The Big Breach: From Top Secret to Maximum Security

Product Information

a b "Spying scandal spreads". BBC News. 20 December 1999. Archived from the original on 19 April 2003 . Retrieved 5 December 2012.

Norton-Taylor, Richard (29 June 2006). "Police raid Riviera home of former MI6 officer". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 10 February 2021 . Retrieved 3 December 2012. In 2008, Tomlinson was a witness for the inquest into the deaths of the Princess of Wales and Dodi al Fayed. He had suggested that MI6 was monitoring Diana before her death and that "he knew for a fact" that [9]her driver on the night she died, Henri Paul, was an MI6 informant. He claimed that her death mirrored plans he saw in 1992 for the assassination of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, using a bright light to cause a traffic accident. In 1999, Tomlinson enlisted in the French Foreign Legion, using a nom de guerre. He served with 3rd Company, 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment until medically discharged in 2003. Tomlinson is now believed to live in France, where he qualified and now works as an airline pilot. He now lives permanently in France and has retrained as a professional pilot. [58] Personal life [ edit ] verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Richard John Charles Tomlinson was born in Hamilton, New Zealand, and raised in the nearby town of Ngāruawāhia. [2] [9] He was the middle child in a family of three brothers. [10] 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. [11] The family moved to the village of Armathwaite [12] in Cumbria, England, in 1968. [10] 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. [13] He excelled at mathematics and physics, and won a scholarship to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1981. [11]

a b Financial Times (London, England) 31 March 2001 Saturday London Edition 1 BOOKS: The spy who talked too much: The renegade MI6 agent is an unconvincing advocate of free speech, argues Jimmy Burns BYLINE: By JIMMY BURNS SECTION: BOOKS; Pg. 4 Tomlinson worked in the "SOV/OPS" department, operating during the ending phases of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. [18] He was posted to a diplomatic role in Moscow, and was one of the agents responsible for the retrieval of the valuable Mitrokhin Archive in 1992. [18] From March 1992 until September 1993, he worked in the Eastern European Controllerate of MI6 under the staff designation of UKA/7. [19] [20] Whilst working there, it was discovered that the Conservative Party had been receiving donations from Serbian supporters. [20] 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. [2] There he was a "targeting officer", with a mission to identify potential informants and gather intelligence. [20] A soldier who escorted Tomlinson to Bosnia described him as a "liability", a "sulk" and "totally unprofessional", although Tomlinson has disputed this. [21] a b c d Barnett, Antony (13 June 1999). "British agents helped Iran to make killer gas". The Observer. Archived from the original on 1 December 2017 . Retrieved 15 February 2013. 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 given parole, whereupon he left the country. The book, named The Big Breach, was published in Moscow in 2001 (and later in Edinburgh), 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 had a " licence to kill", the latter later confirmed by the head of MI6 at a public hearing. [5]

Jimmy Burns, reviewing the book for the Financial Times, speculated that it was plausible that "MI6's senior management realised they had made a terrible mistake in recruiting someone who thought that espionage was just one big adventure." [39] 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." [39] He was born in Ngaruawahia, New Zealand and grew up in Armathwaite, England. He was educated at Barnard Castle School where he was a contemporary of England Rugby players Rory Underwood and Rob Andrew. He excelled at mathematics and received double-stars in A and S-level mathematics and physics. He then won an entrance scholarship to Cambridge University. He was first approached by MI6 in 1984 after graduating from Gonville and Caius College Cambridge, with a Double First Class Honours Degree in aeronautical engineering. He also completed flying training with Cambridge University Air Squadron, won a Cambridge Blue for Modern Pentathlon. On graduation he was accepted to join the Royal Navy as a Fleet Air Arm Officer. However he instead applied for and won a Kennedy Scholarship to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S., where he obtained an S.M. in Technology policy. 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. He suggested that Diana and Dodi might have been killed by MI6 in the same way. Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 at the time, admitted that plans of that nature had been drafted regarding a different Eastern European official, but that the proposal had been swiftly rejected by management. [6] 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, and had never claimed (despite having said so in former interviews), that that person was necessarily Henri Paul. [10] The Increment