Wilfred Dunderdale

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Wilfred Albert Dunderdale (also called Bill and Biffy; code name John Green) (born December 24, 1899 in Odessa , † November 13, 1990 in Surrey ) was a British intelligence service .

Life and activity

Dunderdale was a son of the British naval engineer Richard Albert Dunderdale. He grew up in Russia so he was fluent in the Russian language. He attended a grammar school in Nikolayev and began studying architecture in Saint Petersburg before he was forced to flee the city by the Russian Revolution.

He went to Vladivostok , where, on behalf of his father, he organized the dispatch of a submarine supplied by the United States and divided into five sections with a freight train across revolution-torn Russia to the Black Sea . Because of these achievements and because of his language skills, he was hired as an agent by the British naval intelligence service and worked in the Black Sea and Marmara Sea area in the following years.

In 1921 Dunderdale was employed by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6), the British foreign intelligence service . He was first used in Constantinople .

In 1926 he was employed as station head of the SIS branch in rue Jourbert in Paris. He held this post for fourteen years, until 1940. His main tasks in this position were to act as a liaison to the various British secret services as well as the organization of espionage activities with the target countries Russia and Germany.

He achieved his first coup when he was involved in it around 1927

Of considerable importance for the later course of the Second World War was the transmission of a replica of the German Enigma coding machine made by experts from the Polish secret service to the SIS in 1939, which was organized by Dunderdale. This became the basis for British monitoring of German radio traffic during the subsequent years of the war Decryption Center in Bletchley Park.

After the German occupation of France in 1940 and especially the capital Paris, Dunderdale was one of the last British representatives to fled the city in June 1940, shortly before the German troops marched into Paris: he finally reached Bordeaux, from where he was was flown out with a special aircraft of the Royal Air Force.

Even before the war, Dunderdale was classified as an important target by the National Socialist police. In the spring of 1940 the Reich Main Security 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, were to be located and arrested with special priority by the occupying forces following special SS units.

In the early years after the war, Dunderdale headed the Secret Service's Special Liaison Center. This was responsible for looking after and checking defectors from the Eastern Bloc as well as for questioning them in order to gain knowledge about the communist states of Eastern Europe. The staff of the Special Liaison Center consisted mostly of older Polish and Russian emigrants.

1959 Dunderdale left the SIS.

Aftermath

Dunderdale is often seen in the specialist literature as one of several people on which the fictional character of the British secret agent James Bond developed by Ian Fleming is based: It has been pointed out that Fleming got to know Dunderdale during the Second World War and was in closer professional contact with came to him and accordingly with his personality and career (Fleming was assistant to the chief of the British Naval Intelligence Service at the time and Dunderdale was a leading agent in the SIS).

Furthermore, authors have pointed out various parallels between Fleming's character and Dunderdale in terms of personality / character, habitus and lifestyle habits or discovered that the fictional agent Bond has numerous traits that are also guaranteed for the real agent Dunderdale: Dunderdale had one like Bond Preference for tailor-made suits, smoked the same cigarettes as the fictional character and, like her, was considered a womanizer, a charming bon vivant and a lover of noble automobiles that were equipped with individualized special equipment (for example, he used a Rolls-Royce in Paris, which was equipped with bulletproof armor).

Finally, elements from Dunderdale's secret service career can also be found in the Bond novels.

literature

  • Keith Jeffery : MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949 , 2010.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hitler's Black Book - information for Dunderdale , accessed January 29, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Dunderdale, Wilfred
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dunderdale, Wilfred Albert (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British intelligence officer
DATE OF BIRTH December 24, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Odessa
DATE OF DEATH November 13, 1990
Place of death Surrey