The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [167]
Between the wars the Sofia station (‘11000’) had an unusually high turnover of staff. From 1920 until the war there were six heads of station, all of whom operated under Passport Control cover. They included an ex-actor, three sailors, including Lieutenant Commander Leonard Hamilton Stokes (April 1924 to December 1929) and Engineer Captain Charles Limpenny (1933 to July 1935), one soldier, Captain (later Major) William Mackinnon Gray (August 1935 to September 1937), and an airman. The most intriguing of these appointments was that of the fifty-one-year-old Limpenny, a submariner and presumably longstanding acquaintance of Sinclair’s. One of a talented and creative West Country family - the concert pianist Moura Lympany was his niece - he had been appointed an ADC to the King in December 1932, and on his formal retirement from the Royal Navy in April 1933 was promoted rear admiral.22 What the diplomatic corps in a small Balkan capital (let alone the local security authorities) made of such a distinguished personage occupying the comparatively modest position of Passport Control Officer is anyone’s guess.
Limpenny evidently made a success of his posting because, after brief sojourns in Athens and Stockholm, he was brought back to Broadway in December 1936 to take over as head of the Economic Section, where he stayed until June 1946. The same could not be said of his successor, Mackinnon Gray, who had been introduced to SIS in 1932, and had spent some time as a ‘learner’ at Istanbul and an assistant at Jerusalem before his appointment to Sofia. Gray had a problematic personal life. In 1936 his wife sued for divorce, and there was concern that his SIS appointment might get mentioned in the proceedings. Situations like this, when crises in the private lives of officers (and, indeed, agents) might jeopardise cover or security generally, were not uncommon, though in this instance - and to his evident relief - Gray’s real role in Sofia remained secret.23 During 1937, however, concerns were raised about financial irregularities in the payment of an agent. Sinclair ordered an inspection of the Sofia office and sent Limpenny out to investigate the matter. The results of these enquiries revealed Gray to have been guilty of carelessness and slipshod record-keeping rather than peculation, but they also throw revealing light on the mechanisms by which a local SIS station ran its finances. While there were strict rules that any local expenditure had to be approved from London (which Gray had failed to follow), funds appear routinely to have been transferred from Head Office to the head of station’s personal bank account and from there to a second offshore account. In Sofia local currency for paying agents was acquired clandestinely on the ‘Black Bourse’ by the wife of a junior member of the Passport Office staff.
In September 1937 Gray simply abandoned his post, returned home without authorisation and resigned from the Service. In Sofia Limpenny made good some bounced cheques and reported that there was no cause for anxiety regarding the functioning of the local SIS organisation. Thus the SIS senior management might have hoped that the Mackinnon Gray case was closed. In 1941, however, after he murdered his second wife and attempted suicide in Chilcompton, near Bath