TOMLINSON, RICHARD• 547an unprecedented public denial and even include a formal statement
rejecting the allegation in the official Security Service handbook pro-
duced by theCabinet Office.
Tomlinson was obliged to keep on the move, flying between New
Zealand, where he was served with an injunction, and Switzerland,
which expelled him in May 1999 following the publication on the
internet of a list of 115 serving or recently retired SIS officers. Al-
though Tomlinson denied being the source of the information, claim-
ing that all the names had been made public before or were retirees,
the foreign secretary denounced him in the strongest terms. Now
Tomlinson had nothing to lose and, after a spell in Rimini working in
a bar, he settled in Cannes, where he completed his book,The Big
Breach. The book was published in the English language in Moscow
with an advance of £28,000 and gave a detailed account of his train-
ing and his assignments. Although Tomlinson altered the true names
of several of his former colleagues, giving them semitransparent
cover names, further material surfaced on the Internet, revealing their
authentic identities. The Court of Appeal ruled that the book could
be serialized in theSunday Times. According to SIS, Tomlinson’s
Russian publisher, Sergei Korovin, had no known previous experi-
ence in publishing, but had traveled to Switzerland and the United
States using the alias Kirill V. Chashchin and was sponsored by Rus-
sian intelligence, the SVR, which was still smarting after the embar-
rassment ofVasili Mitrokhin’s disclosures.
SIS thought they detected the SVR’s distinctive handiwork in the
published version ofThe Big Breachin its treatment of Platon Obu-
kov, a junior Russian Foreign Ministry official who was arrested in
April 1996 while meeting his SIS contact, Norman McSween, in
Moscow. The son of a senior Russian diplomat, Obukov had been
recruited while working as a consul in Sweden, and in his defense
claimed that he had been collecting material for one of his spy nov-
els. He was convicted of espionage, sentenced to 11 years’ imprison-
ment, and transferred to a psychiatric hospital, and McSween was
expelled. However, Tomlinson had known nothing about Obukov,
who was recruitedafterTomlinson’s dismissal, and the author’s orig-
inal draft had not mentioned the case at all. The insertion of the dam-
aging passages about Obukov suggested either that Tomlinson had
lost control over his manuscript, and the SVR had taken the opportu-