Harold Gibson

Harold Charles Lehrs Gibson (born May 13, 1897 in London , † August 23/24, 1960 in Rome ) was a British diplomat and intelligence officer. During the 1930s and 1940s, Gibson was the director of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS; also known as MI6) in Prague and Istanbul.

Life and activity

Gibson grew up as the son of British parents in Tsarist Russia, where his father, Charles J. Gibson, ran a chemical plant. His younger brother was the journalist and intelligence service Archibald Gibson , best known as a correspondent for the London daily Times . He was educated at the Tonbridge School .

Career in the SIS from 1918 to 1945

In the late phase of the First World War, in which he participated as a volunteer in the Russian army from 1914, Gibson entered the service of the British secret service SIS, for which he initially worked in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. During the Russian Civil War, Gibson, who in later years was considered a hater of the Soviet Union and the so-called People's Republics , temporarily acted as a representative of the British secret service to the counter-revolutionary General Anton Deniken , one of the leaders of the "white" troops fighting the Communist Red Army , in the south of the country. He was then employed at different locations as an intelligence agent for the Secret Service: from 1919 to 1921 he worked as an intelligence agent for the SIS in Constantinople, then until 1930 in Bucharest and finally from 1930 to 1933 in Riga. From 1923 (until 1958) he was officially in the service of the Foreign Service, the British foreign service.

From February 1934 Gibson headed the SIS office for Central and Eastern Europe in Prague under the name of station chief with the rank of major. He officially belonged to the British diplomatic mission in Prague as Vice Consul and employee of the passport department. He had to give up this post in the course of the occupation of the so-called remaining Czech Republic by the German Wehrmacht in March 1939. Before that, however, he was able to evacuate numerous Czechoslovak intelligence agents , such as František Moravec , as well as files from the Czechoslovak secret service on March 14, 1938 with KLM aircraft to Great Britain, where they worked as suppliers and agents for the Allies against the Axis powers during the war.

In the event of a successful invasion of Great Britain, Gibson was placed on the special wanted list compiled by the Reich Main Security Office in 1940 , a directory of people who should automatically and primarily be arrested by special units of the SS in the event of a German occupation of the country.

In 1940 Gibson was transferred to Istanbul, where he headed the SIS office for Turkey until at least 1944 - now with the rank of Colonel.

post war period

After the Second World War, Gibson was again a member of the British diplomatic mission in Czechoslovakia from 1945 to 1948 (and secretly again headed the SIS station in Prague). He then worked for two years as the head of the SIS department in Berlin, before finally being appointed head of the SIS office in Rome in 1955. In 1958 he retired. He kept his residence in Rome. In his final years he was, among other things, honorary secretary of the Commonwealth Club and representative of the British Chamber of Commerce for Italy in Rome.

On August 24, 1960, Gibson was found shot dead in his apartment at 25 Via Antonio Bosio, Rome. British and Italian investigators concluded that he had committed suicide. Three years later, the British domestic secret service MI5 opened the Gibson murder files again: The background was that defectors from the Soviet secret service had informed MI5 that their former employer had succeeded in smuggling several moles into the SIS, although they did not know their identity but they knew that these were people who had strong personal ties to Russia. Since this also applied to Gibson, who grew up in Russia and was married to two Russian women one after the other, he too came into the focus of the investigation. According to the MI-6 monograph Nigel West, the investigation did not reveal any evidence of Gibson's activity as a double agent, other than the obscure circumstances of his death.

Gibson was buried on the Cimitero Acattolico di Roma .

honors and awards

Gibson was a member of the Royal Institute for International Affairs in London and was awarded the orders of St. Vladimir and Stanislawa (Russia), Polonia Restituta (Poland) and Legion of Merit (USA).

Marriages

Gibson's first marriage was since 1921 with Rachel Kalmanoviecz, the daughter of an engineer from Odessa. From this marriage a daughter was born. In 1948, a year after the death of his first wife, he married Ekaterina Alfimov, with whom he had a son and a daughter.

literature

• Keith Jeffery : MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949 , 2010.
• Nigel West: MI6: British Secret Intelligence Service Operations 1909-1945 , 1983, p. 243.
• Anonymus: Dossier on Harold Gibson, September 1949 , in: Nigel West (Ed.): Triplex: Secrets from the Cambridge Spies, 2009, pp. 335-344.
• Who was who: A Companion to Who's Who, Containing the Biographies of Those who Died During the Period , Vol. 5, 1961, p. 418.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ This is Gibson's official date of birth, which can be found on his tombstone and in the Who's Who . According to the intelligence dossier quoted below, he was actually born in Moscow in 1894.
2. ↑ http://www.cemeteryrome.it/infopoint/Risultati.asp