Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence

BROOMAN-WHITE, DICK• 73

years’ imprisonment, Brook was exchanged in a spy swap for Peter

and Helen Kroger in 1969.

BROOK, SIR NORMAN.Secretary of the Cabinet during the Attlee,
Churchill, and Macmillan administrations, Sir Norman Brook, later
ennobled as Lord Normanbrook, undertook a review of the Security
Service in March 1951 and recommended changes that would be en-
shrined later in the year in theMaxwell Fyfe Directive.
In August 1961 Brook conveyed a request toJohn Profumofrom
MI5to assist in entrapping the Soviet naval attache ́,Eugene Ivanov,
a suggestion made so discreetly that the secretary of state for war
misunderstood it.

BROOKS, TONY.Codenamedalphonse, Brooks was one ofSpecial
Operations Executive’s most successful organizers and ran a net-
work around Lyons that delayed German reinforcements from reach-
ing Normandy after the D-Day landings. Decorated with the
Distinguished Service Order, Brooks joined theSecret Intelligence
Serviceafter the war, helped developstay-behind networksin East-
ern Europe, served inBulgariaand Cyprus, and joined the Mount-
batten Inquiry intoGeorge Blake’s escape from Wormwood Scrubs
prison.

BROOMAN-WHITE, DICK.Educated at Eton and Trinity College,
Cambridge, Dick Brooman-White worked first as a private secretary
to Sir Archibald Cochrane, MP, and then drifted into journalism, end-
ing in 1938 as a public relations officer for the Territorial Army. At
the outbreak of war, he joinedMI5, but later transferred into theSe-
cret Intelligence Service(SIS) to head the Iberian Section, where he
recommended Kim Philby for recruitment. Despite contesting
Bridgetown, Glasgow, in the 1945 general election, Brooman-White
remained in SIS and was posted in 1946 to the SIS station in Turkey,
where he had worked alongside Philby under diplomatic cover.
When Philby was sacked from SIS in November 1951 for suspected
disloyalty, he had many supporters in the service itself, in the media,
and especially in the Commons among those who had worked in the
same secret wartime corridors, of whom Brooman-White was but
one.