STEWART, BOB• 523STEVENS, RICHARD.The son of a former British minister in Ath-
ens, Major Richard Stevens was fluent in German, French, and Rus-
sian when, in 1937, he was appointed theSecret Intelligence
Service(SIS) head of station in The Hague underpassport control
officercover, his only previous intelligence experience having been
in the North-West Frontier of India. Upon the outbreak of war, he
combined his resources withSigismund Best, his counterpart in the
Z Organisation. Both men were abducted at Venlo by theSicher-
heitsdienstin November 1939 as they waited to rendezvous with
what they believed to be representatives of an anti-Nazi conspiracy.
Stevens survived the war but was criticized for having failed to
resist his Nazi interrogators, and he was credited with having sup-
plied much of the information about SIS found inInformationscheft
GrossBritannien. Stevens blamed Best for having talked, and later
found a post as an interpreter at NATO. After his death in Brighton
in 1965, SIS learned that the German source had beenDick Ellis,
and that they had played one prisoner off against the other with ex-
ceptional skill, leaving each believing that he had been betrayed by
the other.
STEWART, BOB.A dour teetotal Scot and Communist activist, the
three volumes of Bob Stewart’sMI5file open in September 1920
with a report from theSecret Intelligence Service(SIS) that identi-
fied him as a Communist and ‘‘a secret agent for England on behalf
of the Third International.’’ Born in February 1877 in Eassie, in
Angus, Stewart was trained as a ship’s carpenter, but never went to
sea to practice his trade. Instead, he took up politics, became a mem-
ber of the Dundee Town Council, and achieved some considerable
notoriety locally before moving to London in 1929. Even then he did
not sever all his connections with Dundee, standing for the city as
theCommunist Party of Great Britain(CPGB) candidate in the
June 1929 general election.
Stewart had been a founder member of the party when it was cre-
ated in 1921, and the following year had been appointed the CPGB’s
Scottish organizer. He remained a member of the Executive Commit-
tee until 1936, when he became secretary of the Control Commis-
sion, the party’s hard-line, disciplinary body; between 1925 and
1926, he served as acting general secretary. In 1924 Stewart had been