COLVIN, JOHN• 103COLLARD, JOHN.Born in January 1913 and educated at Cranleigh
and Keble College, Oxford, where he read history, John Collard was
a solicitor working for the treasury solicitor when in 1940 he joined
the Cheshire regiment and was seconded toMI5and thenMI11.
After the war he rejoined MI5 and undertook protective security du-
ties until he was posted to Singapore for two years. Upon his return
to England, he was recruited by the recently retired director-general,
Sir Percy Sillitoe, to combat the trade in illicit diamonds, and for the
next three years Collard was based in Johannesburg working for the
International Diamond Security Organization. His subsequent ac-
count of his adventures, as disclosed toIan Flemingin 1957, became
The Diamond Smugglers. His own book,A Maritime History of Rye,
reflected his latter occupation as a partner in a firm of solicitors in
that town. He died in October 2002.
COLOSSUS.The first programmable analog computer, designed to
race through millions of permutations of the keys of the German
Enigmacipher machine during World War II, Colossus was built at
the General Post Office Research Station atDollis Hilland installed
atBletchley Parkin December 1943.
COLVIN, JOHN.After graduating from Dartmouth and London Uni-
versity, John Colvin joined the Royal Navy and was an entirely con-
ventional sailor until his transfer to the Adriatic during the war. There
he ferried agents across toYugoslaviaon motor gunboats, but his
clandestine career was to start in earnest when he joined theSecret
Intelligence Service(SIS) in 1951 and was posted to Oslo. In 1953
he was transferred to Vienna.
Colvin’s first posting to the Far East, after three years in London,
took place in 1958 when he went to Kuala Lumpur. During the height
of the Vietnam War, between 1965 and 1967, he was in Hanoi, endur-
ing the nightly American air raids. Colvin’s next appointment was as
ambassador to the People’s Republic of Mongolia, a post tradition-
ally reserved for retiring SIS personnel, although in 1977 he went to
Washington, D.C., for his final posting as the SIS head of station.
After his retirement Colvin took up writing, and he remained active
until his death in London in 2003.