Leslie Nicholson

Arthur Leslie Nicholson (* 1902, † 1969 ) (pseudonym John Whitwell) was a British intelligence service .

Life and activity

In the 1920s, Nicholson was a member of the British occupation army in Wiesbaden , where he was first dealt with intelligence issues. Shortly after the occupation army was disbanded in 1929, he was recruited as an agent by the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI 6) , then with the rank of captain . As a result, Nicholson - who spoke German and French - headed the secret office of the SIS in Prague from 1930 to 1934, succeeding Harold Gibson as station chief : As a camouflage, he was given the rank of passport control officer. at the British diplomatic mission there. The secret service operations organized by him were mainly aimed at the target countries Germany and Hungary. In 1934 Nicholson moved to the post of station chief of the SIS office in Riga , where he stayed until 1940.

At the end of the 1930s, his intelligence work brought Nicholson into the sights of the National Socialist police, 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 were particularly dangerous or dangerous to the Nazi surveillance apparatus important, which is why, in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht, they should be located and arrested by the special SS commandos following the occupation forces.

After the dissolution of the SIS office in Riga due to the military situation at the time, Nicholson returned to Great Britain via Russia, Japan, the Pacific Ocean, America and the Atlantic, where he worked at the SIS headquarters in London from November 1940 until the end of the war was. At the end of 1945 Nicholson was sent to Bucharest, where he set up a new secret SIS office to monitor the communist regime that was developing there after the end of the war.

In 1966, Nicholson published his memoirs of his secret service career under the pseudonym John Whitwell. The background to the publication of this work - which directly violated a Secret Service regulation that prohibited agents and former agents from publishing memoirs and reports on their activities in the SIS - was that Nicholson had left the SIS after his wife became seriously ill and subsequently received what he considered to be an inadequate pension from his former employer, so that he decided to improve it by publishing his book - the first published memoir by a member of MI6.

In the last years of his life, Nicholson, an alcoholic at the time and himself suffering from cancer, lived in poor conditions above a café in east London. In 1967 newspaper reports based on information obtained by journalist Philip Knightley - who had tracked down and questioned Nicholson based on his book - through the questioning of Nicholson, which revealed that SIS agent Kim Philby, then in the focus of the British public, caused a stir , who had been exposed as a double agent in the service of the Soviet Union and had fled there, in the 1940s even temporarily headed the SIS department dealing with espionage in the Soviet Union (i.e. the head of SIS anti-Soviet espionage himself was a Soviet spy had been), which until then had been successfully kept secret from the public.

Fonts

• British Agent , William Kimber, London 1966. (Reprinted 1997) (under the pseudonym Leslie Nicholson)

literature

• Wesley K. Wark: "Our Man in Riga: Reflections on the SIS Career and Writings of Leslie Nicholson", in: Intelligence and National Security , Vol. 11, Issue 4, October 1996, pp. 625-644.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Nicholson on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .