Brian Tovey
 Brian Tovey    (spook) | ||||||||||||||||
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| Born | 15 April 1926 | |||||||||||||||
| Died | 23 December 2015 (Age 89) | |||||||||||||||
| Alma mater | St Edward's School (Oxford), St Edmund Hall (Oxford), School of Oriental and African Studies | |||||||||||||||
A former head of GCHQ.
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Sir Brian John Maynard Tovey was a former director of GCHQ, a post he held from December 1978 to December 1983.[1]
Contents
Background
Born in London, Tovey was educated at St Edward's School, Oxford, St Edmund Hall, Oxford and the School of Oriental and African Studies,[2]; emerging fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese and Vietnamese.
Career
After national service in the Royal Navy, Tovey joined GCHQ in 1950. He was thus the first GCHQ director not to have worked at Bletchley Park. He was knighted in 1980.
He made his reputation with two coups as a signal intelligence analyst. At the start of the Confrontation with Indonesia in 1963 Tovey was able to brief intelligence chiefs in Singapore with total accuracy on the deployment of President Sukarno’s naval, air and ground forces.[3]
Five years on, as the divisional head responsible for SIGINT on the forces of the Warsaw Pact, his matching of photographs from theCIA with GCHQ’s own signals intelligence enabled him to predict with confidence the Soviet-led intervention in Czechoslovakia.[3]
Industrial action in 1981 during Tovey's tenure as Director at GCHQ led later to the banning of trades unions from GCHQ.[4] The decision was also taken to inaugurate the controversial Zircon project.[5]
Later life
Tovey maintains an interest in Italian art of the 13th to 17th centuries. He is currently working on a biography of the life and times of Filippo Baldinucci.[2] It is alleged that while he was Director of GCHQ, Tovey shared this interest with the head of the French SDECE, Alexandre de Marenches, and as a result GCHQ gained valuable intelligence on the war in Afghanistan.[6]
Refrences
- ↑ Document:UK Intelligence And Security Report, 2003
- ↑ a b Learning Skills foundation profile
- ↑ a b https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/12127856/Sir-Brian-Tovey-obituary.html
- ↑ Union crusade rewarded as Cook lifts GCHQ ban The Independent, 16 May 1997
- ↑ Federation of American Scientists: For UK Eyes Alpha
- ↑ John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, Pluto Press, 1999
