HYDE, HARFORD MONTGOMERY• 255cow? he was challenged. Hyde reassured his interrogator that he had
always planned to return to London overland. Hyde’s shared accom-
modation with Burgess lasted only a short time before he was posted
to Liverpool as a liaison officer with the censorship authorities. There
he found the theatrical producer Eric Maschwitz, whose job was to
riffle through parcels mailed overseas for clues to enemy agents.
Born in Ulster and educated at Queen’s University, Belfast, and
Magdalen College, Oxford, Hyde had been called to the bar and had
built up a reasonable criminal practice on the Northeast circuit when
the war broke out. He had also written several books, the first being
theRise of Castlereaghin 1933. Hyde volunteered as a reserve offi-
cer during the Munich Crisis, when he was also serving as private
secretary to the minister of air, Lord Londonderry, and this had led
him to Section D, through the intervention of his wife’s contacts.
In January 1940 Hyde was assigned to a new Section D office in
Gibraltar, and then in August he was transferred to Bermuda, where
a major examination center forImperial Censorshipwas under de-
velopment. In May 1941, having reported toBritish Security Coor-
dination(BSC), the regional headquarters of theSecret Intelligence
Service(SIS) in New York, Hyde was sent on a secret mission to
Bolivia. This was a reconnaissance to research a scheme for thwart-
ing a pro-Nazi coup in the capital, La Paz, and resulted in the circula-
tion of a forged letter purporting to come from the coup leader, then
the Bolivian military attache ́in Berlin. The document was never de-
tected as a fake and its publication sparked off an anti-Nazi purge in
the Bolivian government, exactly as had been intended.
Apart from one short visit to London and a few visits to the Carib-
bean and Central America, Hyde remained at BSC headquarters in
New York until the latter part of 1944. He was later appointed legal
adviser to theBritish Control Commission for Austria,andin
1950 was elected the Unionist MP for North Belfast.
Hyde was an amateur criminologist and his many books brought
him great success, particularly his acclaimed biography of Oscar
Wilde and his studies of Victorian scandals. His biography of his for-
mer chief at BSC,Sir William Stephenson,The Quiet Canadian
(1962), identified the wartime chief of SIS asSir Stewart Menzies
for the first time in print and led to awkward questions being tabled
in the Commons. In April 1981 Hyde published a letter in theTimes