Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence

TEAGUE, JOHN• 537

in charge of his own section, with responsibility for not only liaising

with Fleet Street but also handling the foreign journalists thronging

London. His future wife was the Savoy Hotel’s public relations offi-

cer, where many of the American newspapermen were staying, and

he was thus well placed to monitor their dispatches home and influ-

ence the stories they filed.

Tangye spent 10 years working for MI5, even when, after the war,

he was first a gossip columnist on theDaily Expressand later a car-

toon writer on theDaily Mail. His job as William Hickey, the page

made famous byTom Driberg, lasted just three days because he

‘‘had not been waspish enough’’ about Waugh. On theDaily Mailhis

collaborator was Julian Phipps, a gifted artist who was later to marry

Joan Miller, another MI5 agent.

At the end of Tangye’s service with MI5 in late 1949, he moved

away from London and settled in Cornwall, where he wroteThe Way

to Minack.Tangye died in October 1996. In February 2000 an un-

identifiedGRUgeneral in Moscow claimed that Tangye had supplied

information from inside MI5 to a GRU contact in London.

TATE. MI5code name for Wulf Schmidt, alias Harry Williamson, a
Dane who parachuted into Cambridgeshire in September 1939 and
was arrested the same day. Initially he had resisted interrogation at
Camp 020, but details of his mission had been betrayed already by
summer, and eventuallytateagreed to cooperate. Wireless contact
withHamburgwas established at Camp 020 under the supervision
ofRussell Lee, andtatebecame one of B1(a)’s most effectivedou-
ble agents, maintaining his radio link until the end of World War II
and even being awarded an Iron Cross.tatewas allowed consider-
able liberty and lived withColonel T. A. Robertsonand his family
in Radlett, Hertfordshire. He eventually found a job as a press pho-
tographer on a Watford newspaper, which he retained until his retire-
ment. He married a local woman who knew nothing of his past, nor
of his experiences before the war on a banana plantation in West Af-
rica. Later they were divorced andtate, who kept the name William-
son, became an international judge at canary breeding competitions.

TEAGUE, JOHN.Commissioned into the Warwickshire regiment in
World War I, Colonel John Teague earned a Military Cross in France