Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence

OLDFIELD, SIR MAURICE• 399

Treasury counsel, Sir Harry Poland, acknowledged Marvin’s phe-

nomenal memory and withdrew the prosecution.

The 1888 Act made it an offense to disclose official information

without proper authority. It was enhanced in August 1911 by further

legislation, passed by both Houses of Parliament in record time, to

make espionage an offense.

In 1920, following the success ofRoom 40during World War I,

another Official Secrets Act was passed, Section 4 of which required

all commercial cable companies to supply the government with cop-

ies of their traffic, which was routinely studied by theGovernment

Code and Cipher School, although the practice did not receive any

publicity until February 1967.

OGPU. The Soviet intelligence service during the 1920s and early
1930s, the OGPU (Obyedinennoye Gosudarstvennoye Politic-
heskoye Upravleniye) replaced theChekaand was in turn replaced
by theNKVDin 1934.

OLDFIELD, SIR MAURICE.Chief of theSecret Intelligence Ser-
vice(SIS) from 1973 to 1978, Maurice Oldfield had gained a com-
mission in Egypt while serving in Security Intelligence Middle East
as a sergeant in theIntelligence Corpsduring World War II and had
been invited by Brigadier Douglas Roberts to transfer to SIS in Lon-
don at the end of 1946, together with a group of others, among them
Alistair Horne, Myles Ponsonby, andHarold Shergold. Having es-
tablished his reputation as ‘‘Brig’s Brains,’’ Oldfield joined R5, the
requirements sectiondealing withcounterintelligence,asKim
Philby’s deputy.
Oldfield spoke fluent French and German, having traveled widely
on the Continent before the war, and was well liked. The eldest son
of a Derbyshire tenant farming family, with 10 younger brothers and
sisters, from the village of Over Haddon, Oldfield had taken a mas-
ter’s in history at Manchester University on a scholarship and ex-
celled as an organist, specializing in church music. With a first-class
honors and elected to a fellowship, he had intended an academic life,
but he settled for the world of intelligence.
Oldfield served atBroadwayas a counterintelligence specialist
until his first overseas posting, to Combined Intelligence Far East in