O’BRIEN-FFRENCH, CONRAD• 395OATSHEAF. MI5code name in 1967 for derogatory information
about Prime MinisterHarold Wilsonoffered by James Angleton,
then chief of Counterintelligence Staff at theCentral Intelligence
Agency(CIA). Angleton offered to tell MI5’s director-general,Sir
Martin Furnival Jones, the details on the condition that the CIA
could control whatever action MI5 decided to take. Furnival Jones
refused those terms, so the substance of the allegations remained un-
known until 1974 when a further investigation, codenamedwor-
thington, was conducted, based on claims made by a KGB
defector,Anatoli Golitsyn, and subsequently disclosed byPeter
Wright.
O’BRIEN-FFRENCH, CONRAD.At the age of 17, Conrad O’Brien-
Ffrench, an Irishman born in London, set off for Canada to become
a Mountie. Shortly before the outbreak of the World War I, he re-
turned to England and was sent to France with the Royal Irish Regi-
ment. Wounded at Mons in August 1914, he spent the next three
years of the conflict in a German prisoner of war camp near the Baltic
where, through the use ofsecret writing, he established contact with
British Intelligence. His contact was Cathleen Mann and, using po-
tassium iodide purloined from the Augustabad camp hospital, he kept
up an illicit correspondence with Mann, who happened to work for
theSecret Intelligence Service(SIS) as one of the Chief’s secre-
taries.
O’Brien-Ffrench continued to use the secret writing even after he
had been transferred to an internment camp in Holland. Both bellig-
erents had agreed that after three years of captivity, PoWs could be
moved to a neutral territory and kept there for the duration. For
O’Brien-Ffrench, this meant staying at Scheveningen and undertak-
ing voluntary work for the Italian Legation in The Hague, where the
minister had responsibility for looking after the interests of Italian
PoWs in Germany. Naturally this provided plenty of useful intelli-
gence and once again brought the Irishman into contact with the local
SIS station.
At the end of the war he was invited to meetStewart Menzies,
who offered him the post of assistant military attache ́at the British
Legation in Helsinki. This, however, was to be his cover, and he was
actually to work for Major Dymoke Scale, SIS’s representative in