Sir Richard Billing Dearlove (born 23 January 1945) was head of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), a role known informally as "C", from 1999 until 6 May 2004. He was in his role as head of MI6 during the invasion of Iraq. He was blamed by the Iraq Inquiry for providing unverified intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair. He currently serves as Chair of Board of Trustees of University of London. He previously served as Master of Pembroke College at the University of Cambridge from 2004 to 2015. Early life Dearlove was born at Gorran Haven in the county of Cornwall, the son of Jack Dearlove, a 1948 Olympic silver medallist in rowing. He received his early formal education at Monkton Combe School near Bath, and the Kent School in Kent, Connecticut, and graduated from Queens' College, Cambridge with a Masters degree in History. Career HM's civil service Dearlove joined MI6 in 1966 and was posted to Nairobi in 1968. In 1984, he was appointed an OBE. After being posted to Prague, Paris and Geneva, he became head of Washington station in 1991, director of personnel and administration in 1993 and director of operations in 1994. Dearlove was appointed chief of MI6 in 1999, by Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, following David Spedding's August 1999 retirement from the position. Early on Dearlove facilitated the publication of the famed Mitrokhin Archive, under project Jessant. In 2001, he was appointed a KCMG. His tenure as the head of MI6 saw many events for the Service as well as tension with the Government over the evidence for war on Iraq. It has been suggested that many within the intelligence community were uneasy that their qualified judgements on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were presented as hard facts in various dossiers (e.g. September Dossier & The Dodgy Dossier AKA Iraq Dossier). In July 2002, Dearlove privately told ministers that in the US "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy". The official Chilcot Report published in 2016 blamed Dearlove for presenting so-called "hot" intelligence about alleged weapons of mass destruction provided by an Iraqi with "phenomenal access" to high levels in the Iraqi government directly to Prime Minister, Tony Blair, without first confirming its accuracy. The investigators found that references to this intelligence in government reports were over-certain and did not adequately stress uncertainties and nuance. The