C's Busted Cover

The director of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, popularly known as M16, has always been referred to by his in-the-know colleagues as "C." The practice is said to date back to the department's first director, Sir Mansfield Gumming, who insisted on it for the sake of anonymity. Sir Mansfield, who died in 1923, passed the initial on to his successors. To the British press, on the other hand, the director of M16 is usually referred to as "M"--as in the James Bond thrillers.

By tradition, nobody outside the service was supposed to know C's real name; the British government maintained the official camouflage by dissuading the press from ever printing the identity of the M16 director, under threat of enacting the dire provisions of the Official Secrets Act. Nonetheless, newsmen, diplomats, foreign spies, and presumably even the waiters at his London clubs (Brook's and Bath) were aware that for the past four years C was a colorless civil servant named Sir John Ogilvy Rennie, 59, with the innocuous title of Deputy Undersecretary of State.

Last week C's cover was blown under curious circumstances. Charles Tatham Ogilvy Rennie, 25, and his wife Christine, 23, were hauled into the Old Bailey on a narcotics charge. The government, for security reasons, invoked the "D" (for defense) Notice arrangement, under which the British press voluntarily censors news items that are potentially harmful to security. The German magazine Stern, however, not only named him but explained the reason for the secrecy by identifying Sir John as Charles Rennie's father and explaining what the son had done.

The case clearly did not affect national security. It did, though, revive old arguments in Britain that the secrecy surrounding C's identity is pointless and the country's top spy might as well be identified routinely in the same way that the director of the CIA or Russia's KGB is. The debate is unlikely to affect Sir John. He has moved his retirement ahead eleven months, apparently because he feels compromised by the incident.

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