MACDERMOTT, NIALL• 315McColl’s first posting was to Bangkok in September 1958, where
he married Shirley Curtis, followed by Vientiane in April 1960. Two
years later McColl was back atBroadway, then in 1966 went to War-
saw. In January 1973 he was posted to Geneva. He returned to Lon-
don four years later to spend the next 10 years in senior posts at
Century House, before being appointed chief by Prime Minister
Thatcher in November 1988.
McColl proved highly effective and quickly established a reputa-
tion for flamboyant dress, colorful ties, unconventional attitudes, and
a no-nonsense attitude. He also had an interest in music and was not
unknown to whip out his flute to put visitors at their ease. While cop-
ing with the demands of the Scott Inquiry, McColl was also preoccu-
pied with the drafting of theIntelligence Services Act, which for the
first time brought SIS onto a statutory footing and created an element
of parliamentary oversight for all three intelligence and security ser-
vices. This was probably McColl’s most significant and lasting con-
tribution to the service, and his retirement was delayed to allow the
passage of the Bill through the Commons.
A colorful, affable raconteur, McColl was the first SIS chief to
refer to his position in hisWho’s Whoentry as ‘‘head ofMI6.’’ With
a new family and a young son, McColl found work as a consultant to
a financial group in Edinburgh and now lives in Oxfordshire.MACDERMOTT, NIALL.A wartimeMI5officer, Niall MacDermott
was educated at Rugby and read modern languages at Cambridge and
then law at Oxford. While an undergraduate at Balliol, he was prose-
cuted, and acquitted, for the manslaughter of a fellow student. Mac-
Dermott was elected the Labour MP for Lewisham North in February
1957, but his political career came to an end when in August 1966,
as minister of state in the Department of Housing and Local Govern-
ment, he married his longtime Russian mistress, Ludmila Benvenuto,
after divorcing his wife. She was interrogated by MI5 in February
1968 and when MacDermott was told her answers had been unsatis-
factory, he retired from the House of Commons at the next general
election and went to live in Geneva where he worked as secretary-
general of the International Commission of Jurists from 1970 and
died in February 1996.