Richard Tomlinson

Richard John Charles Tomlinson (born 13 January 1963) is a former officer of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).

The family moved to the village of Armathwaite in Cumbria, 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 fellow student, historian Andrew Roberts, remembers Tomlinson as "a bright and charming undergraduate, popular with the boys for his drinking and sporting prowess, and with the girls for his dark good looks."

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.

Tomlinson was imprisoned under the Official Secrets Act 1989 in 1997 after he gave a synopsis of a proposed book detailing his career with MI6 to an Australian publisher.

He served six months of a twelve-month sentence before being paroled, after which he fled Britain.

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, and 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.

From March 1992 until September 1993, he worked in the Eastern European Controllerate of MI6 under the staff designation of UKA/7.

Whilst working there, it was discovered that the Conservative Party had been receiving donations from Serbian supporters.

In November 1993, he joined the Balkans Controllerate, and was posted to Sarajevo for six months as the MI6 representative in Bosnia during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia.

There he was a "targeting officer", with a mission to identify potential informants and gather intelligence.

A soldier who escorted Tomlinson to Bosnia described him as a "liability", a "sulk" and "totally unprofessional", although Tomlinson has disputed this.

From 1994 to 1995, Tomlinson worked in the operational counter-proliferation department.

He argued that he was subjected to unfair dismissal from MI6 in 1995, and attempted to take his former employer to a tribunal.

MI6 refused, arguing that to do so would breach state security.

Staff at MI6 have been allowed employment tribunals since 2000, and have been able to unionise since 2008.

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.

His father came from a Lancashire farming family and he worked for the Ministry of Agriculture, and had met his wife whilst studying agriculture at Newcastle University.

The book, named The Big Breach, was published in 2001 and was subsequently serialised by The Sunday Times.

The book detailed various aspects of MI6 operations, alleging that it employed a mole in the German Bundesbank and that it held a "licence to kill", the latter later confirmed by the head of MI6 at a public hearing.

Tomlinson then attempted to assist Mohamed Al-Fayed in his privately funded investigation into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and al-Fayed's son Dodi.

Tomlinson claimed that MI6 had considered assassinating Slobodan Milošević, the president of Serbia, by staging a car crash using a powerful strobe light to blind the driver, and suggested that Diana and Dodi might have been killed by MI6 in the same way.

MI6 confirmed that plans of that nature had been drafted regarding a different Eastern European official, but that the proposal had been swiftly rejected by management.

In 2009 MI6 apologised for its treatment of Tomlinson, dropped all threat of charges and agreed to unfreeze royalties on his book.