At Her Majesty's Secret Service: The Chiefs of Britain's Intelligence Agency, Mi6 by Nigel West

Author:Nigel West [West, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781853677021
Google: 2KNlQgAACAAJ
Goodreads: 1903664
Publisher: Greenhill Books
Published: 2006-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter VIII

Dickie Franks

1978–1981

‘It is generally accepted by almost all intelligence officers whom I have questioned that, when Sir Arthur Franks was in charge of MI6, it was run with competence.’

Chapman Pincher in The SpyCatcher Affair1

A career SIS officer, Arthur Temple Franks had joined the organisation in 1949, having been educated at Rugby and Queen’s College Oxford. The son of a successful businessman and director of W.B. Dick Ltd, which later became Castrol, his army service had begun in 1940 in the Royal Corps of Signals before he had been commissioned into the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment, and in 1942 posted to the Middle East, attached as an intelligence officer to the Libyan Arab Force in the Western Desert.

In 1944 he transferred to SOE in Cairo and was parachuted into Serbia, leading a team of saboteurs on a mission to disrupt Axis shipping traffic on the Danube. In this role he led a number of dangerous but highly successful actions against German shipping, and continued to operate until the Red Army reached the Danube, at which point Franks’s unit was evacuated through Bulgaria. He then served with the Control Commission for Germany, and after being demobbed spent three years in London as a sub-editor at the Daily Mirror. 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 which overthrew Mossadeq and established the Shah. In 1956 he returned to Broadway as Controller Middle East. Later, as head of the London station, he had laid the foundations of the operation to run Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, which was to prove so important.

Franks’ recruitment of Greville Wynne as an agent and courier in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe must have seemed fortuitous at the time, especially when his contact, Oleg Penkovsky, turned out to be a veritable goldmine of intelligence. This became clear at his first debrief in London, an event attended by two CIA officers, George Kisevalter and Joe Bulic, who acknowledged that Penkovsky was an authentic GRU officer, despite the suspicions articulated at headquarters by the Counterintelligence Chief, James J. Angleton, when Penkovsky had attempted to pitch the CIA. Although Penkovsky was to be one of the most important cases of the Cold War, it was handicapped by his overenthusiasm which led his case officers to believe that he had something approaching a death-wish. Equally dangerous was the behaviour of his British contact, Greville M. Wynne, although these were matters that Dick White never alluded to when he had gathered SIS’s headquarters staff together at the conclusion of the Cuban Missile Crisis to disclose SIS’s covert role in resolving the confrontation.

Then a 43-year-old engineer and foreign trade negotiator, Wynne had been approached by Penkovsky in Moscow to pass secrets to London, his previous attempts having been rebuffed by the Americans and Canadians the previous year. It is at

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