Richard Tomlinson

Richard John Charles Tomlinson was born in Hamilton, New Zealand, and raised in the nearby town of Ngāruawāhia. He was the middle child in a family of three brothers. The family moved to the village of Armathwaite in Cumberland, England, in 1968. The young Tomlinson won a scholarship for the independent Barnard Castle School in County Durham, where he was a contemporary of Rory Underwood and Rob Andrew, who went on to become England rugby internationals. He excelled at mathematics and physics, and won a scholarship to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1981. His friends included Gideon Rachman, who wrote him a reference after his tutor refused to do so. Tomlinson completed flying training with Cambridge University Air Squadron and won a Half Blue for Modern Pentathlon. He graduated from the University of Cambridge with a starred First Class honours degree in aeronautical engineering in 1984, and was approached by MI6 shortly afterwards, whose offer he turned down. Following his graduation he took examinations to join the Royal Navy as a Fleet Air Arm Officer, but he failed the medical examination due to childhood asthma. Instead he applied for and was awarded a Kennedy Scholarship, which allowed him to study technology policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with full funding during 1986–7. Following this, he was awarded a prize from the Rotary Foundation, allowing him to study in the country of his choice for a year. Consequently, he enrolled in a political science course at the University of Buenos Aires, where he became fluent in the Spanish language. He continued to pursue his aeronautical interests and qualified as a glider pilot with the Fuerza Aérea Argentina. During 1988–9, Tomlinson worked in Mayfair, London, for management consultancy company Booz Allen Hamilton. ==Military and MI6 service==

, London Finding his desk job unsatisfying, Tomlinson joined the Territorial Army in September 1989 and, after passing selection, served as a reservist with the SAS in the Artists Rifles, and then 23 SAS, qualifying as a military parachutist and radio operator. He represented Britain in the 1990 Camel Trophy, competing in Siberia, and crossed the Sahara desert solo on a motorcycle. He enjoyed the experience, subsequently applied to join MI6, and officially joined the Service on 23 September 1991. He completed his training with MI6 and claims he was the best recruit on his course, being awarded the rarely given "Box 1" attribute by his instructing officers including Nicholas Langman. Tomlinson worked in the "SOV/OPS" department, operating during the ending phases of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. He was posted to a diplomatic role in Moscow, and was one of the agents responsible for the retrieval of the Mitrokhin Archive in 1992. Whilst working there, it was discovered that the Conservative Party had been receiving donations from Serbian supporters. From 1994 to 1995, Tomlinson worked in the operational counter-proliferation department. His first posting in this capacity was to work as an undercover agent against Iran, where he succeeded in penetrating the Iranian Intelligence Service. He posed as a British businessman, and infiltrated a network of arms dealers that included Nahum Manbar. MI6 dismissed him on 22 May 1995 as he came to the end of his extended probationary period. Tomlinson's probationary period had been extended over the standard six-month duration due to his senior line manager's doubts about his personality. Tomlinson claimed that he had become suicidally depressed following the death of his long-term girlfriend from cancer and that he had been suffering from post-traumatic stress after witnessing violence against a civilian during the siege of Sarajevo, and that MI6 had been ill-equipped to handle his condition. MI6 argued that he was dismissed for "not being a team player, lacking motivation and having a short-term interest in the service", but later conceded that he had experienced a "personality clash" with his senior line manager. Another reason given for his dismissal was for "going on frolics on his own". Tomlinson argued that his supervisors had unfairly disregarded his personal circumstances. Since 2000, employees of MI6 have had the same employment rights as other British citizens, including written contracts and access to employment tribunals. However, MI6 refused to allow these procedures to be applied retroactively to Tomlinson's case. MI6 have not succeeded in obtaining another PII certificate since the Tomlinson case. ==The Big Breach==

in Hampshire, which Tomlinson asserts is an MI6 training facility Tomlinson moved to the Costa del Sol in Spain for 18 months from early 1996. Realising that a disgruntled former spy could be problematic for the agency, the aide-de-camp to the head of MI6 was enlisted to attempt to appease Tomlinson in February 1997. He offered him a £15,000 loan and a marketing job with Jackie Stewart's Formula One racing team, in return for a promise of silence. Tomlinson returned to Britain, and in October 1997 was arrested and accused of breaking the Official Secrets Act 1989, after delivering a seven-page synopsis of The Big Breach to the Australian office of Transworld, a British publisher. On 18 December 1997 he was sentenced to 12 months in prison after pleading guilty. After the Court of Appeal of England and Wales ruled in his favour, the book was made available in the UK. Reception The Economist criticised the "mess" that MI6 had made in failing to handle the Tomlinson case properly: "Recruiting Mr Tomlinson looks like a bad mistake, and his sacking seems to have been clumsily handled." He concluded, however, that the book "left me with the feeling that the spooks in Whitehall could have avoided a great deal of adverse publicity by agreeing to Tomlinson's original proposal: an employment tribunal held in camera." Tomlinson removed the references to Mandela in the British edition of the book, conceding that Mandela was probably unaware that the officials with whom he spoke were affiliated with MI6. ==Other alleged breaches and assertions==

List of MI6 agents In May 1999, a list of 116 alleged MI6 agents was sent to the LaRouche movement's publication Executive Intelligence Review, a weekly magazine which published it online. Its names included Andrew Fulton, who had recently retired, Christopher Steele, David Spedding and Richard Dearlove. MI6 biographer Stephen Dorril explained that most of the names were "light-cover" sources who worked out of embassies or missions posing as diplomats. Dorril argued, "it is well known that rival intelligence networks know who these people are and accept them." Tomlinson wrote, "If MI6 had set out to produce a list that caused me the maximum incrimination, but caused them the minimum damage, they could not have done a better job." He also said, "It mystifies me why MI6 gave the list credibility. If they were really worried about the safety of their agents they could have denied it." Government officials later conceded that the list did not originate from Tomlinson. He had suggested that MI6 was monitoring Diana before her death and that her driver on the night she died, Henri Paul, had been an MI6 informant, and that her death resembled plans he saw during 1992 for the assassination of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević, using a bright light to cause a traffic accident. At the Coroner's Inquest into the death of the Princess, on 13 February 2008, speaking by video-link from France, Tomlinson conceded that, after the interval of 16 or 17 years, he "could not remember specifically" whether the document he had seen during 1992 had in fact proposed the use of a strobe light to cause a traffic accident as a means of assassinating Milošević, although use of lights for this purpose had been covered in his MI6 training. On being told that no MI6 file on Henri Paul had been found, Tomlinson said that it "would be absurd after 17 years to say I can positively disagree with it, but... I do not think the fact that they did not manage to find a file rules out anything either". He said he believed MI6 had an informant at the Paris Ritz but he could not be certain that this person was necessarily Henri Paul. ==Post-MI6 activities==

In August 1998, Tomlinson left the United Kingdom for France, and shortly afterwards moved to New Zealand. He moved to Germany until he was hounded out by officials, whereupon he moved to Italy. From 2006 to 2007, Tomlinson maintained a series of blogs detailing his treatment. His Riviera home was raided by police in 2006. In 2007, government lawyers decided not to prosecute him for publishing The Big Breach. The Crown Prosecution Service said there was no real prospect of conviction in a jury trial, which would reveal "sensitive matters". ==Personal life==

In 1998, Tomlinson was described as possessing "the air of slight arrogance that goes with good looks, a hard-trained body and a sharp intellect". The Geneva press reported that he had a "perfect command of French". ==References==