576 • WHITE, SIR DICK
WHITE, SIR DICK. Director-general of the Security Servicefrom
1953 to 1956 and chief of theSecret Intelligence Servicefrom 1956
to 1968, Dick White was the only person to have headed both organi-
zations, despiteKim Philby’s acerbic comment that ‘‘he was a nice
and modest character, who would have been the first to admit that he
lacked outstanding qualities. His most obvious fault was a tendency
to agree with the last person he spoke to.’’
Educated at Bishop’s Stortford College, Christ Church, Oxford,
and the Universities of Michigan and California, White had been an
outstanding runner and the captain of rugby, cricket, and athletics in
his last year at school. Initially set for a career as a schoolmaster at
the Whitgift School in Croydon, in 1936 White had been persuaded
by Malcolm Cumming to be one of the first, if notthefirst, university
graduate to joinMI5. White had been accompanying a group of his
pupils to Australia, and by coincidence Cumming was a passenger on
the same ship, traveling to attend some army exercises in the Far
East. The two men became friends, and upon his return to London,
Cumming had recommended White to his director-general,Sir Ver-
non Kell. At that time, the Security Service was a tiny organization,
run from a suite of offices in Thames House, on the Embankment,
still headed by Kell and his faithful deputy,Sir Eric Holt-Wilson,
who had been with him since December 1912.
White achieved success quickly through his work as case officer
forWolfgang zu Putlitz, an anti-Nazi homosexual German diplomat
who had been recruited byIona von Ustinov. With his shrewd han-
dling of zu Putlitz, White gained a reputation with the Security Ser-
vice for quiet, thoughtful efficiency. In 1940 he averted a crisis when
an anonymous staff officer attached to the British Expeditionary
Force publishedA Staff Officer’s Diary, including an indiscreet refer-
ence to the use of wireless intercepts. White simply called his older
brother Alan, then working for Methuen, which had published the
offending book, identified the author as a Major Gribble, and ar-
ranged for the problem passages to be removed from all future cop-
ies. White becameGuy Liddell’s prote ́ge ́, and in 1944 was posted to
Montgomery’s 21st Army Group to run a continental version of the
double crosssystem, designated the 212 Committee.
At the end of World War II, the incoming Labour administration
appointed former chief constableSir Percy Sillitoeas director-gen-