Sir Dick Goldsmith White, (20 December 1906 – 21 February 1993) was a British intelligence officer. He was Director General (DG) of MI5 from 1953 to 1956, and Head of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) from 1956 to 1968. Early life White was born in Tonbridge, Kent, the son of an ironmonger Percy Hall White and Gertrude Farthing and went to school at Bishop's Stortford College. He took a First Class Degree in History at Christ Church, Oxford in 1927, and learnt to speak German. He was athletic in his youth and obtained a blue in running at Oxford. He was described by Peter Wright as resembling David Niven: "the same perfect English manners, easy charm, and immaculate dress sense." He was, said Wright, "tall with lean, healthy features and a sharp eye". He would qualify for a Commonwealth Fellowship in 1928 which saw him seek further education in the United States at the University of Michigan and California. After returning to the UK, he failed to obtain a position at Christ Church, Oxford and after being rejected by the navy, he obtained work in Croydon as a teacher. He was spotted by a recruiter in 1935 while on Mediterranean cruise with his students and invited to an interview with Guy Liddell at MI5. Career He was employed at MI5 in 1936 to monitor the rise of Nazism in Germany and spent a year in Munich attempting to recruit Germans. When back from Germany, he worked with Jona Ustinov to identify potential recruits. He was a co-creator of the Double-Cross system in 1940, to turn Abwehr agents in the UK and elsewhere. He would eventually become Liddell's assistant director in B Division. By 1943, he was seconded to SHAEF as a special advisor on counter-intelligence ending the war as a brigadier. He was sent to Berlin at the end of the war to investigate Hitler's fate. He returned to MI5 in 1947 as head of its counter-intelligence division. In 1949, he was warned by the FBI of a Soviet spy at Harwell, the UK's Atomic Energy Research Establishment. Investigation identified Klaus Fuchs who was later interrogated and confessed to being a spy for the Soviets. White and MI5 were still in denial of the state of the Soviet penetration until the FBI discovered a spy via the Venona project called "Homer" working in British government. Kim Philby would warn the