RENNIE, SIR JOHN• 445Born in Marylebone in January 1914 to a match manufacturer,
Rennie had been educated at Wellington and Balliol College, Oxford.
After graduating with a third-class degree in modern history, he
spent four years in New York as an advertising executive, where he
married a Swiss woman, Anne-Marie Godat, who bore him one son.
A talented painter, he had works exhibited at the Royal Academy in
1930 and 1931 and at the Paris Salon in 1932. A week after the out-
break of World War II, Rennie joined the Consular Service in Balti-
more, and in September 1940 he transferred to the British Press
Service in New York and then moved to the British Information Ser-
vice before returning to London in January 1946, when he formally
joined the Foreign Office. Three years later, in March 1949, he was
posted to Washington, D.C., with the rank of first secretary (commer-
cial), and in June 1951 went to Warsaw.
Following his unusually long stint in the IRD, whereNigel Clive
(who ran IRD for three years) says he was ‘‘widely admired for his
skill and ingenuity,’’ Rennie was posted to Buenos Aires as minister
(commercial) in April 1958, and then in November 1960 went
straight to Washington, D.C., where he served alongsideMaurice
Oldfieldand Denis Greenhill. In 1964, having returned to London to
take a year off to nurse his terminally ill wife, Rennie was promoted
to assistant undersecretary in charge of the Americas, concentrating
on the dispute between Guatemala and British Honduras. He spent
the following year on loan to the Civil Service Commission, chairing
the interview board. In October 1966 he was back at the Foreign Of-
fice, having been promoted to deputy undersecretary for defense, and
having married a widow, Mrs. Jennifer Rycroft, by whom he had two
more sons. The following year he was awarded the KCMG.
Probably the most memorable event during the period of Rennie’s
tenure was thedefectionofOleg Lyalin, the culmination of a re-
cruitment achieved by a jointMI5-SIS group that had targeted poten-
tially vulnerable suspectedKGBandGRUprofessionals.
Rennie’s tenure as Chief was brief, and after just five years he re-
tired, the catalyst being the embarrassment caused when his eldest
son Charles and daughter-in-law were arrested in a squat for posses-
sion of Chinese heroin and tried at the Old Bailey. Despite the pro-
tection of aD Notice, which requested discretion on the identity of
SIS’s chief and his personnel, the inevitable publicity inSternand