Geoffrey Wedgwood Harrison

Sir Geoffrey Wedgwood Harrison (born July 18, 1908 in Hampshire , England, † April 12, 1990 ) was a British diplomat . Among other things, he served as British ambassador to Brazil, Turkey and the Soviet Union.

Life and activity

Harrison was a son of the officer Thomas Edmund Harrison and his wife Maud Winfried, nee. Godman. After leaving school, he studied at Winchester College in Hampshire and King's College, Cambridge University. He then entered the British diplomatic service: Officially, he was appointed after passing the recruitment test on October 21, 1932, and was awarded the rank of third-class secretary in the diplomatic service (3rd secretary).

In the diplomatic service Harrison was first used in the London Foreign Office before he was transferred to the British mission in Tokyo on February 7, 1935 . He stayed there for almost two years before moving to the British Embassy in Berlin on April 8, 1937, of which he was a member until September 1939. During this time he was briefly seconded to London in May 1937 to attend the coronation of King George VI as the companion of the Japanese representative at this event (Prince Chichibu). to participate. On October 21, 1937 he was promoted to the rank of secretary, 2nd class in the diplomatic service.

After the outbreak of the Second World War, Harrison was withdrawn from Berlin and was a member of the Foreign Office in London from September 4, 1939. From September 11, 1939 to November 24, 1941 he served as the private secretary of the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State [Vanissart was permanent secretary, who was parliamentary?]. Otherwise he worked in the Foreign Office for the German Reich until the end of the war. During this time Harrison was promoted to July 1, 1942 in the rank of acting secretary in the diplomatic service ( Acting 1st Secretary ).

Due to his work in Berlin from 1937 to 1939, Harrison came under the sights of the National Socialist police officers in the late 1930s, who classified him as an important target: In the spring of 1940 the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who In the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht, special SS commandos that followed the occupation troops should be located and arrested with special priority.

After the end of World War II, Harrison was posted to the British Mission in Brussels on September 7, 1945. Previously, he had been involved in the formulation of the Potsdam Agreement between the three most important Sierra Leonean powers of the Second World War, in which the cornerstones regarding the treatment of the occupied German Empire were laid down. In particular, Article 12 of the agreement, which provided for the transfer of the German population from the areas east of the Oder-Neisse border and in Czechoslovakia to the four sectors of the remaining German territory occupied by the Allies, had been designed by him in a leading role.

On October 24, 1946, Harrison was promoted to the rank of Foreign Service Officer. Soon thereafter, on October 23, 1947, he was assigned to the British Embassy in Moscow with the rank of Minister Plenipotentiary. In 1949 he temporarily acted as the ambassador's deputy before he was brought back to the Foreign Office on October 31, 1949 to head the local department for Northern Europe [?] ( Head of Northern Department ). As of October 22, 1951, he was raised to the rank of Assistant Under Secretary of State in the Foreign Office. On January 1, 1955, he was knighted as Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George and from then on carried the suffix "Sir".

On October 1, 1956, Harrison was appointed British ambassador to Brazil (office: Rio de Janeiro ): He remained in this post until 1958. He then held the post of British ambassador to Iran in Tehran from November 3, 1958 to 1963 and became Proposed Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order on March 6, 1961 . From 1963 to 1965 he was Deputy Vice Minister in the FCO (Deputy Vice Minister).

On August 27, 1965, Harrison reached the climax of his diplomatic career with the appointment of British Ambassador to the Soviet Union, who at that time was considered the most important ambassadorial service in the British diplomatic service after the post of Ambassador in Washington DC: he remained in this post for almost three years until 1968, when he was removed from the Foreign Office as ambassador because of his affair with a Russian domestic worker, Galya Ivanov, who turned out to be a KGB agent. The background to his withdrawal as ambassador to Moscow only became public knowledge in 1981 through a report in the Sunday Times . On June 8th he was elevated to the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George.

family

Harrison was married to Amy Katherine Clive, daughter of diplomat Robert Clive, since 1936, with whom he had three sons and a daughter.

literature

• The Foreign Office List and Diplomatic and Consular Year Book , 1963, p. 284.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Harrison on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Knights and Dames: HA-HOR at Leigh Rayment's Peerage

predecessor	Office	successor
Geoffrey Harington Thompson	British Ambassador to Brazil 1956–1958	Geoffrey Wallinger
Roger Bentham Stevens	British Ambassador to Tehran 1958–1963	Denis Arthur Hepworth Wright
Humphrey Trevelyan	British Ambassador to Moscow 1965–1968	Archibald Duncan Wilson