SPEDDING, SIR DAVID• 513MECAS at Shemlan to learn Arabic for two years before joining the
SIS station in Beirut in May 1970. However, the following year,
when the British government expelled 105 Soviet diplomats from
London, Spedding was named byKim PhilbyinIzvestiyaas the
local SIS station commander in Lebanon. His transfer to Santiago
followed in 1972, together with his wife Gillian Kinnear who had
been brought up in Chile, but the country was then in turmoil under
President Salvador Allende’s short-lived, left-wing regime that came
to an end with General Augusto Pinochet’s military coup in Septem-
ber 1973.
Spedding returned to London in September 1974 and in 1977 was
posted to Abu Dhabi where he remained until 1981. Back in London,
Spedding was appointed to the Middle East Directorate and then
went as head of station in Amman in 1983. It was during the queen’s
four-day state visit to the kingdom the following year that Spedding
was credited with foiling a plot hatched by Palestinian extremists led
by Abu Nidal to assassinate her. Forty-eight hours before her arrival,
a bomb was detonated in the Inter-Continental Hotel’s car park and
a second device, with 31 sticks of gelignite, was found nearby. The
local security situation was considered so grave, with the certainty
that Abu Nidal’s men were active in the capital, that Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher held an emergency meeting of the Cabinet at
Chequers to decide whether the visit should be canceled, but the
queen and the prime minister were determined it should proceed.
Spedding’s timely intervention, with the Jordanian security apparatus
which arrested the bombers, prevented a disaster and he was made a
commander of the Royal Victorian Order during her visit.
In 1986 Spedding was placed in charge of a jointMI5–SIS task
force monitoring Middle East terrorists in Britain, and he became
controller, Middle East, to run SIS’s operations during desert
storm, the Gulf War. His promotion to head the Middle EastCon-
trolleratehad been fortuitous, because when hostilities opened, he
had been acting as the deputy head, but the officer directly above him
had been on leave at the crucial moment, leaving Spedding to im-
pressColin McColland others with his grasp of the conflict.
In 1993 the director of requirements and production, Barrie Gane,
took early retirement to go to Group 4 Securitas, and the Chief, Mc-
Coll, appointed Spedding as his successor, effectively placing him in