Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence

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306 • LEE, RUSSELL


ous other buildings in Mayfair, and in 1974 moved to a larger office
block at 140 Gower Street.

LEE, RUSSELL.Born in November 1912 and an amateur license
holder from Liverpool at the outbreak of World War II, Russell Lee
was recruited into the Radio Security Service and was appointed to
supervise the broadcasts oftate. After the war he remained inMI5
and was appointed personal assistant to Director-GeneralSir Percy
Sillitoe. Lee also ghostwrote Sillitoe’s memoirs,Cloak without Dag-
ger.He died in 1992.


LEGGETT, GEORGE.George Leggett began to research the Soviet
intelligence and security apparatus when he joinedMI5 during
World War II. He retired in 1971 having accumulated a mass of
knowledge about the subject. Leggett publishedThe Cheka: Lenin’s
Political Policein 1981, the fruit of many years of academic re-
search. Though drawn entirely from unclassified sources, it neverthe-
less provides a fascinating and authoritative insight into British
perceptions and, in particular,Secret Intelligence Serviceopera-
tions in the Soviet Union, including those conducted bySidney
ReillyandGeorge Hill. Leggett relied upon many academic sources
for his study of theCheka, Feliks Dzerzhinsky’s secret police, and
he has acknowledged the help he received from Ray Rocca, a senior
member of theCentral Intelligence Agency’s Counterintelligence
Staff, and Edward Ellis Smith, another CIA professional who had
been the first chief of station in Moscow. Despite his swift departure
from the CIA following an encounter with Soviet blackmailers seek-
ing to exploit an affair he had conducted with his attractive Soviet
housekeeper, Smith was later to compile a bibliography of Soviet in-
telligence literature, and it was his impressive card index of titles that
Leggett drew upon. Leggett, who is married with a son, still lives in
London and is researching a biography of Dzerzhinsky.


LEIGH FERMOR, SIR PATRICK.A well-known travel writer,
Paddy Leigh Fermor wandered across Europe during the four years
before World War II as an alternative to going to university, and in
1940 he joined the Irish Guards and was transferred to the short-lived
British Military Mission toGreece. In 1943 he joined the Greek Sec-

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