Brian Tovey

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Person.png Brian Tovey  Rdf-entity.pngRdf-icon.png
(spook)
Born15 April 1926
Died23 December 2015 (Age 89)
Alma materSt Edward's School (Oxford), St Edmund Hall (Oxford), School of Oriental and African Studies
A former head of GCHQ.

Employment.png Director of GCHQ Wikipedia-icon.png

In office
December 1978 - December 1983
EmployerGCHQ
Preceded byArthur Bonsall
Succeeded byPeter Marychurch

Sir Brian John Maynard Tovey was a former director of GCHQ, a post he held from December 1978 to December 1983.[1]

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]

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Refrences