-Caveat Lector- ---------- Forwarded message ---------- June 16, 2001- The New York Times David Spedding Dies at 58; Headed British Spy Agency By ALAN COWELL LONDON, June 15 - David Rolland Spedding, who rose to head the Secret Intelligence Service, or M.I.6 - a position immortalized by the author Ian Fleming as the espionage supremo known only as M - died on Wednesday. He was 58. He died of lung cancer, the agency announced. Sir David's career as agent and spymaster saw the business of spying emerge from the cold war to face other threats from terrorism, organized crime and rogue states. In some ways, he was steeped in British espionage traditions. He was recruited as a spy at 24, while still a postgraduate history student at Oxford University. And while he was only the second head of M.I.6 to be publicly identified by name, he maintained some cover until his death: photographs of him in Wednesday's British newspapers were the first to be published. Unlike many of his predecessors, cold warriors who learned their craft spying on the Soviet Union, Sir David was an Arabist who spent much of his working life in the Middle East before his appointment in 1994 as C, as Britain's top spymaster is traditionally known. In another tradition, it is said that C is the only person permitted to write secret memos in green ink. And if there was a fictional precedent for Sir David, it was to be found not so much in M, who sent James Bond off on his missions, but rather perhaps in the work of John le Carr�, the pseudonym of David Cornwell, whose 1986 novel, "A Perfect Spy," depicted the difficult relationship between a spy and his father. The Times of London said in its obituary that Sir David's school days were spent in the shadow of his father, who had attended the same private school in Dorset, rising to prominence as a sportsman and a leader. Sir David preferred clandestine meetings with kindred spirits among classmates more interested in talk, wine and tobacco than in rugby. Those gatherings, Sir David suggested in one of very few published interviews, gave him his first experience of a covert cell operating behind the lines set by school regulations. While his father was a British Army colonel, Sir David joined an annual antinuclear protest march in 1959, angering both his father and his school. David Rolland Spedding was born on March 7, 1943, and had a traditional upper-middle-class upbringing at the Sherborne private school and Hertford College, Oxford, where he studied medieval history. He was formally recruited into M.I.6 in 1967 and worked under diplomatic cover in Beirut after learning Arabic at the British Foreign Office language training school in Lebanon. While he also served as a spy in Chile from 1972 to 1974, at the time Salvador Allende's government was being destabilized, he worked mainly in the Middle East, in Abu Dhabi and Jordan, where he spied on Iraq's covert weapons supplies. In 1984, according to associates, he played a behind-the-scenes role, the details of which remain classified, in thwarting a bomb attack planned by Abu Nidal on Queen Elizabeth II during a royal visit to Amman, Jordan. With characteristic modesty, he played down his part in the episode, which ended when Jordanian agents arrested the would-be bombers. By the time Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, Sir David was in charge of all of Britain's Middle East intelligence activities, including covert operations during the Persian Gulf war. But it was on the home front that he faced the most controversy over issues like M.I.6's move to new, high- profile headquarters on the banks of the Thames, accusations that M.I.6 had plotted to assassinate Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya and the secret service's tactics in spying on Mr. Hussein's weapons programs. Sir David retired from the service in 1999. Sir David is survived by his wife, Gillian, and two sons. ============================================================ <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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