PAT J. • 411The first chairman of the committee was Tom (later Lord) King, MP,
formerly the secretary of state for Northern Ireland and then secre-
tary of state for defense. Upon King’s retirement from the House of
Commons at the 2001 general election, Ann Taylor, MP, a former
Labour chief whip, was appointed to the post until she retired in April
2005.PARROTT, GEORGE.A Royal Navy warrant officer in charge of the
rifle range at Sheerness, George Parrott was arrested in Chelsea in
November 1912 bySpecial Branchdetectives as he collected his
mail from a tobacconist’s shop. Parrott, an expert on naval gunnery,
had been identified as a German spy through a mail intercept onKarl
Gustav Ernst. Parrott had been under surveillance since June and
had been watched as he had traveled to Ostend to met his contact, as
he had been instructed to in letters from Berlin containing money and
questionnaires. Parrott was charged under theOfficial Secrets Act
and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment.
PASSPORT CONTROL OFFICER (PCO).A convenient but some-
what transparent cover for theSecret Intelligence Service(SIS) per-
sonnel overseas, the PCO operated independently of the local British
diplomatic mission between the wars and issued visas to visit Britain
and other parts of the empire. The Passport Control Department of
the Foreign Office, which supposedly supervised the activities of the
PCOs abroad, was run for many tears byMaurice Jeffes, a veteran
SIS officer. Difficulties arose when the PCOs began to issue that
most valuable of commodities, a visa forPalestine, and a trade de-
veloped in them. One casualty was MajorHugh Dalton, the head of
station in The Hague who shot himself in September 1936 when an
audit of his accounts uncovered illicit sales of visas to desperate Ger-
man Jews. Dalton was replaced byMonty Chidson, and the Venlo
affair of November 1939, in which his successor MajorRichard Ste-
venswas abducted, demonstrated that the SIS station in The Hague
had been comprehensively penetrated by theAbwehr. Further evi-
dence was supplied by the detention in 1938 of Captain Thomas Ken-
drick, the PCO in Vienna.
PAT J.TheSecret Intelligence Service(SIS) code name for Alfred
Meiler, a Dutch diamond cutter who had worked for the Germans