William James Skardon (1904–1987) was a

Special Branch Special Branch is a label customarily used to identify units responsible for matters of national security and Intelligence (information gathering), intelligence in Policing in the United Kingdom, British, Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth, ...

officer who joined

MI5 The Security Service, also known as MI5 ( Military Intelligence, Section 5), is the United Kingdom's domestic counter-intelligence and security agency and is part of its intelligence machinery alongside the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Go ...

in 1940 and became an

interrogator Interrogation (also called questioning) is interviewing as commonly employed by law enforcement officers, military personnel, intelligence agencies, organized crime syndicates, and terrorist organizations with the goal of eliciting useful infor ...

and head of "The Watchers" (physical

surveillance Surveillance is the monitoring of behavior, many activities, or information for the purpose of information gathering, influencing, managing or directing. This can include observation from a distance by means of electronic equipment, such as c ...

teams). He was intimately involved with the investigation of the

Cambridge Five The Cambridge Spy Ring was a ring of spies in the United Kingdom that passed information to the Soviet Union during World War II and was active from the 1930s until at least into the early 1950s. None of the known members were ever prosecuted for ...

and the interrogation of

Klaus Fuchs Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs (29 December 1911 – 28 January 1988) was a German theoretical physicist and atomic spy who supplied information from the American, British and Canadian Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union during and shortly aft ...

. After rapidly and non-coercively eliciting a confession from Fuchs, Skardon acquired a reputation as a very skilful interrogator. However his own report of the Fuchs interrogation indicates that Fuchs – apparently in a condition of considerable mental stress – volunteered his entire confession with very little prompting. Peter Wright also claimed that the success of that interrogation depended mainly on the detailed brief supplied to Skardon, plus the "listeners" who picked Fuchs's lies to pieces. Skardon's subsequent record in interrogations was considerably less successful, and his success with Fuchs led to these negative results being given too much credence. Some of Skardon's subsequent failures include: *

Kim Philby Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby (1 January 191211 May 1988) was a British intelligence officer and a double agent for the Soviet Union. In 1963 he was revealed to be a member of the Cambridge Five, a spy ring which had divulged British secr ...

– interrogated ten times without result (although Skardon was apparently never given a free hand). *

Anthony Blunt Anthony Frederick Blunt (26 September 1907 – 26 March 1983), styled Sir Anthony Blunt KCVO from 1956 to November 1979, was a leading British art historian and Soviet spy. Blunt was professor of art history at the University of London, dire ...

– interviewed and cleared 11 times between 1951 and 1964. Finally confessed in 1964 when confronted with

incontrovertible evidence Incontrovertible evidence, or conclusive evidence, is a colloquial term for evidence (law), evidence introduced to prove a fact that is supposed to be so conclusive that there can be no other truth to the matter; evidence so strong it overpowers c ...

. *

John Cairncross John Cairncross (25 July 1913 – 8 October 1995) was a British civil servant who became an intelligence officer and spy during the Second World War. As a Soviet double agent, he passed to the Soviet Union the raw Tunny decryptions that influ ...

– interviewed and cleared in 1952, despite strong circumstantial evidence being found in Burgess' flat. Left the country very soon after the interrogation but returned in 1967 and confessed when confronted with Blunt's confession. * Jim Hill – liaison officer in the

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

n Ministry of Foreign Affairs, access was restricted to classified information in 1949 on the basis of

Venona project The Venona project was a United States counterintelligence program initiated during World War II by the United States Army's Signal Intelligence Service (later absorbed by the National Security Agency), which ran from February 1, 1943, until Octob ...

material, interrogated three times by Skardon in 1959, cleared and access restored. Almost certainly an

NKVD The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (russian: Наро́дный комиссариа́т вну́тренних дел, Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del, ), abbreviated NKVD ( ), was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union. ...

agent.

References

1904 births 1987 deaths Counterintelligence analysts MI5 personnel British police officers {{UK-bio-stub

See also

References