RICKMAN, ALEXANDER• 453Pembroke College, Oxford. He is married, with one son and one
daughter. Ricketts joined the Foreign Office in 1974 and after post-
ings to Singapore and the British Delegation to NATO in Brussels,
he served as assistant private secretary to Foreign Secretary Francis
Pym from 1983 to 1985. He also served in Washington, D.C., and
Paris and was the Foreign Office’s deputy political director from
1997 to 1999, with particular responsibility for the Balkans.RICKMAN, ALEXANDER.Long before the outbreak of World War
II, Sweden was regarded as a vital source of strategic minerals for
Germany, and accordingly theSecret Intelligence Service(SIS) pre-
pared various schemes to deny the Reich’s heavy industry some of its
key supplies. While a group of conspirators at the Ministry of Supply
plotted to bust any blockade imposed in the Baltic by the Kriegsma-
rine,Section Dconcentrated on a scheme to smuggle explosives into
Stockholm and then destroy the cargo handling installations at cer-
tain selected ports.
Alexander Rickman was assigned to survey potential targets for
this sabotage. His cover was his wholly authentic claim to be re-
searching a book for the respected London publishers of Faber &
Faber on Sweden’s principal industry. The resulting book was indeed
released in August 1939, betraying no clue to the author’s true pur-
pose. Unfortunately Section D’s plan went horribly wrong at a very
early stage, causing much embarrassment for the British embassy,
which tried unconvincingly to distance itself from the fiasco.
While still in the preparatory stages of the operation, which was
codenamedstrike ox, Rickman recruited two members of the Brit-
ish expatriate business community. One was the local British Petro-
leum representative, Harry Gill, and the other wasErnest Biggs,a
one-legged tea importer. Unknown to Rickman, his attempts to re-
cruit a network of saboteurs had not gone unnoticed by the ubiqui-
tous Swedish secret police, which placed him under surveillance and
tipped off the SIS head of station, John Martin. Unfortunately Martin
decided to keep this information to himself, apparently for fear of
compromising his Swedish contact, and in consequence Rickman
was arrested while moving his cache of explosives to Oxelo ̈sund and
Lulea, the principal ice-free harbors in Sweden used for loading iron
ore, following the destruction of the quays at Narvik. Biggs was also