Andrew King (spy)
British intelligence officer died 2002
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. During the war, King was stationed in Switzerland for SIS. Here, he handled an agent named Halina Szymanska, who had access to Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. After the war, he became the SIS Controller for the Eastern Area (CEA), placed in charge of Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Later, he was made the Chief of Station in Vienna, and then Hong Kong. King was "retired" from SIS in 1966 after revelations that he was a homosexual surfaced in connection to questions surrounding his friendship with Kim Philby while they were both studying at the University of Cambridge. In 1986, King was prosecuted alongside many of his former colleagues for the breach of classified information in relation to the book Conspiracy of Silence: The Secret Life of Anthony Blunt by the authors Barrie Penrose and Simon Freeman.
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.
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This entry incorporates text from “Andrew King (spy)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.