February 14, 2008
My friend, the renegade spy
I always thought that one of the things about going to Cambridge University was that you had a guarantee that at least some of your fellow students would end up running the world. Not in my case. The Gonville and Caius College class of 1984 has produced a few respectable academics. But the only fellow student who has done something really interesting with his life is Richard Tomlinson, who joined British intelligence and then had a spectacular disagreement with his employers. MI6 sacked him and Richard ended up serving a term in Belmarsh prison, for breach of the Official Secrets Act - after trying to publish a book about his life as an agent. MI6 also accused him of publishing a list of British agents on the internet - a charge he denied.
Tomlinson is now living as a semi-fugitive in France. But he has not disappeared from view. Yesterday he made a video-link appearance at the inquest into the death of Princess Diana - and strongly implied that MI6 might have had a hand in her death.
MI6 must be rueing the day that they ever tapped Richard on the shoulder. But it surprises me that they still recruit at Cambridge. After all, they had pretty mixed results with Philby, Burgess and McClean.
Tomlinson must have looked a good bet, though. He was a star student and took a first in engineering. He was a member of the territorial army and, I think, a keen cross-country runner. He also won a coveted Kennedy scholarship to study in the US. I remember meeting him one evening in the college bar. His tutor - prescient man - had refused to write a reference for Richard. So I did it instead, suggesting (facetiously) that his sole flaw was that he "drives himself too hard in the pursuit of excellence." Little did I know.
Some people at Caius did think Richard was a little odd. I remember that a girl who went to a May Ball with him reported that she found him "strangely sexless". This has since become a favourite euphemism of mine.
After Cambridge I more or less lost touch with Richard. But I do remember meeting him at a party, shortly before I went to Bangkok as a foreign correspondent in 1992. Richard more or less told me that he was working for MI6 and gave me the name of the British spy at the embassy in Thailand. When I arrived in Bangkok, I duly made contact. The spy was a bit suspicious and asked who had given me their name. I said Tomlinson and there was a long pause, before he replied warily - "He shouldn’t have told you that". As far as I know, Richard didn’t fall out with MI6 until the mid-1990s. But I guess he was displaying an unconventional attitude to security, even then.
Why would he know the name of the British spy in Bangkok? Are not these services supposed to be compartmentalised?
Why would the British spy in Bangkok admit he was an officer? It seems from this story that MI6 were all-round incompetents.
Well I guess since WCM has come close to accusing you of being an MI6 spook yourself, then possibly your post is part of a well-crafted piece of disinformation.
Posted by: RCS 007 | February 14th, 2008 at 6:27 pm | Report this commentJudging by the success of the late Peter Wright’s “Spycatcher”, I think
a magazine or a web site for people like Mr. Tomlinson (a brilliant man by all accounts) and Craig Murray, the former ambassador to Uzbekisatn, is likely to do good business.
( http://www.renegades.co.uk/ is still available as a domain)
Anybody in Private Equity, interested in a flutter?! It must be more interesting than buying waste disposal companies and you may make a pretty penny too.
P
PS…One of my contemporaries at uni is a leading light of the Tamil Tigers…now beat that for namedropping
Posted by: Pacifist | February 14th, 2008 at 6:52 pm | Report this commentre: RCS 007: > My thoughts were far worse: that he was flirting with Sawyer-Miller! Gideon is far to smart to see a future in overnment-sponsored spying!
Posted by: WCM | February 15th, 2008 at 9:35 am | Report this commenthmmm. Cambridge, journalism, an English spy in an exotic location…sounds like a Somerset Maugham novel to me - or perhaps the stirring of a plot for a Rachman novella?
btw, looking forward to your views on recent events in Damascus and Beirut…
Posted by: AYC | February 15th, 2008 at 10:47 am | Report this commentWhilst also at Caius at the same time, I have absolutely no recollection of Tomlinson at all, but MI6 getting it all wrong does not surprise me at all. The left-wing girlfriend of a friend of mine came from Sheffield (Scargill country in miner-strike days)and was studying Russian. She was approached by our glorious security services and vetting consisted of a chat with an equally ultra-left tutor (as most academics at Cambrridge)who gave her a glowing reference. That was sufficient to get her an offer. Not that she was interested in joining up as she recounted the tale but given the laughably low standard of due diligence it does not surprise me that several bad apples or semi-unhinged fantasists made it into the security services. Since we are 25 years on, one hopes none of the unreliables who joined up are running the show.
Posted by: Richard | February 15th, 2008 at 7:34 pm | Report this commentHe could know our man in Bangkok simply because they went through SIS induction training together.
You can be sure that anyone recruited into the security services will have their background pretty thoroughly investigated. Any offer is going to be conditional on getting through it.
Casting their net wider than Oxbridge has not brought unalloyed success for the security services and foreign service. For example, Craig Murray and David Shayler are both graduates of Dundee University. It isn’t the institution that’s so significant. For example, each is an individual, forming their own view of how they are treated or what they are expected to do or keep quiet about. But whatever the merits of individual cases, the world has moved on as demonstrated by our recent whistleblower legislation.
Posted by: ACR | February 17th, 2008 at 6:48 pm | Report this commentPerhaps Tomlinson thought that he would receive a CEO pay for his work as an spy, forgetting he was a public servant, hehe.
Posted by: Enrique | February 18th, 2008 at 3:10 am | Report this comment“The spy was a bit suspicious and asked who had given me their name. I said Tomlinson and there was a long pause, before he replied warily - “He shouldn’t have told you that”.”
Did you intend to not reveal said spy’s gender and forget?
Posted by: RR | February 18th, 2008 at 5:18 pm | Report this commentVery nice to read that Gideon still remembers me after so long, even though some of his recollections are a little muddled. It is true, however, that he wrote me a spectacularly excellent reference, which was probably the only reason I got into MI6!
Posted by: Richard Tomlinson | April 5th, 2008 at 11:05 am | Report this comment