Cecil Shipp CB OBE, deputy Director-General of the Security Service, MI5, from 1982 to 1988

• Educated at West Leeds High School in the 1940s
  1946-48 served intelligence corps in Germany. Temporary job teaching Russian at JSSL then joined MI5 in June 1952.
  1967 posted to security intelligence far east involved in counter-intelligence during Indonesian confrontation.
  1965 returned to UK posted to F branch MI5.
  
  
• Considered a master interrogator with an unusually retentive memory. He interrogated members of the Cambridge spy ring.
  
  "Watson was identified by former Soviet spy Anthony Blunt as having been an ardent Marxist at Cambridge and, on the basis of other circumstantial evidence, questioned over a period of six weeks by MI5's interrogator Cecil Shipp in 1965. Whilst he confessed to having met with Soviet KGB officials, he denied passing secrets to them.[2] Watson's security clearance was immediately revoked, and he was removed from his post and transferred to the National Institute of Oceanography (now a part of the National Oceanography Centre ), where he worked until retirement. "

• Stella Rimington gave a pen-picture of him in her autobiography:
  
  "After I had been in the Sovbloc agent section for about three years or so, and was again wanting to move on, I pressed to be sent to do similar work against the Provisional IRA. My director at the time was Cecil Shipp, whom I had first come across in my first year in MI5 when he was in charge of the group investigating the ramifications of the 1930s Cambridge spy ring. In the interim Cecil had been in Washington as liaison officer to the CIA and the FBI and had established a reputation as an interrogator and a counter-espionage expert.
  Like all the best counter-espionage officers, Cecil was a details man. He did not feel comfortable, even as Director, unless he knew everything that was going on; not for him the delegation of the operations to the desk officers while he got on with the strategy. He wanted to see the papers and make his own mind up, then he would call you in to discuss what you were doing while puffing clouds of cigarette smoke over you and the files. This detailed approach could slow things up, particularly later when he became Deputy Director-General and files would be incarcerated in his cupboard for days while action ground to a halt.
  He was the man who had been open minded enough to post me as the first woman in the agent section and I had a lot to thank him for. But for me to run agents against terrorists in Northern Ireland was a step too far even for him. He told me firmly, 'A family needs its mother,' and who is to say he was wrong? My daughters would certainly have agreed with him if they had been asked."