

Davies, Philip. “From Special Operations to Special Political Action: The ‘Rump SOE’ and SIS Post-War Covert Action Capability, 1945–1977.” INS 15, no. 3.

———. “The SIS Singapore Station and the SIS Far Eastern Controller.” INS 14, no. 4.

Deacon, Richard. “C”: The Biography of Maurice Oldfield. London: Macdonald, 1985.

Fourcade, Marie-Madeleine. Noak’s Ark. London: Allen & Unwin, 1973.

Gulbenkian. Nubar. Pantaraxia. London: Hutchinson, 1965.

Jones, R. V Most Secret War. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978.

McKay, C. G. “Our Man in Reval.” INS 9, no. 1.

Madeira, Victor. “‘Wishful Thinking Allowed’: Secret Service Committee and Intelligence Reform in Great Britain, 1919–1923.” INS 18, no. 1.

Marck, David de Young de la. “De Gaulle, Colonel Passy, and British Intelligence, 1940-1942.” INS 18, no. 1.

Marshall-Cornwall, Sir James. Wars and Rumours of War. London: Leo Cooper, 1984.

Morrell, Gordon. “Redefining Intelligence and Intelligence-gathering: The Industrial Intelligence Centre and the Metro-Vickers Affair, Moscow, 1933.” INS 9, no. 3.

Muggeridge, Malcolm. Chronicles of Wasted Time. New York: William Morrow, 1974.

O’Brien-ffrench, Conrad. Delicate Mission. London: Skilton & Shaw, 1979.

Philby, Kim. My Silent War. London: McGibbon & Kee, 1968.

Read, Anthony, and David Fisher. Colonel Z. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1984.

Rieul, Roland. Soldier into Spy. London: William Kimber, 1986.

Smith, Michael. Foley. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1999.

Thomaselli, P. “C’s Moscow Station: The Anglo-Russian Trade Mission as a Cover for SIS in the Early 1920s.” INS 17, no. 3.

Whitwell, John. British Agent. London: William Kimber, 1966.

Winterbotham, F. W. Secret and Personal. London: William Kimber, 1969.

———. The Ultra Secret. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974.

———. The Ultra Spy. London: Macmillan, 1989.

BRITISH INTELLIGENCE PERSONNEL

Allen, W. E. D. David Allen: The History of a Family Firm, 1857–1957. London: John Murray, 1957.

Bingham, Charlotte. Coronet among the Weeds. London: Heinemann, 1963.

Bingham, John. The Double Agent. London: Victor Gollancz, 1966.

———. A Fragment of Fear. London: Victor Gollancz, 1965.

———. Night’s Black Agent. New York: Dodd’s, 1961.

Bingham, Madeleine. Peers and Plebs. London: Allen & Unwin, 1975.

Cairncross, John. After Polygamy Was Made a Sin. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974.

Carr, John Dickson. Top Secret. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1964.

Fleming, Ian. Casino Royale. London: Signet, 1953.

Grant, Joan. Joan Wheatley. Return to Elysium. London: Methuen, 1957.

Greene, Graham. The Heart of the Matter. London: Bodley Head, 1948.

———. Our Man in Havana. London: Bodley Head, 1958.

———. The Tenth Man. London: Bodley Head, 1985.

Knight, Maxwell. Crime Cargo. London: Philip Allan, 1934.

———. Gunmen’s Holiday. London: Philip Allan, 1935.

———. Pets and Their Problems. London: Heinemann, 1968.

Kurtz, Harald. Princess Eugenie. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1964.

Le Carré, John [David Cornwell]. A Murder of Quality. London: Victor Gollancz, 1962.

———. A Perfect Spy. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1986.

Lyall, Archie. The Balkan Road. London: Methuen, 1930.

———. Russian Roundabout. London: Douglas Harmsworth, 1933.

———. Twenfy-five Languages of Europe. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1932.

Mole, William [William Younger]. The Hammersmith Maggot. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1955.

Prater, Donald. A Ringing Glass. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.

Rickman, Alexander. Swedish Iron Ore. London: Faber & Faber, 1939.

Verschoyle, Derek. The Balcony. London, 1949.

Wheatley, Dennis. Drink and Ink. London: Hutchinson, 1979.

———. Stranger than Fiction. London: Hutchinson, 1959.

Williams, Valentine. The Man with the Clubfoot. London: Herbert Jenkins.

Zaehner, Robert. Hinduism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966.

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

Fergusson, Thomas G. British Military Intelligence: The Development of a Modern Intelligence Organization, 1870–1914. Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1984.

Gudgin, Peter. Military Intelligence: A History. Phoenix Mill, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1999.

———. Military Intelligence: The British Story. London: Arms & Armour, 1989.

Harris, Stephen M. British Military Intelligence in the Crimean War, 1854–1856. London: Frank Cass, 1999.

Occleshaw, Michael. Armour against Fate: British Military Intelligence in the First World War. London: Columbus Books, 1989.

Parritt, B. A. H. The Intelligencers: The History of British Military Intelligence up to 1914. Ashford, Kent: Intelligence Corps Association, 1983.

Sheffy, Yigal. British Military Intelligence in the Palestinian Campaign, 1914–1918. London: Frank Cass, 1998.

Winstone, H. V. F. The Illicit Adventure: The Story of Political and Military Intelligence in the Middle East from 1898 to 1926. London: Jonathan Cape, 1982.

MI5

Benois, Nadia. Klop and the Ustinov Family. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1973.

Blunt, Anthony. Tomás Harris. London: Courtauld Institute, 1975.

Burt, Leonard. Commander Burt of Scotland Yard. London: Heinemann, 1967.

Crocker, Sir William. Far from Humdrum. London: Hutchinson, 1967.

Curry, Jack, The Security Service, 1909–1945: The Official History. London: PRO, 1999.

Dorril, Stephen. The Silent Conspiracy. London: Heinemann, 1993.

Glover, Sir Gerald. 115 Park Street. London: Gerald Glover, 1982.

Hollingsworth, Michael, and Nick Fielding. Defending the Realm. London: André Deutsch, 1999.

Hope, John. “Surveillance or Collusion?: Maxwell Knight, MI5, and the British Fascists.” INS 9, no. 4.

James, M. E. Clifton. I Was Monty’s Double. London: Rider & Co., 1954.

Lander, Sir Stephen. “British Intelligence in the Twentieth Century.” INS 17, no. 1.

Masterman, J. C. The Double Cross System of the War of 1939–1945. Boston: Yale University Press, 1972.

———. On the Chariot Wheel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Miller, Joan. One Girl’s War. Dublin: Brandon Books, 1986.

Mills, Cyril. Bertram Mills Circus: Its Story. London: Hutchinson, 1967.

Rimington, Stella. Open Secret. London: Hutchinson, 2001.

Rothschild, Baron Nathaniel Mayer Victor. Meditations on a Broomstick. London: Collins, 1977.

———. Random Variables. London: Collins, 1984.

Seaman, Mark. Garbo: The Spy Who Saved D-Day. London: PRO, 2000.

Sillitoe, Sir Percy. Cloak without Dagger. London: Cassell, 1955.

Spence, Richard. “Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley and British Intelligence in America.” IJIC 13, no. 3.

Stephens, Robin. Camp 020: MI5 and the Nazi Spies. London: PRO, 2000.

Tangye, Derek. The Way to Minack. London: Michael Joseph, 1978.

Watts, Stephen. Moonlight on a Lake in Bond Street. New York: W. W. Norton, 1961.

Zu Putlitz, Wolfgang. The Zu Putlitz Dossier. London: Allan Wingate, 1957.

MI9

Darling, Donald. Secret Sunday. London: William Kimber, 1975.

———. Sunday at Large. London: William Kimber, 1977.

Langley, J. M. Fight Another Day. London: Collins, 1974.

Langley, J. M., and M. R. D. Foot. MI9: Escape and Evasion, 1939–1945. London: Bodley Head, 1979.

Neave, Airey. Saturday at MI9. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1969.

———. They Have Their Exits. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1953.

GCHQ

Aldrich, Richard. “GCHQ and Sigint in the Early Cold War, 1945–1970.” INS 16, no. 1.

Beesley, Patrick. Very Special Intelligence. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977.

Bennett, Ralph. Ultra and Mediterranean Strategy. New York: William Morrow, 1980.

———. Ultra in the West. London: Hutchinson, 1979.

Boyd, Carl. Hitler’s Japanese Confidant. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993.

Cairncross, John. The Enigma Spy. London: Random Century, 1997.

Calvocoressi, Peter. Top Secret Ultra. London: Cassell, 1980.

Clayton, Aileen. The Enemy Is Listening. London: Hutchinson, 1980.

Cole, D. J. Geoffrey Prime. London: Robert Hale, 1998.

Croft, John. “Reminiscences of GCHQ and GCB.” INS 13, no. 4.

Denniston, A. G. “The Government Code and Cypher School between the Wars.” INS 1, no. 1.

Erskine, Ralph. “Churchill and the Start of the Ultra-Magic Deals.” IJIC 10, no. 1.

Ferris, John. “The British Army and Signals Intelligence in the Field during the First World War.” INS 3, no. 4.

———. “The Road to Bletchley Park: The British Experience with Signals Intelligence, 1892–1945.” INS 17, no. 1.

———. “Whitehall’s Black Chamber: British Cryptology and the Government Code and Cipher School, 1919–1929.” INS 2, no. 1.

Filby, W. William. “Bletchley Park and Berkeley Street.” INS 3, no. 2.

———. “Floradora and a Unique Break into One-Time Pad Ciphers.” INS 10, no. 3.

Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma. London: Hutchinson, 1983.

Lewin, Ronald. Ultra Goes to War. London: Hutchinson, 1978.

Macksey, Kenneth. The Searchers. London: Cassell, 2003.

Richelson, Jeffrey, and Desmond Ball. The Ties That Bind. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985.

Smith, Michael. Station X. London: Channel 4 Books, 1998.

Stripp, Alan. Codebreaker in the Far East. London: Frank Cass, 1989.

Thomas, Andy. “British Signals Intelligence after the First World War.” INS, 3, no. 4.

Welchman, Gordon. The Hut Six Story. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982.

BRIXMIS

Geraghty, Tony. Beyond the Frontline. London: HarperCollins, 1996.

Gibson, Steve. The Last Mission. Thrupp, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1997.

DEFECTORS

Gordievsky, Oleg. Last Stop Execution. London: Macmillan, 1995.

Graaff, Bob de. “The Stranded Baron and the Upstart at the Crossroad: Wolfgang zu Putlitz and Otto John.” INS 5, no. 4.

John, Otto. Twice through the Lines. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

Kuzichkin, Vladimir. Inside the KGB. London: André Deutsch, 1990.

Mitrokhin, Vasili. The Mitrokhin Archive. London: Penguin, 1999.

Suvorov, Victor. Inside Soviet Military Intelligence. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984.

———. Inside the Aquarium. London: Macmillan, 1986.

———. Inside the Soviet Army. London: Macmillan, 1982.

DOUBLE AGENTS

Campbell, John. “Some Pieces of the Ostro Puzzle.” INS 11, no. 2.

Chapman, Eddie. The Real Eddie Chapman Story. London: Library 33, 1956.

Moe, John. John Moe: Double Agent. London: Mainstream, 1986.

Owen, Frank. The Eddie Chapman Story. New York: Julian Messner, 1954.

Popov, Dusko. Spy/Counterspy. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973.

Pujol, Juan. Garbo. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985.

Sergueiev, Lily. Secret Service Rendered. London: William Kimber, 1968.

Troy, Thomas F. “The British Assault on J. Edgar Hoover: The Tricycle Case.” IJIC 3, no. 2.

NORTHERN IRELAND

Geraghty, Tony. The Irish War. London: HarperCollins, 1998.

Holland, Jack, and Susan Phoenix. Phoenix: Policing the Shadows. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996.

Ingram, Martin, and Greg Harkin. Stakeknife: Britain’s Secret Agents in Ireland. Dublin: O’Brien Press, 2004.

Maguire, Keith. “The Intelligence War in Northern Ireland.” IJIC 4, no. 2.

Mallie, Eamonn, and David McKittrick. The Fight for Peace. London: Heinemann, 1996.

Parker, John. The Death of a Hero. London: Metro Books, 1999.

Urban, Mark. Big Boys’ Rules. London: Faber & Faber, 1992.

POSTWAR COUNTERINSURGENCY OPERATIONS

Charters, David A. “British Intelligence in the Palestine Campaign.” INS 6, no. 1.

Freedman, Lawrence. “Intelligence Operations in the Falklands.” INS 1, no. 3.

Goulter-Zervoudakis, Christina. “The Politicization of Intelligence: The British Experience in Greece, 1941–1944.” INS 13, no. 1.

Hack, Carl. “British Intelligence and Counter-insurgency in the Era of Decolonisation: The Example of Malaya.” INS 14, no. 2.

Heather, Randall. “Intelligence and Counter-Insurgency in Kenya, 1953–1956.” INS 5, no. 3.

Stewart, Brian. “Winning in Malaya: An Intelligence Success Story.” INS 14, no. 4.

WEBSITES

http://cwr.iwm.org.uk/server/show/ConWebDoc.827 [Official website of the Cabinet War Rooms]

http://www.64-baker-street.org/main/index.html [Independent website covering SOE and the Radio Security Service]

http://www.army.mod.uk/intelligencecorps/chicksands.htm [Intelligence Corps official website]

http://www.bl.uk [The British Library’s official website]

http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk [Cabinet Office official website, including the Joint Intelligence Committee]

http://www.fas.org/irp/world/uk/dis [Independent website describing the Defence Intelligence Staff]

http://www.five.org.uk/security/mi6org/ [Independent website with accurate information on MI5 and SIS]

http://www.gchq.gov.uk [GCHQ’s official website]

http://www.iwmcollections.org.uk [Imperial War Museum official website]

http://www.MI5.gov.uk [British Security Service official website]

http://www.mod.uk [Ministry of Defence official website]

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk [Official website of the Public Record Office at Kew]

Index

A-54

A Branch

A Division

“A” Force

Abbasia

ABDEL

abdication crisis

Abdoolcader, Sirioj Husein

ABEAM

Aberdeen, Lord

Abinger, Lord

Abse, Leo

Abwehr ; chief of (see Canaris)

Acland, Sir Antony

action

Adam, John

Adam Street

Adams, Gerry

Adams, J. R.

AD/B

Adcock, Frank

Aden

Administration Directorate

Admiral Graf Spee

Admiralty Research Laboratory

Adye, Sir John

Aerial Intelligence

AE/TICKLE

Agabekov, Georges

Agar, Augustus

Agee, Philip

agent

agent of influence

agent provocateur

AI 1(e)

Aiken-Sneath, Francis

AIR BUBBLE

Air Intelligence; directors of (see Blount; Boyle)

Aitken, Agns

Akhmedov, Ismail G.

ALAN

ALASTAIR

Albania

ALBERTO

Alcazar de Velasco, Angel

Aldrich, Richard

ALEC

Alekseyev, N. N.

Alexander, Hugh

Alexander, W. A.

Alien Control

Alison, Barley

All Russia Cooperative Society. See ARCOS

ALLEN

Allen, Harry

Allen, Maj.

Allen, Percy

Allen, Vic

Allen, William

Alley, Stephen

Allford House

ALLIANCE

Allier, Albert

Al-Magrahi, Abdelbaset

Almassy, Count

Alpass, John

ALPHONSE

Amerasia

Amery, John

Amery, Sir Julian

Ames, Aldrich

Amies, Sir Hardy

Anand Parbat

Andaman Islands

Anderson, Sir Robert

André, John

Andrew, Christopher

Andropov, Yuri

Angleton, James Jesus

Anglo-German Fellowship

Anglo-Iranian Oil Company

Anglo-Turkish Security Bureau

Angola

Angry Brigade

ANKER

ANTELOPE

ANTHONY

ANTHROPOID

Anti-Terrorist Branch

The Apostles

Appleyard, Geoffrey

APPRECIATION

Arab News Agency (ANA)

Archer, Liam

ARCHIBALD

ARCOS

Ardagh, Sir John

Arkley View

ARMIN

ARMONIA

ARMOUR

Armstrong, Brig.

Armstrong, George

Armstrong, Sir Robert

Armstrong, Sir William

ARNIKA

ARNOLD

Arnold, Benedict

Arnold-Foster, Christopher

ARTHUR

Arthur, Miss B.

Arthur, Sir Geoffrey

ARTIST

ASCENSION

Ashanti Campaign

Ashdown, Paddy

Ashley, Lord

ASIO. See Australian Security Intelligence Organization

ASIS

ASPIDISTRA

ASPIRIN

Asquith, Viscount

Assessment Staff

Aston, Sir George

Astor, the Hon. Hugh

Astor, Lord

Atherton, Terence

Atkins, Vera

Atomic Energy Authority

Attlee, Clement

Aubert, Capt.

Audit Office

AUDREY

August, Frantisek

Ausland Organization (AO)

Australian Defence Signals Directorate

Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS)

Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) director of (see Reed, Judge Geoffrey)

Austria

AUTOGIRO

AUTOMATION

AUTONOMOUS

Auxiliary Units

Avon, Lady

Ayer, A. J.

Ayios Nikolaos

B1

B1(a)

B1(b)

B1(c)

B1(d)

B1(f)

B1(g)

B1(h)

B1(k)

B1(l)

B2

B3

B3(a)

B3(b)

B3(c)

B3(d)

B3(e)

B4

B4(a)

B4(b)

B5

B6

B Division

BACKHAND

Bacon, Francis

Bad Nenndorf

Bad Oeynhausen

Bad Salzuflen

Baddeley, J. E.

Baden-Powell, Sir Robert

Badoglio, Marshal

Bagot, Millicent

Bagrichev, Nikolai

Bailey, Bill

Bailey, Neil

Baker, John

Baker Street

Balaclava

Baldwin, Stanley

Ball, Sir Joseph

Ballantrae, Lord

BALLOON

BALLYGUNGE

banknotes

Baranv, Gen.

Barbrook, Bill

Barclay, Cecil

Barclay, Sir Colville

Bardsea Island

Barff, Maj.

Barker, Nick

Barker, Royd

Barker-Benfield, Karl

Barkovsky, Vladimir

Barnard Road

Barnes

Barnes, Tom

BARON

Barry, Maj.

BASKET

Basna, Elyesa

BATES

Battenberg, Adm.

Baumgart, Johann

Bazna, Elyesa

Bazoft, Farzad

Beach, Thomas

Beatty, Sir Chester

Beaulieu

Beaumanor Hall

Beaumont, Adm.

Beer, Israel

Beesley, Patrick

Beevor, Jack

Begin, Menachim

Behrisch, Arne

Belfrage, Cedric

Belgian Section

Belgian Deuxieme Bureau; head of (see Bernard; Marissal)

Belgian Sureté d’Etat; head of (see Lepage)

Belgium

BELIEF

Bell, Walter

BEN

Benes, Edouard

Benhall

Benham, J. E.

BENJAMIN

Bennett, Gill

Bennett, Leslie James

Benoist, Nadia

Benson, Henry

Bentley, Elisabeth

Benton, Kenneth

Beria, Lavrenti

Berlin Tunnel

Bermuda

Bernal, J. D.

Bernard, Henri

Berne Club

Berry, John

Bertil, Prince

Bessedovsky, Grigori

Best, Sigismund Payne

Bethell, Adm.

Bettaney, Michael

Beurton, Len

Beurton, Ursula

Bevan, John

Bevin, Ernest

Bialoguski, Michael

Bide, Peter

BIG LEMON

Biggs, Ernest

Biley, George

BILLOW

Bingham, Charlotte

Bingham, David

Bingham, John

Bingham, Madeleine

Bingham, Maureen

Bingham, Seymour

BIRD

Bird, Roland

BIRDCAGE

Bireva, Olga

BISCUIT

Bitov, Oleg

BJ

BLACK JUMBO

Black, Mervyn

BLACK TOM

Blair, Neil

Blair, Tony

Blake, George

Blake-Budden, C.

BLANDINGS

Bleicher, Hugo

Blenheim Palace

Bletchley Park

Blizard, Charles

Blockade Intelligence

Blount, Sir Charles

BLUE JACKETS

Blunt, Anthony

BOB

Bode, William

Bodsworth, Wilfred

BODYGUARD

Boemelberg, Carl

Boer War

Bohr, Niels

BOLERO Combined Committee

Bond, James

Bondarenko, Aleksandr

BONIFACE

Bonnier de la Chapelle, Fernand

Bonsall, Sir Arthur

BOOKLET

BOOT

Bose, Maj.

Bosley, Rex

Bossard, Frank

Bothwell, John

Bottome, Phyllis

Boughey, Peter

Bourke, Sean

Bower, Tom

Bowlby, Cuthbert

Boxer Rebellion

Boxshall, Edward

Boy Scout Movement

Boyle, Archie

Brackenbury, Henry

Brady, Terence

Braithwaite, Sir Roderic

Brandes, Willi

BRANDON

Brandon, Captain Vivian

Brandt, Willi

Brandy, Mrs.

Brazilian Embassy

Brazilian Secret Police (DOPS)

Breit, Gregory

Bremner, William

BRIDE

Bridge, Adm.

Bridges, Lord

Bridou, Jacques

Bright Astley, Joan

Brik

BRILLIG

BRISSEX

Bristow, Desmond

British Control Commission for Austria (BCCA)

British Control Commission for Germany (BCCG) ; Intelligence Division

British Free Corps

British Middle East Office (BMEO)

British Security Coordination (BSC); director of (see Stephenson, Sir William)

British Services Security Organization (BSSO)

British Union of Fascists (BUF)

Britten, Douglas

BRIXMIS

BROADSIDE

Broadway

Brodie, Capt.

Bromley-Fox, Mrs.

BROMO

Bronstein, Leib

BRONX

Brook, Gerald

Brook, Sir Norman

Brook, Sir Robin

Brooks, Tony

Brooman-White, Dick

Broome, Richard

BROUER

Browder, Earl

Brown, G. E.

Brown, John

Brown, Lord Justice

Brown, O. H.

Brown, Peter

Browning, Freddie

Brownrigg, Sir Robert

Broz, Josip

Bruce-Lockhart, John

Bruce-Lockhart, Sir Robert

Bruce-Mirford, Terence

Brun, Dr. Joamr

Brundrett, Sir Frederick

Brunnet, Gilles

Brunswick, Duchess of

Brunswick, Duke of

BRUSA

BRUTUS

Bryan, Dan

Bryan, Robert

Bryce, Ivar

Bryhn, Asbjorn

BUCCANEER

Buchan, John

Buckmaster, Maurice

Budd, Colin

BULBASKET

Bulgaria

Bulgarian Intelligence Service (DS)

Bull, Gerald

Buller, Redvers

BUNNY

Bureau Centrale de Renseignements et d’Action (BCRA); head of (see Dewavrin)

Burgess, Guy

Burland-Harris, William

Burma

Burne, C. H.

Burrows, Sir Bernard

Burt, Leonard

Burton, Cmdr.

Burton, John

Bush, George W.

Butkov, Mikhail

Butler, Charles

Butler, Lord

Buzzard, Adm.

Bystrolyotov, Dmitri

Bywater, Hector

Cabinet Office

Cabinet Secretary

Caccia, Sir Harold

Cadogan, Lady

Cadogan, Sir Alexander

Cadogan, William

CAESAR

Cairncross, John

Cairo

Calais-Sender

Calcutt, David

Calthrop, Edward

Calvo, Luis

Calvocoressi, Peter

Cambridge spies

Cameron, lain

CAMILLA

Camp 020; commandant of (see R. W. G. Stephens)

Camp 020R

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND)

Campbell, John

Canadian National Research Council

Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS)

Canaris, Wilhelm

Canning, Albert

Carew-Hunt, Robert

Caroe, Victor

Caron, Henri le

Carr, Harry

Carré, Mathilde-Lily

Carrington, Lord

Casement, Sir Roger

Casey, William J.

Cattley, Charles

Cave Brown, Anthony

Cavell, Edith

Cavendish, Anthony

Cavendish Laboratory

Cavendish-Bentinck, Victor

Cawthorn, Walter

CAZAB

Cazalet, Cmdr.

CD

Cecil, Robert

CELERY

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

Central Registry

Century House

Chadwick, H. B.

CHAIR

Chamberlain, Neville

CHANCELLOR

Chang, John

Chapman, Eddie

Chapsky, Adolf

CHARACTER

CHARLIE

Charpentier, George

Charteris, Sir John

Chastelaine, Gardyne de

Chateau Thierry, Countess of

Chaudoir, Elvira

Chaworth-Musters, James

CHEESE

Cheka

Chemical Defence Establishment

Chen Ping

Chernyak, Jan

Chesham House

Chesshire, Jim

CHEST

Chevalier, Haakon

Chichaev, Ivan

CHICKADEE

Chicksands Priory

Chidson, Monty

Childers, Erskine

Childs, Sir Wyndham

Chilton, Sir John

China Mission

Chinook Crash

Chisholm, Janet

Chisholm, Ruari

Chizhov, Mikhail

CHOIR

Cholmondeley, Charles

CHOPIN

Churchill, Peter

Churchill, Randolph

Churchill, Winston

CICERO

Cilcellin, Lord

CINNAMON

Civilian Wireless Reserve

Clarence, John

Clarendon Laboratory

CLARIBEL

CLARIDGES

Clark, David

Clark, Mary Ann

Clarke, David

Clarke, Dudley

Clarkson, Willie

Clayton, Gilbert

Clayton, Jock

Clayton, Sir Iltyd

Clayton, Wally

Clemens, Hans

Clements, Dick

Clive, Nigel

CLOWDER

CLOVER II

Clutton, Sir George

COBWEB

Cockerill, Sir George

Codrington, John

Coe, R. D.

Cohen, Kenneth

Cohen, Lona

Cohen, Morris

Colditz Castle

Cole, Harold

Collard, John

Collin, Cmmdt.

Collins, John

Collinson, Capt.

COLOSSUS

Colvin, Ian

Colvin, John

Combes, Edward

Combined Bureau Middle East (CBME)

Combined Intelligence Centre Iraq (CICI)

Combined Intelligence Far East (CIFE); director of (see Wiley)

Combined Intelligence Service (CIS)

Combined Research and Planning Office (CRPE)

Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC)

Comintern

Committee of Imperial Defence (CID)

Communications Intelligence Unit

Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB)

Composite Signals Organisation (CSO)

Comyns-Carr, Richard

Connell, Brian

CONSENUS

Continuity IRA

Contraband Control

Controllerates

Conversazione Society

Conway, Godfrey

Cook, John

Cookridge, E. H.

Coombe-Tennant, Henry

Cooper, Duff

Cooper, Lady Diana

Cooper, Tom

COPPERHEAD

Cordeaux, Jack

Corfield, Sir Frederick

Cornwell, David

CORPORATE

Corps of Guides

Corps of Scouts

Corsair, Tony

Costantini, Francesco

Costantini, Secondo

Costi, Kyriacos

Cottenham, Mark

Cotton, Sidney

Counter-Clandestine Committee

counterespionage

counter-gangs

counterintelligence

counterterrorism

country codes

Courtney, Anthony

Coventry raid

Covert Human Intelligence Source (CHIS)

Coward, Noel

Cowell, Gervase

Cowgill, Felix

Cox, Sir Geoffrey

Coxe, Henry B.

Crabb, Lionel

Cradock, Sir Percy

Cramer, Fritz

Crawford, Albert

Crawford, Sir Stewart

Creslow Manor

Crete

Crime Writers Guild

Crimean War

Criminal Records Office

Crocker, Sir William Charles

Croft, Andrew

Croft, John

Cromwell, Oliver

Cross, John

CROSSBOW

Crossman, Richard

Crozier, Brian

CSS. See Secret Intelligence Service, chief of

Cuban Missile Crisis

Cuckney, John

Cumberlege, Michael

Cumming, D. B.

Cumming, Malcolm

Cuneo, Ernest

Cunliffe-Lister, Phillip

Curda, Karel

Current Intelligence Group (CIG)

Curry, Jack

Curwen, Sir Christopher

Curzon, Lord

Curzon Street House

Cushny, John

Cussen, Edward

Custance, Adm.

CX

Cyprus

Czech Deuxieme Bureau

Czech Intelligence Office (CIO)

Czech Intelligence Service

D1(a)

D4

D4(a)

D4(b)

D4(c)

D4(d)

D4(e)

D4(1)

D Division

D Notice; secretary of D Notice Committee (see Farnhill)

Dabbagh, Colonel al-

Dahl, Roald

Dail, Walter

Dalley, John

Dalton, Dr. Hugh

Damaskin, Igor

Dame, Maj.

Daniel’s Head, Bermuda

Danish Section

Dansey, Sir Claude

Danube

Darlan, Emile

Darling, Donald

DARTBOARD

David, John

Davidson, Basil

Davies, Mostyn

Davies, Ted

Davies, Trotsky

Davis, B. A. P.

Davis, Bradley

Dawson, Robert

Dawson-Sheppard, Col.

Dayan, Moshe

DCSS. See Dansey

D-Day

De Gaulle, Charles

De Graaf, Johann

De Grey, Nigel

De Jaeger, Albert

Deakin, Joseph

Deakin, Sir William

Deale, Adm.

Dean, Sir Patrick

Dearden, Dr. Harold

Dearlove, Sir Richard

deception

defector

Defence Geographic and Imagery Intelligence Agency

Defence Intelligence Analysis Staff (DIAS)

Defence Intelligence and Security Centre (DISC)

Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS)

Defence of the Realm Act (DORA)

Defence Security Officer (DSO)

Defence Signals Directorate

Dehn, Paul

Deighton, Len

Dejean, Maurice

Delhi Intelligence Bureau (DIB)

Delmer, Tom Sefton

Dempster, Fergie

Dench, Judi

Denham, Henry

Denmark

Denning, Adm. Norman

Denning, Lord

Denniston, Alastair

Denniston, J. G.

Dennys, Rodney

Depot of Military Knowledge

Deputy Director-General of the Security Service

Deriabin, Piotr.

Dericourt, Henri

Derring, C. D.

DESERT STORM

Deutsch, Dr. Arnold

Deverell, John

Devonshire, G. E.

Dewavrin, André

Dickson, Jimmie

Dickson Carr, John

Dies, Martin

Dilhorne, Lord

Dillon, Edward

Diplock, Kenneth

Diplomatic Section

Diplomatic Wireless Service (DWS)

direction-finding

Director of Military Intelligence (DMI). See also Brackenbury; Charteris; Davidson; Sinclair, Sir Hugh; Templer

Director of Military Knowledge

Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI). See also Battenberg; Beaumont; Bethell; Bridge; Buzzard; Custance; Domvile; Fitzmaurice; Godfrey; Hall; Hotham; Inglis; Jackson; King-Hall; Longley-Cook; Oliver; Rushbrooke; Scott; Slade; Troup; Usborne

Directorate of Intelligence

Directorate of Special Intelligence

Director-General of the Security Service (DGSS)

DISCLAIM

DIVAN

Dodds-Parker, Sir Douglas

Dolivet, Louis

Dollis Hill

domestic agents

Domvile, Sir Barry

Donovan, Gen. Bill

DOPS (Brazilian Secret Police)

Doran, Desmond

Dorril, Stephen

double agents

double cross

Doyne-Ditmass, Harold

Dozhdalev, Vasili

D/P

DRAGOON

Drake, Reginald

DRAT

DREADNOUGHT

DRESSER

Drew, John

Driberg, Tom

Dronkers, Johannes

Drücke, Karl

Dublin Castle

DUCK

DUDLEY

Duff, Sir Antony

Duffy, Gary

Dugmore, Maj.

Duke, Florimond

Dukes, Sir Paul

Duncan, M.

Duncome, Mrs.

Dundas, Charles

Dundas, Geoffrey

Dunderdale, Wilfred “Biffy”

DUNVERY

Dushkin, Yuri

Dutch Intelligence Service

Dwyer, Peter

Dzhirkvelov, Ilya

E1(a)

E1(b)

E2

E3

E4

E5

E6

E Division

East Africa Mission

East German Intelligence Service (HVA)

Eastcote

Eastwood, David

Eastwood, Sir James

ECHELON

Economic Warfare Intelligence

Eden, Anthony

Edmonds, Arthur

Edmonds, Sir James

Edvardsen, Gunnar

Edward VII, xvi

Edwards, Rosa

Ehrman, William

Einthoven

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

ELAS

Electra House

Elgin Commission

Elletson, Harold

Elliott, Kavan

Elliott, Nicholas

Ellis, Charles, H. “Dick”

Elphinstone, A. C. V

Eltenton, George

Elwell, Charles

Endurance, HMS

Engels, Albrecht

Englandspiel

ENGULF

Enigma

Ennals, David

Ennals, John

ENORMOZ

EOKA; leader of (see Grivas)

Eppler, Johannes

EPSILON

ERIC

Erikson, Vera

Ernst, Karl Gustav

Eschborn

Etzdorf, Rudiger von

EU/P

Evang, Vilhelm

Evans, John

Evans, Jonathan

Evans, R. G.

Evans, Sir Richard

Everett, Nicholas

Ewart-Biggs, Sir Christopher

Ewer, William

Ewing, Sir Alfred

Eyre, John

F1

F2

F2(a)

F2(b)

F2(c)

F3

F4

F Division

F Section

Fairbairn, Peter

FALAISE

Falkland Islands

False Flag

Far East Combined Bureau (FECB)

Farley, Wally

Farm Hall

Farnhill, Adm. Kenneth

Farran, Roy

FARRIER

FEATHERBED

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

Federal German Security Service (BfV)

Federated Press of America (FPA)

Felfe, Heinz

Fell, Barbara

Fenwick, Basil

Feoktisov, Georgi

Ferguson, Capt.

Fergusson, Sir Bernard

Fetterlein, Felix

Field, Gerry

Field Intelligence Department

Field Security Police

Field Security Wing

Fielding, Xan

Fifth Column

Figures, Sir Colin

Finland

Finucane, Pat

Fisher, H. A.

Fisher, Willie

Fishwick, Nicholas

Fist United States Army Group (FUSAG)

Fitzmaurice, Adm.

Fleming, Ian

Fleming, Peter

Fletcher, Rex

Flint, Martin

FLORADORA

Floud, Bernard

Flowerdown

Flowers, Tommy

FLUENCY

Foley, Frank

FOOT

Foot, Isaac

Foot, M. R. D.

Foot, Michael

Foote, Alexander

Footman, David

Forbes Dennis, Ernan

Force 133

Force 136

Force 137

Force 139

Force 266

Force 333

Force Research Unit (FRU)

Foreign Office Adviser. See also Clutton; Ewart-Biggs; Henderson, Nicholas; Hooper, Sir Leonard; MacDermott, Geoffrey; Reilly, Sir Patrick; Williams, Michael; Wilkinson

Forester, R. E.

Forfar

Fort Bridgewoods

Fort Monckton

Forter, Alexis

FORTITUDE

Forum World Features

Fourcade, Marie-Madeleine

FOXLEY

Fox wirth, Sam

France

Franck, Louis

Franco, Francisco

Frank, Carl Hermann

Franks, Lord

Franks, Sir Dickie

FREDERICK

Free Austrian Movement

Freidman, William

Frenken, Tim

Friedman, Litzi

Friedman, Sally

The Friends

Frisch, Otto

Frolik, Josef

Frost, Malcolm

Fuchs, Klaus

FUGUE

Fulford, Roger

Funny Neuk

Furnival Jones, Sir Martin

G-2; head of (see Archer; Bryan, Dan)

G officers

G(R)

G. W.

Gabcik, Josef

Gaertner, Friedle

Gaitskell, Hugh

Gale, Richard

Gallegos, Adrian

Gallienne, Simon

Galtieri, Leopoldo

Gambier-Parry, Sir Richard

Game Book

Gandhi, Rajiv

Gane, Barrie

GARBO

Garby-Czerniawski, Roman

Garda Siochana Special Branch

Garnett, David

Garnider, Ritchie

Gaunt, Sir Guy

Gazur, Edward

GC&CS. See Government Code and Cipher School

GCHQ. See Government Communications Headquarters

Gedye, Eric

Gee, Ethel

GELATINE

Gentry, J. E.

GEORGE

Gerlach, Walther

German agents

Gerson, John

Gestapo

GHQ Liaison Regiment. See PHANTOM

Gibraltar

Gibson, Harold

Gibson, William

GIDEON

Giffey, Frank

Gilbert

Gilbert, Victor

Gill, Harry

Gillis, James

Gimson, Tom

Ginhoven, Hubert

Giradot, Neville

GIRAFFE

Giskes, Herman

Glading, Percy

GLADIO

Gladstone, William

Glass, Anthony

Gleadell, Paul

Gledhill, Cecil

Glenconner, Lord

Glotopoulos, Alexandros

Glover, Sir Gerald

Godfrey, Adm. John

Goertz, Dr. Hermann

Goldschmidt, Helmut

Goleniewski, Michal

Golitsyn, Anatoli

Golos, Jacob

Goodfellow, Patrick

Goodwill, Arthur

GOOSE

Gordievsky, Oleg

Gordon-Creed, Geoffrey

Gorsky, Anatoli

Gouk, Arkadi

Gouzenko, Igor

Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS)

Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ); Diplomatic Section; director of (see Adye; Bonsall; Denniston; Hooper; Jones; Loehnis; Marychurch; Omand; Pepper; Richards; Tebbit; Travis)

Gower Street

Graf, Georges

Grafpen, Grigori

Graham, Bill

Graham-Stamper, E. R.

Grand, Laurence

Grant, Colquohoun

Graur, André

Graves, Dr. Armgaard

Gray, Nicol

Gray, Olga

The Great Game

Greece

GREEN

green ink

Green, Oliver

Green, Tom

Greene, Ben

Greene, Elizabeth

Greene, Graham

Greenhill, Sir Denis

GREENLEAVES

Gregory, J. Maundy

Grey, Sir Edward

GRIDIRON

Grierson, Helen

Griffiths, Lord

Grigg, Sir Edward

Grigoriev, Gen. K.

Grivas, George

Grogan

Grosse, Karl

Grotwohl, Prof.

Grove Park

GRU. See Soviet Military Intelligence Service

Gubbins, Sir Colin

Guillaume, Gunter

Gulbenkian, Nubar

Gun, Katharine

Gundarev, Viktor

GUNNERSIDE

Gurney, Brig.

Guthrie, W. K. C.

Gutteridge, Mark

H Section

Haan, Edward de

Haganah

Hahn, Kurt

Hahn, Otto

Haldane, J. B. S.

Hall, Adm. Sir Reginald

Hall, Dr. Theodore

Hall, Reginald

Halsalle, Henry de

Hambleton, Hugh

Hambro, Charles

Hambro, Sir Charles

Hamburg

Hamburger, Rolf

Hamer, Rex

Hamilton, J. A. S.

Hamilton, William

Hamilton-Hill, Donald

HAMLET

Hammond, Nicholas

Hamson, Denys

Hamson, Jack

HAMSPER

Hanau, Julius

Hands, Andy

Hankey, Lord

Hanley, Sir Michael

Hansen, Georg

Hanslope Park

Harcourt, Lord

Hardinge, Lord

Hardt, Paul

Hare, Alan

Harel, Isser

Harker, Jasper

HARLING

Harrington

Harris, Kitty

Harris, Leonard

Harris, Robert

Harris, Tomás

Hart, Herbert

Hart, J. v.

Hart, Jenifer

Harvey, John

Harvison, Cliff

Hasluck, Fanny

HASP

Hassler, Karl

Hastings, Edward

Hastings, Sir Stephen

HATCHET

Hatton-Hall, Maj.

Haugland, Knut

Hayes, Graham

Hayes, John

Haylor, Ronnie

Hayter, Sir William

Heal, Maj.

Heath, Ted

Heisenberg, Werner

Heliopolis

Hemblys-Scales, Robert

Henderson, David

Henderson, Nicholas

Henderson, Paul

Henderson, Simon

Hennessy, Peter

Henry, Sir Edward

Herbert, Edwin

HERZELLE

Hesketh-Pritchard, Alfgar

Hess, Rudolf

Hewett, Colin

Heydrich, Reinhard

Hibberdine, John

Highet, Gilbert

HILAIRE

Hiles, G. D.

Hill, Bernard

Hill, Christopher

Hill, George

Hill, James

Hillgarth, Alan

Hinchcliffe, Leonard

Hinchley-Cooke, Edward

Hindawi, Nezar

Hindle, Wilfred

Hinsley, Sir Harry

Hinton, Geoffrey

Hinxton

Hiroshi, Oshima

HISTORIAN

Hitler, Adolf

Hoare, Sir Sam

Hodgart, Matthew

Holden, Ewart

Holdsworth, Gerard

Holland, Alice

Holland, John

Hollerith machine

Hollingworth, Ralph

Hollis, Marcus

Hollis, Sir Roger

Holmes, Walter

Holt-Wilson, Sir Eric

Home Defence (Security) Executive; chairman of (see Cooper, Duff; Swinton)

Home for Incurables

honeytrap

Hong Kong

Hooper, John

Hooper, Sir Leonard

Hoover, J. Edgar

Hope, Sir Peter

Hopkinson, Henry

Hor Lung

Home, Sir Alastair

Horrocks, Reg

Horsfall, Jock

Horwood, Sir William

Hosenball, Mark

Hotham, Adm. Sir Alan

Houghton, Harry

Household, Geoffrey

Houska, Josef

Howard, Cmmdt.

Howard, Sir Michael

Howard, Rex

Howarth, Patrick

Howse, Philip

Hoxha, Enver

Hudson, Col.

Hudson-Williams, H.

HUGH

Hughes

Hughes, Alfred

Hugo, Sqdn. Ldr.

Hume, Col.

Humphreys, Leslie

Hungary

Hunloke, Henry

Hunter, Sir Alan

Hunter, Harry

Huntercombe Place

Hurran, Christopher

Husak, Robert

Hussein, Saddam

Hutchinson, Sir Arthur

Hutton Inquiry

Hyde, Douglas

Hyde, Harford Montgomery

HYDRA

Imperial Censorship

Increment

Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC)

India Mission

Indian Political Intelligence Bureau

Indo-China

Industrial Intelligence Centre (IIC)

Industrial Security Liaison Officer

Information Research Department (IRD); head of (see Clive; Rennie)

Informationscheft GrossBritannien

Inglis, Adm.

Ingram, Martin

Ingrams, Leonard

Inkster, Nigel

Intelligence and Security Coordinator, Northern Ireland; director of (see Cameron; Deverell; Eastwood, David; Oldfield; Payne, Denis; Ranson; Richards, Sir Brooks; Smellie; Steele)

Intelligence Collection Staff

Intelligence Coordinator to the Cabinet . See also Alpass; Curwen; Duff; Figures; Hooper, Sir Leonard; Jeffrey; Richards, Sir Brooks; Ricketts; White

Intelligence Corps

Intelligence Evidence Unit

Intelligence Offices New Entry Course (IONEC)

Intelligence Services Act

Intelligence Services Tribunal; chairman of (see Brown, Lord Justice)

INTELLIGENSIA

INTERALLIÉ

Inter-Allied Intelligence Bureau

Interception of Communications

International Brigade

Inter-Services Liaison Department (ISLD); director of (see Bowlby; Rosher)

Inter-Services Research Bureau (ISRB)

Inter-Services Security Board (ISSB)

Invergordon Mutiny

IONEC. See Intelligence Officers New Entry Course

Ireland

Irgun

Irish National Liberation Army (INLA)

Irish Republican Army (IRA)

Iron Gates

IRONBARK

Ironside, Sir Edmund

ISCOT

ISK

ISOS

ISPAL

Italy

IVAN

Ivanov, Eugene

Ivens, Jack

J Section

Jack, Maj.

Jackson, Adm.

Jakobs, Josef

James, M. E. Clifton

Jane, Det. Sgt.

Japan

JEAN

Jebb, Gladwyn

Jebsen, Johann

JEDBURGH

JEFF

Jeffes, Maurice

Jeffrey, Bill

Jellicoe, George

Jempson, F.J.

Jenkin, Sir William

Jenkins, Roy

Jenssen, Carla

JEROME

Jerome, V J.

JERRY

Jervis, Thomas

Jewish Agency

Jewish Brigade

Jibril, Ahmed

Johansson, Elsa

John, Otto

John, Sir Caspar

Johns, Philip

Johnson, Kemball

Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Centre (JARIC)

Joint Intelligence Bureau (JIB); head of (see Strong)

Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC); chairman of (see Acland; Arthur, Sir Geoffrey; Braithwaite; Burrows; Caccia; Cavendish-Bentinck; Cradock; Crawford, Sir Stewart; Dean; Duff; Ehrman; Greenhill; Hayter; Lever; Neville-Jones; Pakenham, Michael; Peck; Reilly, Sir Patrick; Ricketts; Stevenson; Wright)

Joint Security Control (JSC)

Joint Services Group (JSG)

Joint Signals Intelligence Committee (JSIC)

Joint Speech Research Unit (JSRU)

Joint Technical Language Service (JTLS)

Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC)

Jones, Aubrey

Jones, Evan

Jones, Evelyn

Jones, Geoffrey

Jones, R. V

Jones, Sir Eric

Jones, Sir John

Jones, Sir Roderick

Jong, I. de

Jordan, Jessie

Joyce, William

JUNIOR

Kagan, Joseph

KAGO

Kallmann, Heinz

Kalugin, Oleg

Kandy

Kapp, Cornelia

KASPAR

Kaye, Sir Cecil

Keble, Brigadier C. M.

Keddlestone Hall

Keeler, Christine

Keith, Kenneth

Kell, Sir Vernon

Kelly, Dr. David

Kelly, James

Kemp, Peter

Kendrick, Thomas

Kent, Tyler

Kenworthy, Harold

Kenya Emergency

Kenyatta, Jomo

Kenyon-Jones, Bill

Kerby, Henry

Kerensky, Alexander

Kerr, Gordon

Kessler, Eric

Keswick, David

Keswick, Sir John

Key, José Estella

Keyes, R.

Keyser, E. S.

KEYSTONE

KGB

KGB archives

Khafaji, Jabbar al-

Khalil, Gen.

Kheifets, Grigori

Khrushchev, Nikita

Kieboom, Charles van der

KILOWATT

King, Andrew

King, Cecil

King David Hotel

King, John

King, Tom

King-Hall, Adm.

King’s Messenger

Kipling, Rudyard

Kirby Green, Phillip

Kirke, Sir Walter

Kirkpatrick, Ivone

Kislitsyn, Filip

Kitchener, Lord

KLATT

Klauder, Richard

Kleber, Gen. Emilio

KLEIN

Klishco, Nikolai

Klop. See Ustinov, Iona von “Klop”

Klugmann, James

Knappe-Ratey, Fritz

Knight, Claude

Knight, Max

Knoblock, Edward

Knockholt Pound

Knox, Dillwyn

Koestler, Dr.

Koghen, Lvovich

KONDOR

Kondrashev, Sergei

Korda, Sir Alexander

Korovin, Nikolai

Kotze, Hans von

Koufodinos, Dmitros

Koutsoyiannopoulos, Capt.

Krafft, Mathilde

Krasin, Leonid

Kreihn, Wayne

Kreipe, Karl-Heinrich

Kremer, Simon

Kreuger, Otto

Krivitsky, Walter

Kroger, Helen

Kroger, Peter

Krotkov, Yuri

Krotov, Boris

Kubis, Jan

Kuczynsky, Birgette

Kuczynsky, Jurgen

Kühlenthal, Karl-Erich

Kukin, Konstantin

Kurtz, Harald

Kuzichkin, Vladimir

Kuzmin, Lori

Kuznetsov, Pavel

Labarthe, André

Lablache-Combier, Capt.

Lai Teck

Lake, Sir Graham

Lakey, Arthur

Lambert, Leslie H.

Lambton, Lord

Laming, Richard

Lammin Tours

Lancaster, Donald

Lancaster, R. F.

Landau, Henry

Lander, Dr. Stephen

Lang, Derek

Langlade, Francois de

Langley, J. M.

Langman, Richard

Lanman, Charles

Laradogottia, José

Lassen, Anders

Latchmere House, Ham Common

Laval, Pierre

LAVINIA

Lawers, Huub

Lawrence, T. E.

Lawson, J. C.

Lazobny, Yevgeny

Leach, Annabel

Leake, Phillip

Lebed, Gen.

Leconfield House

Lee, Christopher

Lee, Russell

Lees, Michael

Leggett, George

Legion of St. George

Leigh, David

Leigh Fermor, Sir Patrick

THE LEMONS

Lenihan, Joseph

Lenin, Vladimir

Lennox, Gilbert

Lepage, Baron Ferdinand

Leopold, John

LESLEY

Lethbridge, J. S.

Letter Interception Unit (LIU)

Levant Fishing Patrol

Lever, Sir Paul

Levi, Renato

Levine, Isaac Don

Liddell, Cecil

Liddell, Guy

LIGHT

Lightower, Adam

Limpenny, Adm.

Lincoln, Trebitsch

Lindemann, Frederick

Lindenthal, Lewis

The Link

LIST

Listowel, Countess of

LISZT

LITTLE FOXLEYS

Littlechild, John

Litvinov, Maxim

Litvinov, Nikolai

Lloyd George, David

Lloyd, Richard

Lloyd, Selwyn

Lockerbie, Scotland

LODGE

Loehnis, Sir Clive

Loewe, Lionel

LOG CABIN

Loginov, Vladimir

Lohan, Sammy

Loi Tak

The London Cage

London Controlling Section (LCS); controller of (see Bevan; Stanley)

London Films

London Reception Centre (LRC)

London Signal Intelligence Board (LSIB)

Long, Leo

Long Range Desert Group

LONGKNIFE

Longley-Cook, Adm.

Lonsdale, Gordon. See Molody

Lopatin, Mikhail

LORA

Lord, Graham

Loskhart Plot

Lothian, Lord

Loustaunau-Lacau, Georges

Loyenko, Nikolai

Lubszynski, Hans

LUCKY BREAK

Lukasevics, Yakov

Luke, William

LUMPS

Lyalin, Oleg

Lyall, Archie

M

M. P.

Macartney, Wilfred

McBrien, James

McCall, Henry

McCaul, Michael

McClellan, George

McColl, Sir Colin

McCormack, Alfred

MacDermott, Geoffrey

MacDermott, Niall

MacDonald, Alec

McDonald Inquiry

Macdonald, Sqdn. Ldr.

MacDonald, William

Macdonough, Sir George

MacGregor, Alistair

Machell

McKenna, Marthe

McKenna, Reginald

Mackenzie, Colin

Mackenzie, Sir Compton

Mackenzie, Stewart

Mackenzie, William

McKibbon, Sandy

Mackie, Marjorie

Maclean, Alan

McLean, Billy

Maclean, Brig.

Maclean, C. S.

Maclean, Donald

Maclean, Melinda

Maclean, Sir Fitzroy

McLure, R. H.

Macmillan, Harold

McNeill, Hector

McSween, Norman

McVittie, George

MAD DOG

Madoc, Guy

Magan, William

MAIN LINE

Makarios, Archbishop

Makarov, Viktor

Makins, A. M. M.

Malay Communist Party (MCP)

Malay Security Service; head of (see Dalley)

Malay Special Branch

Malaya Emergency; coordinating officer for security (see Thompson, Sir Robert)

Malayan Communist Party (MCP)

Malayan Section

MALLONE

Mally, Theodore

Malone, Cecil L’Estrange

Malta

Malta Mission

Maltby, Ted

MANAGER

Manderstam, Leopold

Manhattan Project

Maniu, Julius

Mann, Cathleen

Mann, Dr. Wilfrid

Manningham-Buller, Eliza

MANUAL

March-Phillips, Gus

Marconi

Maringliano, Francisco

Marissal, Jean

Markov, Georgi

Marlborough, Duke of

Marling, Melinda

Marlowe, Christopher

Marriott, Henry

Marriott, John

Marr-Johnson, Patrick

Marshall, William

Marshall-Cornwall, Sir James

Martianon, Constantinos

Martin, Arthur

Martin, John

MARY

Marychurch, Sir Peter

MARYLAND

Maschwitz, Eric

Masira Island

MASK

Mason, A. E. W.

Mason, P. G.

MASSINGHAM

Masterman, Sir John

Masterson, Tom

MASTIF

Mata Hari

MATCHBOX

Mathewson, Ian

Matrix Churchill

MAUD Committee

Maude, John

Maugham, W. Somerset

Mau-Mau

Maunsell, Raymund

Maw, Bertie

MAX

Maxwell, Gavin

Maxwell, Terence

Maxwell-Fyfe, Sir David

May, Dr. Allan Nunn

Maydwell, Paul

Mayer, Hans

Mayers, Colin

Mayhew, Christopher

Mayor, Tess

Mazzini, Guiseppe

meal-ticket

MEDAL

Medlam, H. G.

Meerut Conspiracy

Meier, Carl

Meikle, George

Meiklejohn, Ronald

Meiler, Alfred

Meinertzhagen, Richard

Melville, Sir William

Menezes, Rogeiro de

Menzies, Sir Stewart

Meredith, Frederick

Metcalfe, Dickie

Meteorological Office

Metianu, Silvu

Metropolitan Police. See also Special Branch

Metropolitan Vickers

MI(L)

MI(R)

MI1

MI1 (b)

MI1 (c)

MI1 (d)

MI1 (e)

MI2

MI2(a)

MI2(b)

MI2(c)

MI3

MI3(a)

MI3(b)

MI3(c)

MI3(d)

MI3(e)

MI4

MI4(b)

MI4(c)

MI4(d)

MI4(e)

MI4(f)

MI4(g)

MI5

MI5(f)

MI5(g)

MI5(h)

MI5(p)

MI6

MI7

MI8

MI8(a)

MI8(b)

MI8(c)

MI8(g)

MI9

MI9(a)

MI9(b)

MI10

MI11

MI12

MI14

MI15

MI19

MICKLEHAM

Middle East Intelligence Centre (MEIC); head of (see Clayton, Sir Iltyd)

Middle East Intelligence Committee

Middle East Mission

Middle East Political Intelligence Centre

Mihailovic, Draza

MIKE

Miles, Brig.

Millar, George

Millar, Rex

Miller, Hugh

Miller, Joan

Mills, Cyril

Mills, K. A. M.

Mills, S. H. H.

Milmo, Helenus

Milne, Tim

Milne, Tony

Milner, Ian

Milner-Barry, Stuart

MINARET

MINCEMEAT

Ministerial Committee on the Intelligence Services (MCIS)

Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW)

Ministry of Munitions (MMLI)

Minshall, Merlin

MINT

Miskin

Mitchell, Graham

Mitchell, Hamish

Mitchell, Leslie

Mitrokhin, Vasili

Mitskevich, Yevgeni

MO5

Moare

Mobile Reconnaissance Force (MRF)

Mocambique

Modin, Yuri

Moe, John

mole

MOLIERE

Mollinger, Frits

Molody, Konon

Monckton, Walter

Monkhouse, Allan

Montagu, Ewen

Montagu, Ivor

Montgomery, Bernard

Montgomery, Brian

Montgomery, Mrs. H. M.

Montgomery, William

Moon Squadrons

MOONBEAM

MOONLIGHT SONATA

MOOR

Moorehead, Alan

Moravec, Frantisek

Morgan-Jones, Sir Morgan

Morley, John

Morocco

Morris, Harry

Morrison, Herbert

Morrison, James

Morrison, William

Morton Evans, Kenneth

Morton, Jack

Morton, Michael

Morton, Sir Desmond

Moscow Center

Moscow Narodny Bank

Mosley, Sir Oswald

Moss, Robert

Moss, W. Stanley

Mossad

Mossadeq, Mohammed

Mott, G. Egerton

MOUNTAIN CLIMBER

Mountbatten, Lord

Mowbray, Stephen de

Moyne, Lord

Moyzisch, Ludwig

MPSB. See Special Branch

Muggeridge, Malcolm

Muhie, A. J. M.

Muirhead, David

Mukhabarat

Muller, Gen.

MULLETT

MULLIGATAWNY

Munthe, Malcolm

Murdoch, Iris

Murley, John

Murray, Sir Ralph

Muselier, Emile

Mussolini, Benito

MUTT

MY

Myers, Brig. Edmund

Mytchett Place

Narkevich, Maj.

Nasser, Abdel

NATION

National Coordinator of Ports Policing (NCPP)

National Counter-Terrorism Security Office (NCTSO)

National Criminal Intelligence Service

National Joint Unit

National Ports Office (NPO)

National Public Order Intelligence Unit

National Security Agency

National Special Branch Technology Unit

National Terrorist Financial Investigation Unit

NATO

Naval Intelligence Division

Neave, Airey

Neel, Tony

Nelson, Brian

Nelson, Sir Frank

Netherlands

Netherlands Section

Neville-Jones, Dame Pauline

Newbold, J. Walton

Newsam, Frank

Niall, F. W.

Nicholls, Arthur

Nicholson, Leslie

NICOSSOFF

Nidal, Abu

Niedenfuhr, Gunter

Nimrodi, Yacov

Niven, David

NKVD

No. 1 Special Force

NOBILITY

NODDY

nominal agents

NONCHALANT

NORDPOL

Nordwall, Charles

Norman, Herbert

Normanton, Tom

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

Northrop, Anthony

Norway

Norwegian Section

Norwood, Melita

November

Novotny, Antonin

Nutting, Anthony

Oakley

Oakley-Hill, Dayrell

Oatley, Michael

OATMEAL

OATSHEAF

OBLIVION

O’Brien, J. F. C.

O’Brien-Ffrench, Conrad

O’Bryan Tear, Hubert

Obukov, Platon

Office of Strategic Services (OSS)

official historian

Official Secrets Acts

OGPU

Oka, Capt.

Oldfield, Maurice

Oldham, Ernest

Oliver, Adm.

Omand, Sir David

one-time pads

Onslow, Sir Cranley

Opalka, Adolf

Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC)

Oppenheimer, J. Robert

ORANGE

Ordzhonikidze

Oriental Mission

Orlov, Alexander

Orlov, Vladimir

Oshchenko, Viktor

Oslo Report

Ossipov, Col.

OTTO

OUT DISTANCE

OVERLORD

Overseas Control

Owen, David

Owen, Gwynfor

Owen, Will

Owens, Arthur

Oxenstierna, Johan

The Oxford Ring

P-27

Paclik, Jan

PADDOCK

Page Arnot, Robin

Page, Denys

Paget, Sir James

Pakenham, H. D. V.

Pakenham, Michael

Palestine

Palmach

Palme Dutt, Rojani

Palmer, Leonard

Palmerston, Lord

Pan Crescent

PanAm

PANDORA

Pantcheff, Theodore “Bunny”

PAPERCLIP

Park, Daphne

Parker, Edward

Parlanti, Conrad

Parliamentary Security and Intelligence Committee; chairman of (see King, Tom; Taylor, Ann)

Parrott, George

Parsons, Sir Anthony

Passport Control Office

Passport Control Officer (PCO)

PAT J

Paterson, Geoffrey

Patton, George

Paulson, Godfrey

Payne, Christopher

Payne, Denis

Payne, Lionel G.

Payne-Payne, C.

Peal, Edward

Pearl Harbor

Pearse, Cmdr.

Pearson, Norman Holmes

Pearson, Robin

PEASANT

Pecjak, Smiljan

Peck, Edward

PEDANT

Peierls, Sir Rudolf

Pendelbury, John

Peninsula War

Penkovsky, Oleg

Penrose, Barrie

Pepper, John

PEPPERMINT

Perkins, Harold

Perkins, John

Permanent Secretaries’ Committee on the Intelligence Services (PSIS)

personality profiling

PESSIMIST Y

Petch, L.

PETERS

Peters, Frederic

Petrie, Anne

Petrie, Sir David

Petropavlovsky, Vladimir

Petrov, Vladimir

Petter, Robert

PHANTOM

Philby, Kim

Phillpotts, Christopher

PICKAXE

Pieck, Henri

Pilkington

Pincher, Chapman

Pinney, George

Pinochet, Augusto

Pinto, Oreste

Pirie, Ian

Poland, Sir Harry

Police International Counter-Terrorism Unit (PICTU)

Polish Deuxieme Bureau

Polish Intelligence

Polish Section

Political Warfare Executive (PWE)

Polland, Alex

Pollitt, Harry

Pollock, Sir George

Pons, Sjoerd

Ponsonby, Myles

Pontecorvo, Bruno

Pool, Skipper

Popov, Dusan “Dusko”

Popov, Ivo

Porter Hargreaves, M.

Porter, Ivor

Porton Down

Portugal

Portuguese International Police (PIDE)

positive vetting

Post, Kenneth

POSTMASTER

Poulson, Jens

Powers, F. Gary

Pradit, Luang

Prager, Nicholas

Prater, Donald

precautionary index

PREMIUM

Prenant, Marcel

Prendergast, Sir Jack

Primakov, Yevgenni

Prime, Geoffrey

Princess of Wales

Pritt, Denis

Prizker, Israel

Proctor, Sir Denis

PRODROME

Production Sections

PROFESSOR

Profumo, John

PROMETHIUS

Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA)

Public Interest Immunity Certificate

Public Records Act

Pujol, Juan

PUPPET

Purdy, Walter

PURPLE

Putlitz, Wolfgang zu

Q ships

QUANTUM

Quayle, Sir Anthony

Quebec Liberation Front

Queen’s Messengers

Quennell, Peter

Quinn, F. A.

Quinn, Patrick

Rabagliati, Euen

Rabinowitz, Alexander

Radcliffe, Lord

RADICAL

Radio Security Service (RSS); head of (see Gambier-Parry; Morton Evans; Sandhurst)

Raglan, Lord

Rakov, N. V

Ramsay, Archibald

Ramsay, Meta

Ramsbotham, Sir Peter

RANJI

Ransom, Charles

Ransome, Arthur

Ranson, David

Rastvorov, Yuri

Rawlinson, A. P.

Ray, Philip

Razin, Vasili

Rea, Lord

Reade, Arthur

Real IRA

Rebrur-Paschwitz, Capt. von

Reckitt, Eva

Redesdale, Lord

Reed, Judge Geoffrey

Reed, Ronald

Rees, Goronwy

Regional Security Liaison Officer (RSLO)

Registry

Reid, Sir Edward

Reif, Ignaty

Reilly, Sidney

Reilly, Sir Patrick

RELATOR

REMORSE

Rendle, Frank

Rennie, Sir John

Renzy Martin, Edward de

Requirements Sections

RESERVIST

resettlement

Reuter’s News Agency

Reynolds, Roger

Rezident

Rezidentura

Rezun, Vladimir

Rhydymwyn

Ribbentrop, Joachim von

Richards, C. S.

Richards, Rod

Richards, Ron

Richards, Sir Brooks

Richards, Sir Francis

Richardson, L. J. W.

Richardson, Tony

Richter, Karel

Rickard, William

Ricketts, Sir Peter

Rickman, Alexander

Riddell, Richard

Rideall, Sir Eric

Rieul, Roland

The Right Club

Riis, Ib

Rikovsky, Maj.

Rimington, Dame Stella

Ritter, Nikolaus

Rittner, Maj.

Rivert, Louis

Rivett-Carnac, Charles

ROBERTS

Roberts, Alfred

Roberts, Douglas

Robertson, E. J.

Robertson, James

Robertson, T. A.

Robinson, Henri

Rocca, Ray

Rodin, Nikolai

Rogers, Lindsay

Rogov, Leonid

Rolo, Cyril

Rolph, William

Romania

romeo spy

Ronin, Georges

Room 40

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

Rootham, Jasper

Rosbaud, Paul

Rose, Fred

Rosenberg, Julius

Rosher, Maj.

Rosin, Nikolai

Roskill, A. W.

ROTE KAPELLE

Roth, Andrew

Rothschild, Lord

ROVER

Rowlandson, M. W.

Royal Air Force; No. 1 Photographic Reconnaissance Unit Signal Unit

Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)

Royal Corps of Signals

Royal Observatory Plot

Royal Prerogative

Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC)

Royal Victoria Patriotic School (RVPS)

Royle, D.

Rucker, Sir Arthur

Rudniev, Sergei

Rumboll, E. A.

Rumrich, Gunther

Ruser, Hans

Rushbrooke, Adm.

Russell, Capt.

Russell-Jones, Barry

Russian Federation Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR)

Rutland, Frederick

Ryder, Col.

S Organization

Sabatier, Gilbert

Said, Haitham

Salazar, Dr. Antonio

Salis, John de

Salisbury, Lord

Salmone, Habib Anthony

Samson, Odette

Sandhurst, Lord

Sandys, Duncan

Sanstede, Heirich

SAPLING

Sarafand

SATYR

SAUNDERS

Saunders, Bunty

Saunders, Jack

Saunders, Stephen

Savin, Vladislav

Savinkov, Boris

Scale, Dymoke

Scappaticci, Freddie

Scarlett, John

Scherbius, Arthur

Schmidt, Wulf

School of Military Intelligence

Schroeder, Adolph

Schultze, Reinhard

Schuster, Anton

Scientific Intelligence

Sclater, Col.

SCONCE

Scotland, Alexander

SCOTT

Scott, Adm.

Scott, Bernard

Scott, Donald

Scott, Edward

Scott, Kenneth

Scott Inquiry

Scott-Ford, Duncan

SCRAMBLE

SCULPTOR

Secret Intelligence Service (SIS); chief of (see Curwen; Dearlove; Figures; Franks; McColl; Menzies; Oldfield; Rennie; Scarlett; Sinclair, Sir Hugh; Sinclair, Sir John; Smith-Cumming; Spedding; White); deputy chief of (see Browning; Bruce-Lockhart, John; Curwen; Dansey; Inkster); G officers; German stations; Production Sections; Requirements Sections; Special Political Action Section; vice chief of (see Vivian)

Secret Office

Secret Service Bureau

Secret Service Funds

secret vote

secret writing

Section I

Section II

Section III

Section IV

Section V

Section VI

Section VII

Section VIII

Section IX

Section X

Section D

Security Commission; chairman of (see Griffiths)

Security Control Officer (SCO)

Security Executive; chairman of (see Cooper, Duff; Swinton); secretary of (see Stewart, Sir Findlater)

Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME); chief of (see Maunsell; Roberts, Douglas)

Security Liaison Officer (SLO)

Security Service; B1(a); B1(b); B1(f); B1(h); B Division; C Branch; D Branch; D Division; deputy director-general of (see Alpass; Barker, Royd; Evans, Jonathan; Furnival Jones; Hanley; Harker; Hollis, Sir Roger; Holt-Wilson; Liddell, Guy; Manningham-Buller; Mitchell, Graham; Ranson; Shipp; Simkins; Symonds, Ronald); director-general of (see Furnival Jones; Hanley; Hollis, Sir Roger; Jones, Sir John; Kell; Lander; Manningham-Buller; Petrie, Sir David; Rimington; Sillitoe; Smith, Sir Howard; White); E Division; F Division

Security Service Act

Seddon, A. D.

Sedlacek, Karel

Sehmer, John

Selborne, Earl of

Sempill, Lord

Sereni, Enzo

Sergueiev, Lily

Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA)

Serov, Ivan

Serpell, Michael

Service de Renseignements

Servicio Informazione Militaire

Seth, Ronald

Seton-Watson, Hugh

SETTEE

Setton, M.

Seymour, George

Shai

Shayler, David

Sheehan, Olive

Sheen, H. G.

Shelley

Sheppard, Rufus

Shergold, Harold

Shetland Bus

Shillitto, Hugh

Shipp, Cecil

Shore Wireless Service

Short, Maj.

Shortt, Arthur

Siam

Sicherheitsdienst (SD)

Sidney Street Siege

Sikorski, Wladislaw

SILENT MINUTE

Sillitoe, Sir Percy

SILVER

Silverwood-Cope, Maclachlan

Simcox, Anthony

Simkins, Anthony

Simoes, Ernesto

Simon, Anton

Simon, Walter

Simonds, Tony

Simpson, Evan John

Sinclair, Evelyn

Sinclair, Reginald

Sinclair, Sir Hugh

Sinclair, Sir John

Single Intelligence Vote (SIV)

Sirnis, Melita

Skardon, Jim

Skinner, Maj.

Sklyarov, Col.

Skripkin, Ivan

Slade, Adm.

Slocombe, George

Slocum, Frank

Slocum, Robert O.

Small-Scale Raiding Force

Smedley, Agnes

Smellie, Craig

Smiley, David

Smith, A. W.

Smith, Edward Ellis

Smith, Ferguson

Smith, Leslie

Smith, Michael

Smith, Robert

Smith, Sir Howard

Smith-Cumming, Mansfield

Smith-Hughes, Jack

Smith-Ross, Teddy

Smith-Wright, J.

Smithers, Sir Peter

Smolka, Henri

Smollett, Peter

SNAKE

SNIPER

SNOW

SO10

SO11

SO12

SO13

Soboloff, David

Solcombe, George

Soldatensendersender Calais

SONIA

Sorge, Richard

SOSUS

Soupert, Jean-Paul

Soustelle, Jacques

Soviet Military Intelligence Service (GRU)

Soviet Trade Delegation

Spaatz, Carl

Spanehl, Ivan

Spanish Embassy

Sparrow, Wilhemind Payne

SPARTAN

Spearman, Richard

Special Air Service Regiment (SAS)

Special Branch; heads of (see Bryan, Robert; Canning; Gilbert; Hewett; Jones, Evan; Littlechild; McBrien; Parker; Quinn, Patrick; Smith, Ferguson)

Special Communications Unit (SCU)

Special Counter-Intelligence Unit (SCI)

Special Forces Headquarters (SFHQ)

Special Intelligence Bureau

Special Intelligence Service

Special Irish Branch

Special Liaison

Special Liaison Unit (SLU)

Special Means

Special Operations Executive (SOE); Belgian Section; Czech Section; F Section; Greek Section; H Section; headquarters; heads of (see Gubbins; Hambro; Nelson, Sir Frank); Hungarian Section; N Section; Planning Section; Russian Section; SD Section; T Section; training schools; X Section; Yugoslav Section

Special Operations Executive Adviser. See also Boxshall; Cowell; Stuart, Duncan; Woods

Special Signals Unit (SSU)

Special Training School (STS)

Special Wireless Group (SWG)

Spedding, Sir David

Spencer Chapman, Freddie

Spiro, Edward

Spiru, Vasili

Spooner, Frank

Sporborg, Harry

SPRINGBOK

Springhall, Douglas

Spycatcher

Staff Counsellor

Stafford, Sir Edward

STAKEKNIFE

Stamp, Blanshard

Stanley, Oliver

Starbeck, Irwin

Starnes, John

Starr, George

Station

Station

Stawell, W. A.

stay-behind networks

StB

Steele, Frank

STELLA POLARIS

Stephens, R. W. G.

Stephenson, John

Stephenson, Sir William

STEPMOTHER

Stern Gang

Stevens, John

Stevens, Richard

Stevenson, Ralph

Stewart, Bob

Stewart, Sir Findlater

Stirbey, Prince Barbu

Stirling, Walter

Stockbridge, Ralph

Stone, Harry

Stonehouse, John

Stopford, Richman

STOPWATCH

Strachey, John

Strachey, Oliver

STRAGGLE

Straight, Michael

Strankmueller, Emil

Stratton, F. J. M.

Streater, Isabel

STRIKE ox

Strong, Sir Kenneth

Stross, Sir Barnett

Stuart, Bill

Stuart, Duncan

Stuart, Sir Campbell

Sub-Committee on Security Service Priorities and Performance

Sudoplatov, Pavel

Suez Canal

Suffolk, Earl of

Sullivan, Bill

SUMMER

SUNSHINE

Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF)

Suschitsky, Edith

Suvorov, Viktor

SVR. See Russian Federation Foreign Intelligence Service

Svreddlov, Stefan

SWALLOW

Swaythling, Lord

Swedish Security Police

SWEET WILLIAM

Sweet-Escott, Bickham

SWEETIE

Swinton, Lord

Switz, Marjorie

Switz, Robert

Syers, Kenneth

Sykes, Bill

Sykes, Percy

Symonds, John

Symonds, Ronald

Szymanska, Halina

T Section

TABLE

Tai Lio, Gen.

TANGO

Tangye, Derek

TANK

Tank, Dr. Kurt

Tasoev, J. D.

TATE

Tauscher, Hans

Taverner, Brig.

Taylor, A. J. P.

Taylor, Ann

Taylor, H. P.

Taylor, John

Taylor, Telford

Teague, John

Teague-Jones, Reginald

TEAPOT

Tebbit, Sir Kevin

Telios, Kostas

Temple, Capt.

Templer Barracks

Templer, Sir Gerald

Tennyson, Harry

Teplyakova, Irina

Ter Braak, Jan Willem

Terletsky, Yakov

Teufelsberg

Thatcher, Margaret

Thelfall, Henry

Thirty-One Committee

Thistlethwaite, Dick

Thompson, Frank

Thompson, Sir Robert

Thomson, Sir Basil

Thornhill, Cudbert

Thornley, Ronald

Thornton, Leslie C.

Thümmel, Paul

Thurloe, John

Tikhvinsky, Sergei

Tilman, Bill

Tiltman, John

Tinsley, Richard

Tisdall, Sarah

Todd, John

Todorov, Vladimir

Tokaev, Grigori

Tomlinson, Richard

Topographical and Statistical Department (TSD)

TORCH

Torrie, T. G.

Townshend, B. H. L.

Toynbee, Phillip

traffic analysis

Travis, Sir Edward

Trayhorn, R

Treachery Act

TREASURE

Treaty of Westminster

Trebilcock, H. L.

Treholt, Arne

Tremlett, Innes

Trench, Bernard

Trend, Sir Burke

Trent Park

Trepper, Leopold

Trevor Roper, Hugh

Tribune

TRICYCLE

triple agent

TRIPLEX

TROJAN

Trotsky, Leon

Troup, Adm.

Trundle, Gp. Capt.

Tsavev, Oleg

Tube Alloys

TUDOR

Tudor Hart, Dr. Alex

Tudor Hart, Edith

Tuffy, Martin

Turcanou, Nicolae

Turing, Alan

Turnbull, Ronald

Twenty Committee

212 Committee

Typex

TYPICAL

Tyson, John

U-2

UB. See Polish Intelligence

U-boat

UKUSA Agreement

Uljanov, Vladimir

ULTRA

United States

Uren, Ormond L.

Urwick, Sir Alan

Usborne, Adm. C. V.

Ustinov, Iona von “Klop”

Ustinov, Peter

V-2

Valcik, Josef

VALUABLE

Vanden Heuvel, Frederick

Vansittart, Sir Robert

Vasilevsky, Lev

Vassall, John

Vauxhall Cross

Venlo

VENONA

Veress, Lazlo

Vermehren, Erich

Vermork

Vernon, Wilfred

Verschoyle, Derek

Verulam, Earl of

Vickery, Sir Philip

Vincent, Hedley

VIRGIL

Vivian, Valentine

VOGUE

Voight, Frederick

Voluntary Interceptors (VI)

VOLUNTEER

Von der Golz, Horst

Voronin, Yuri

Vrinten, Adrianus

Wagstaffe, Keith

Waldberg, Jose

Walker, David

Walker, Fit. Lt.

Walker, Sir Patrick

Wallace, David

Wallace-Hadrill, M.

Wallerstein, L. D. J.

WALLFLOWER

Wallinger, Sir John

Walsall bomb factory

Walsingham, Sir Francis

Wälti, Werner

War Crimes Investigation Unit

War Office Y Group (WOYG)

Ward, Irene

Ward, Stephen

Warner, Sir Gerald

Warren, Alan

Warsaw Pact

WATCHDOG

Watcher Service

Watkins, John

Watrous, Capt.

Watson, Alister

Watton

Watts, Stephen

Waugh, Alec

Waugh, Evelyn

WAVE

Wedlake, F.

Weeding

Weiss, Ernest

Weizsacker, Carl von

Welch, Dick

Welchman, Gordon

Weldon, L. B.

Wellington, Duke of

Wells, Kenneth

Welsh, Eric

Wennerstrom, Stig

WESTWARD HO

Wey, Keith

Whaddon Hall

Wharton, Harry

Wharton-Tigar, Edward

Wheatley, Dennis

Wheatley, Joan

Wheeldon, Alice

Wheeler, Sir John

WHEELRIGHT

Wheeton, Stephen

Whinney, Patrick

WHISKY

White, Sir Dick

WHITE LADY

White’s Club

Whitney, Ray

Whomack, George

Whyatt, Phillip

Whyte, Jock

Wickham, Sir Charles

Wigg, George

Wiley, Bill

Wilkinson, Sir Peter

Wilky, Helen

Williams, Albert

Williams, Michael

Williams, Sinclair

Williams, Valentine

Williamson, Sir Horace

Wilson, Charles

Wilson, Fraser

Wilson, Harold

Wilson, John

Wilson, Sir Horace

Wilson, Woodrow

Winn, Rodger

Winnifrith, John

Winter, Dr. Carl

Winter, Ormonde

Winterbotham, Fred

Wireless Board

Wireless Experimental Station, Anand Parbad; director of (see Marr-Johnson)

Wiseman, Sir William

Woburn Abbey

Wodehouse, P. G.

Wolf, Marcus

Wolfe, James

Wolfson, Vladimir

Wolkoff, Anna

Wolseley, Lord

Wood

Woodfield, Bill

Woodfield, Sir Phillip

Woodhall, Edwin

Woodhouse, Monty

Woods, Christopher

Woolcombe, Malcolm

Woolwich Arsenal

Worke, Kenneth

Worlledge, J. P. G.

Wormwood Scrubs

WORTHINGTON

Wright, Clive

Wright, Patrick

Wright, Peter

Wrigley, Michael

Wynne, Greville

Wyton, RAF

x group

X Section

Xenos, Dimitrius

Xiao-Ping, Deng

XX Committee; chairman of (see Masterman)

xxx. See TRIPLEX

XXXI

Y Box

Y Service

YAK

Yartseva, Mrs.

Yellin, Avram

Yosii, Minitory

Young, Alan

Young Communist League

Young, Courtney

Young, George

Young, James

Young, Sir George

Younger, Kenneth

Younger, William

Yugoslav Section

Yugoslavia

Z Organization

Zaehner, Robert

Zahirudden, Mohammed

Zbytek, Karel

Zeppelins

Zhivotovsky, Georgi

ZIGZAG

Zimmermann, Arthur

Zimmermann Telegram

Zinde, Max

Zinoviev, Grigori

Zinoviev Letter

ZIRCON

Zog, King

Zolotussky, P. A.

Zu Putlitz, Wolfgang

Zuckerman, Sir Solly

Zulu War

Zululand

About the Author

Nigel West was born in London and educated at a Benedictine monastery before reading English at university. He is a military historian specializing in intelligence and security issues, and while still at university he worked as a researcher for two authors: Ronald Seth, who had been parachuted into Silesia by Special Operations Executive, and Richard Deacon, formerly the foreign editor of the Sunday Times. He later joined BBC TV’s General Features department to work on the SPY! and ESCAPE series.

Mr. West’s first book, coauthored with Richard Deacon in 1980 for BBC Publications, was the book of the SPY! series, and it was followed by other nonfiction: British Security Service Operations, 1909–1945 (1981); A Matter of Trust: MI5, 1945–1972 (1982); MI6: British Secret Intelligence Service Operations, 1909–1945 (1983); The Branch: A History of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch (1983); Unreliable Witness: Espionage Myths of the Second World War (1984); GARBO, coauthored with Juan Pujol (1985); GCHQ: The Secret Wireless War (1986); Molehunt (1987); The Friends: Britain’s Postwar Secret Intelligence Operations (1988); Games of Intelligence (1989); Seven Spies Who Changed the World (1991); Secret War: The Story of SOE (1992); The Faber Book of Espionage (1993); The Illegals (1993); The Faber Book of Treachery (1995); The Secret War for the Falklands (1997); Counterfeit Spies (1998); Crown Jewels, with Oleg Tsarev (1998); VENONA: The Greatest Secret of the Cold War (1999); The Third Secret (2000); and Mortal Crimes (2004).

The Sunday Times has commented that “his information is so precise that many people believe he is the unofficial historian of the secret services. West’s sources are undoubtedly excellent. His books are peppered with deliberate clues to potential front-page stories.” In 1989 he was voted the Experts’ Expert by a panel of spy writers selected by the Observer. He is currently the European editor of the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. He also teaches the history of postwar intelligence at the Center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, an independent Washington, D.C.-based organization that is contracted to the CIA and FBI.

As a lecturer on the ever-popular subject of espionage, Mr. West fulfills regular engagements for Cunard on the QE2, QM2, and Caronia arid for Hilton Hotels special events, and he helped inaugurate Spy-Cruise. Between June 1987 and May 1997 he was the Conservative member of Parliament for Torbay and made contributions to two Security Service Bills, the Official Secrets Bill and the Intelligence Services Bill. In October 2003 he was awarded the U.S. Association of Former Intelligence Officers’ first Lifetime Literature Achievement Award.

Nigel West may be contacted at P.O. Box 2, Goring on Thames, England RG8 9SB; 44-20-7352-1110 (tel.); 44-7836-200-600 (cell); or nigel@westintel.co.uk (e-mail).