Claude Dansey

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Lieutenant Colonel Sir Claude Edward Marjoribanks Dansey (1876-1947), also known as Colonel Z, was the deputy chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, the British intelligence agency commonly known as MI6. He began his career in intelligence in 1900, and remained active until his death.

Dansey, the son of a soldier, was born in 1876. Educated at Wellington College he served in the British Army in South Africa during the Boer War. He was recruited by MI5 and put in charge of "port intelligence" and the surveillance of civilian passengers during World War I. He was inadvertently responsible for allowing Leon Trotsky to return to Russia in 1917. [1]

He then joined MI1c (later MI6) and worked in Switzerland and the Balkans until 1919. After the war he went into business, but remained a part-time agent. After losing his money in the Wall Street Crash, Dansey worked as a full-time agent for MI6 in Italy.

In 1932 Dansey created the Z Organization as a parallel intelligence network in Europe in response to the fear that the PCO (Passport Control Officer) cover often assumed by SIS officers had been compromised. The Z-agents were provided with cover stories as businessmen and journalists. Dansey even funded Alexander Korda's London Films, as cover for agents travelling around Europe. However Section Z was fatally compromised when the Head of Z in the Netherlands, Captain Sigismund Payne Best and the Head of the SIS Station Major Richard Stevens were captured by the Germans at Venlo in September 1939. In the aftermath Z was re-absorbed into SIS. Eventually Dansey became Deputy-Chief of MI6.

Dansey died in June 1947. He has been variously described as "The only professional in MI6", and by the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper as "...an utter shit, corrupt, incompetent, but with a certain low cunning."