418 • PETRIE, SIR DAVID
as biographies, good examples being those of Deng Xiaoping by
Richard Evans, Francisco Franco byBrian Crozier, and General
Lebed by Harold Elletson.PETRIE, SIR DAVID. Director-general of the Security Service
from 1940 to 1945, Sir David Petrie was a Scot who spent much of
his career in the Indian police, which he joined in 1900 at the age of
- In 1924 he was appointed director of theIndian Political Intelli-
gence Bureau, a post he kept until 1931 when he had been made
chairman of the Indian Public Service Commission. After his official
retirement, he was sent toPalestinein December 1938 to undertake
a review of the security arrangements in the Mandate for the Colonial
Office. In 1940 he was asked by Sir Horace Wilson to succeed Jasper
Harker, the acting director-general ofMI5. In 1945 the new prime
minister, Clement Attlee, appointedSir Percy Sillitoein his place.
PETROV, VLADIMIR.Both seniorNKVDofficers, Vladimir Petrov
and his wife Evdokia landed in Sydney early in February 1950 from
the linerOrcades, where they were greeted on the quay by the em-
bassy’s second secretary andrezident, Valentin Sadovnikov, and
TASS correspondent Ivan Pakhomov, who was to succeed him
briefly as rezident based in Sydney when he was recalled in April the
following year. The Petrovs had already served together abroad, in
Stockholm from March 1943 until October 1947. Nine years later,
when thehaspmaterial had become available, two 1945venonain-
tercepts from the Stockholm embassy showed that Petrov, then code-
namedseaman, had been the personal cipher clerk to tworezidents,
first Mrs. Yartseva, then Vasili F. Razin.
An operation codenamedcabin, launched by theAustralian Se-
curity Intelligence Organisation(ASIO) to cultivate a source in the
Soviet embassy in Canberra, lasted from April 1951, four months
after the arrival of the Soviet consul, to hisdefectionin April 1954.
During that period ASIO placed an agent of long standing, a Polish
refugee and physician named Michael Bialoguski, close to Petrov in
the hope of persuading him to defect. Petrov, whose real name was
Proletarsky, enjoyed life in Australia and when in May 1953 he was
recalled to Moscow, Bialoguski arranged to diagnose an eye com-
plaint to give the diplomat an excuse to stay. The last straw proved