Andrew King

Charles Andrew Buchanan King was an intelligence officer of the Z Organisation and the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) who served during World War II and the Cold War. In 1938, he was recruited by Claude Dansey into the Z Organisation, where he was designated Z-2, answering to Thomas Kendrick and Kenneth Cohen.

Biography

Early life Andrew King, as he was mostly known, was born 25 July 1915. His father was Major Andrew Buchanan King, an officer in the 7th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders who was killed from injuries sustained during fighting at the Second Battle of Ypres, when King was still a fetus. King's mother would eventually remarry and become Evelyn Nina Crombie. The common British pedagogy term is to say that King "read economics" here, which effectively means that economics was his primary subject of study.

In the Spring and Summer of 1933, King travelled to Germany for holiday.

Andrew King was placed undercover into the British Foreign Office, and appointed the assistant to Count Frederick Vanden Heuvel, the SIS Chief of Station in Zurich, who was working at the time as a consul in Geneva. In 1941, King was then transferred to Bern.

In Bern, he cultivate Halina Szymańska, a close friend of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Canaris had seen the rise of the Nazi Party with disgust, but had also managed to become chief of the Abwehr. Through Szymańska, King passed on information to the Russians that Hitler planned to attack them – information that they failed to heed, and did not believe when they received it. Andrew King was Szymańska's case officer through the entire war, and saw her resettlement in England at the end of the war. He even secured her three daughters a place at St. Mary's, Ascot.

Cold War In 1950, King became the Chief of Station in Vienna. He supervised the management of Operation Silver, which had been launched the year before. Silver involved a series of tunnels dug under the city, tapping the communication cables at the Hotel Imperial, which was the headquarters of the Soviet Kommandatura in the city. Operation Silver was never discovered by the USSR.

In 1951, upon the exposure of Kim Philby, and the flight of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to Russia, King was recalled to London and submitted to questioning for three days.

In 1953, King got into a fight with another SIS officer named Anthony Cavendish. Details of the brawl are still classified, but as punishment, King was sent to the other side of the planet.

King was made Chief of Station in Hong Kong. Here, he gained an affinity for the Far East, where he had never been before.

Forced retirement In 1966, a renewed molehunt investigation at MI5 and SIS Section V was searching for new persons who might have been involved with the Cambridge Five. He informed his investigators that Kenneth Cohen had known the whole time that King had been a Communist at Cambridge, and that Stewart Menzies had signed off on it. However, MI5 did not have a record of this. The fact that King had known of Philby's membership in the Communist Party put King under suspicion himself. He took an early retirement.

He joined the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, where he became the Chief of the Western Hemisphere Division.

Many years later, after homosexuality was legalized in the United Kingdom, he admitted that he was actually forced to resign because he was gay, and that the interrogations had been rather cordial.

He died in 2002.