MI6 officer who as head of counter-intelligence helped to unmask the KGB double agent George Blake
John Quine’s future career in the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) was set in stone when he decided to learn Japanese during the Second World War, following an appeal by the Government for volunteers.
He was a man who enjoyed challenges, not all of them confronted successfully, as his retirement years would demonstrate. But his willingness to seize the wartime opportunity to study Japanese to debrief prisoners of war marked him out as an obvious candidate for a life in the intelligence world.
At the end of the war he slipped seamlessly into the open arms of MI6 and flourished as an intelligence officer. He never spoke about his secret career to his family, but his name emerged into the public domain when it was revealed that he was one of four people who confronted their MI6 colleague George Blake when SIS had evidence that he was working as a double agent for the Soviet KGB.
John Quine was born in 1920 in the parish of Gretna, the son of Albert and Amy Quine. His father was a doctor. He grew up in Seasalter on the North Kent coast, and was educated at Faversham grammar school. He went on to King’s College, London but was there only a short time before war broke out.
He was a keen sailor, so he joined the Royal Navy’s Coastal Forces, serving on board MTBs (motor torpedo boats), and was eventually promoted to captain.
His wife, Heather Martin, whom he married in 1946, used to say that whenever he returned on leave without his cap it meant his boat had been sunk. He came home capless on two occasions.
After the Government appeal for volunteers to learn Japanese, Quine went to the United States in 1944 for language training at the University of Colorado. He was then sent to Japan to start the long process of debriefing senior Japanese figures as part of a team of interrogators.
After joining MI6 at the end of the war, he was posted to Tokyo where he served for seven years. Two of his children were born there. On his return to Britain in 1954, he was sent as an intelligence officer to Warsaw where he was responsible for recruiting a network of agents whose cover would be blown by George Blake.
Blake had been posted to Lebanon but was summoned back to London in March 1961, and reported to his employers at one of MI6’s residences, a smart mansion house in Carlton Gardens, SW1. It was April 1961. Blake, a longstanding MI6 officer, faced four accusers: Quine, then head of counter-intelligence, Terence Lecky and Harold Shergold who had both served with MI6 in Germany, and a former police officer.
Quine and the others interrogated him all day, questioning his loyalty and accusing him of selling his country for money. Although Blake held out for a few hours, he finally broke, admitting he was a KGB double agent. But he insisted to Quine and the others that he had worked for the Russians for ideological reasons, not for money. At his trial he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 42 years in prison. Quine was one of several MI6 officers who visited him in Wormwood Scrubs to question him further about the British agents he had exposed to the Russians. Many of them had been killed as a result of his betrayal.
Quine became convinced that Blake was plotting to escape and warned his superiors. But in October 1966 Blake duly succeeded in escaping from Wormwood Scrubs, with the help of three men he had befriended, and he remains a hero in Russia, living in a flat in Moscow and now in his nineties.
Quine travelled extensively in Africa for MI6, and in the late 1960s he was posted to South Africa. His final posting was in Mauritius before he retired from MI6 in 1975.
Mysteriously, he is supposed to have written a postcard from Dallas on the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 although his family have never managed to find it.
He was an avid reader of James Bond books, and in the late 1960s he bought an 18th-century house called The Old Palace in Bekesbourne, near Canterbury. A previous owner of the property, for two years, was Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond.
After leaving MI6 Quine applied his hand to a series of business ventures but without much success. His family have admitted that his latter years were not his finest.
His wife, Heather, died in 2005, having been separated from Quine since the end of the 1980s. He remarried and is survived by his second wife, Pat, and by three sons.
John Quine, MI6 intelligence officer, was born on September 13, 1920. He died on April 29, 2013, aged 92
Hereditary proprietor of St Michael’s Mount who presided with genial enthusiasm over its affairs and a host of Cornish charities
John Francis Arthur St Aubyn, 4th Baron St Levan, was very much the grand seigneur of St Michael’s Mount as well as being an active and widely respected supporter of numerous Cornish public bodies.
Born in 1919, he went to Eton and then Trinity College, Cambridge, to read history. While at Trinity he joined the RNVR as a cadet. Hearing the news of the Dunkirk evacuation, he and a friend took the train to Chatham where he was placed in charge of a Belgian freighter that was used in a rescue mission, pulling some 150 soldiers off the beaches.
After qualifying courses, he was appointed to the minesweeper Salamander, nominated for detached service in North Russia and in February 1942 escorted Arctic Convoy PQ11 to Archangel.
Employed for much of the time sweeping for mines in the Barents Sea and around the port of Murmansk, Salamander was also involved in escorting six more of these arduous and dangerous convoys, which supported the Soviet war effort at a cost of 105 merchantmen sunk from all causes. One of these convoys was the notorious PQ17, massacred after having been mistakenly ordered to scatter under a supposed threat from German major warships. Salamander was sent out to rescue some of the survivors. He qualified for the Arctic Medal, which was introduced shortly before his death.
Promoted to Lieutenant RNVR, St Aubyn was awarded the DSC in 1942 for his gallantry and devotion to duty.
He was sent to the US to collect, as second-in-command, the minesweeping sloop Combatant, completed by Associated Shipbuilders of Seattle in November 1943. Before and during the D-Day landings in Normandy in June to August 1944, Combatant supported minesweepers in a variety of tasks including making safe the anchorage of the battleship Warspite and other bombarding warships. After the war he commanded the armed trawler Prospect in clear-up operations including the disposal of German barges full of poison-gas projectiles.
Demobilised in 1946, he returned to Cambridge and took a law degree. He was admitted as a solicitor in 1948. Besides his legal practice in a conveyancing firm, his business activities included ownership of a pie shop in the Earl’s Court Road, promoting the first launderettes in London and running a TV rental and repair business.
The St Aubyn family had owned St Michael’s Mount since 1659. John’s father had handed the Mount to the National Trust with a large endowment in 1954. However, the family retained a 999-year lease to live in the castle and the licence to operate the visitor business. During John’s time on the Mount, from 1976 to 2003, the number of tourists each year increased threefold. He was prone to giving slightly startled visitors impromptu tours of his private quarters. He was awarded the National Trust’s annual Octavia Hill award for his support.
He and his wife Susan, whom he married in 1970, cultivated a fine garden, noted for rare plants which benefited from the Mount’s microclimate. Susan, daughter of Major-General Sir John Kennedy, sometime governor of Southern Rhodesia, died in 2003.
John St Aubyn’s wide range of official and charitable activities included nearly 30 years as vice-president of the Royal Bath and West and Southern Counties Society. He was vice-president of the Royal Cornwall Agricultural Association since 1980, and he was active in the London Cornish Association, the Cornwall Community Foundation, the Truro Naval Association, the Penlee Lifeboat Station, the West Country Writers’ Association and the Cornwall Normandy Veterans. He was High Sheriff of Cornwall in 1974, deputy Lieutenant from 1977 and vice-Lord Lieutenant in 1992. He succeeded his father to the title in 1978.
A fellow of the Royal Society of Arts from 1974, he was particularly proud of his achievement as a Bard of Cornwall. These public services were acknowledged by appointment to OBE in 2004. He moved ashore in 2003, establishing himself in Penzance.
A keen sailor and a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron, St Aubyn owned what is often called the “oldest boat afloat”, Lord St Levan’s “Ceremonial Barge” built in St Mawes about 1740. His heir is his nephew, James St Aubyn.
John St Aubyn, OBE, DSC, 4th Baron St Levan, was born on February 23, 1919. He died on April 7, 2013, aged 94
'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
