Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence

FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION• 179

slow to react and became heavily dependent on intelligence in its ef-

fort, codenamed Operationcorporate, to recapture the islands.

See alsoHMSENDURANCE.

FALSE FLAG.An agent-cultivation technique intended to deceive the
target about the true identity or nature of his or her recruiter. Thus,
KGBpersonnel occasionally adopted a Polish or Czech identity to
make them more acceptable to their intended recruits, andMI5offi-
cers investigating leaks have masqueraded as hostile intelligence of-
ficers in the hope of entrapping a spy. In 1945 whenAllan Nunn
Maywas identified as a Soviet spy,Iona von Ustinovwas deployed,
unsuccessfully, to rendezvous with him in the hope of obtaining
some incriminating evidence that could be used against him. When
Michael Smithwas approached in August 1992 by a contact claim-
ing to be a Russian with a message from his former handler,Viktor
Oshchenko, he fell for the ploy and incriminated himself to the ex-
tent that at his subsequent trial he was sentenced to 25 years’ impris-
onment.

FAR EAST COMBINED BUREAU (FECB).TheGCHQcover
name for its regional headquarters on Stonecutter’s Island,Hong
Kong, which opened in 1932 under Captain Arthur Shaw, RN. Later
evacuated to Kranji, Singapore, and then Kandy, Ceylon, the FECB
maintained a constant radio link toWhaddon Hall.

FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION (FBI). MI5’sGuy
Liddellestablished an excellent rapport with the FBI director J.
Edgar Hoover when he visited theUnited Statesat the end of Janu-
ary 1938 to brief him on an investigation conducted in Scotland of
Jessie Jordan, a widow and hairdresser who was acting as a postbox
for theAbwehr, forwarding letters to and from the Continent and the
United States. Of interest to Hoover was one of her correspondents,
a ‘‘Mr. Kron’’ at an address in New York, who was identified as
Gunther Rumrich, a former soldier of Sudeten German origin who
was a naturalized American citizen; when arrested, Rumrich con-
fessed to having spied for the Abwehr for 20 months, the FBI’s first
example of German espionage since World War I. In 1941 Hoover
sent two senior FBI officials to study MI5 and theSecret Intelli-