Dick White

White was born in Tonbridge, Kent, the son of an ironmonger Percy Hall White and Gertrude Farthing and went to school at Bishop's Stortford College.[1]^: 29[2]^: 19 He took a First Class Degree in History at Christ Church, Oxford in 1927, and learnt to speak German.[1]^: 29[3][4] He was athletic in his youth and obtained a blue in running at Oxford.[1]^: 29[4] He was described by Peter Wright as resembling David Niven: "the same perfect English manners, easy charm, and immaculate dress sense." He was, said Wright, "tall with lean, healthy features and a sharp eye".[5]

He would qualify for a Commonwealth Fellowship in 1928 which saw him seek further education in the United States at the Universities of Michigan and California.[1]^: 29 After returning to the UK, he failed to obtain a position at Christ Church, Oxford and after being rejected by the navy, he obtained work in Croydon as a teacher.[1]^: 29 He was spotted by a recruiter in 1935 while on Mediterranean cruise with his students and invited to an interview with Guy Liddell at MI5.[1]^: 29

He was employed at MI5 in 1936 to monitor the rise of Nazism in Germany and spent a year in Munich attempting to recruit Germans.[1]^: 29 When back from Germany, he worked with Jona Ustinov to identify potential recruits. He was a co-creator of the Double-Cross system in 1940, to turn Abwehr agents in the UK and elsewhere.[1]^: 29 He would eventually become Liddell's assistant director in B Division.[1]^: 29 By 1943, he was seconded to SHAEF as a special advisor on counter-intelligence ending the war as a brigadier.[1]^: 29 He was sent to Berlin at the end of the war to investigate Hitler's fate.[1]^: 29

He returned to MI5 in 1947 as head of its counter-intelligence division.[4] In 1949, he was warned by the FBI of a Soviet spy at Harwell, the UK's Atomic Energy Research Establishment. Investigation identified Klaus Fuchs who was later interrogated and confessed to being a spy for the Soviets.[1]^: 29 White and MI5 were still in denial of the state of the Soviet penetration until the FBI discovered a spy via the Venona project called "Homer" working in British government.[1]^: 29 Kim Philby would warn the KGB in 1951, that Donald Maclean, now in the UK, had been identified as "Homer" and Guy Burgess was sent to warn him.[1]^: 29 White attempted to track the latter two to France but they had escaped.[1]^: 29 Their arrival in Moscow compromised Philby's position. Under a cloud of suspicion raised by his highly visible and intimate association with Burgess, Philby returned to London.[1]^: 29 There, he underwent MI5 interrogation by White aimed at ascertaining whether he had acted as a "third man" in Burgess and Maclean's spy ring.[1]^: 29 In July 1951, Philby resigned from MI6, preempting his all-but-inevitable dismissal.[6] Philby was cleared a few years later by Harold Macmillan.[1]^: 29

By 1953, White was appointed as director-general of MI5 and in 1956 was appointed Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service in 1956 in the wake of the "Crabb Affair", the exposure of which had damaged Soviet-British relations and embarrassed MI6 and clashed with Anthony Eden and Macmillan over their handling of the Suez Crisis.[1]^: 29[7][4] Much as Peter Wright liked White, he felt his move to MI6 was a mistake for both MI5 and MI6: "Just as his work [at MI5] was beginning, he was moved on a politician's whim to an organisation he knew little about, and which was profoundly hostile to his arrival. He was never to be as successful there as he had been in MI5."[8] During his tenure at MI6, he rebuilt the organisations relationship with Whitehall and the CIA.[1] This was especially true when MI6 recruited Oleg Penkovsky, a GRU Colonel that led to the identification of MI6 officer George Blake in 1963 as Soviet spy.[1]

White had always suspected Kim Philby of being the "third man".[9] When he found out that Philby had been employed as freelance MI6 agent in Beirut, he sent Nicholas Elliott to interrogate Philby and encourage him to return to London.[1] Philby fled to Moscow. By 1964, he was aware of the "Fourth Man" when Anthony Blunt confessed his knowledge of the other three spies for immunity.[10][4]

At the time, the identity of all MI5 and MI6 personnel was kept secret; officially, the government did not even admit to their existence. White's role as head of MI6 came out in 1967, when he was identified by the Saturday Evening Post magazine.[10][2] White would retire in 1968 and became the Cabinet Office's first Intelligence Co-ordinator before retiring for good in 1972.[1]

In 1945, he married Kathleen Bellamy and they had four children, Adrian, Frances, Jenny and Stephen.[1]^: 29[10]

Honoured many times throughout his career, he was given an OBE in 1942, a CBE in 1950, a KBE in 1955, and finally a KCMG in 1960.[1]^: 19[11] Other honours include a Legion of Merit and a Croix de Guerre.[2]^: 29

He died after a long illness at his home from intestinal cancer,[10] "The Leat" in Burpham, near Arundel in Sussex, on 21 February 1993; his wife, Kathleen, survived him.[10]

• Bower, Tom The Perfect English Spy: Sir Dick White and the Secret War 1935–90, William Heinemann, 1995.

• British Army Officers 1939−1945

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