|
George Alexander Hill (1892–1968) was a British intelligence officer. Hill was the son of a timber merchant with business interests stretching from Siberia to Persia. He was born in Estonia and educated by French and German governesses. He had exceptional linguistic skills, and learned to speak six languages, including Russian. ==First World War== Hill was in British Columbia on a fishing trip when the First World War broke out in 1914. He joined a Canadian infantry regiment and was posted to Ypres in 1915. He displayed exceptional bravery and was seriously wounded. He was then sent to the War Office where after training by Scotland Yard〔Russian Roulette by Giles Milton p47〕 he began his career as an intelligence officer, his first assignment being to fly agents behind enemy lines in Greece. In 1917, he was sent to Petrograd, ostensibly as a member of the Royal Flying Corps mission, arriving amid the confusion of the Bolshevik Revolution. In his memoirs, not generally regarded as entirely reliable, he described how he took the Romanian crown jewels from the Kremlin to Iași, helped Leon Trotsky to organize a military intelligence service and the Red Air Force, ran guns to Ukrainian nationalists, and recruited German agents for counter-intelligence work. According to Hill he personally blew up an enemy gasworks, overpowered an assassin who attempted to kill him with a grenade by striking him in the head with a brick and ran one of 2 men who had followed him from secret meeting through with his swordstick.〔Go Spy the Land p148 & p153〕 He eschewed carrying firearms whilst undercover as he considered them impossible to explain if searched and improvised having a bottle of acid to hand whenever writing his dispatches so that he could quickly destroy his secret documents if necessary.〔Go Spy the Land p50 & p152-3〕 Rather than physical force Hill preferred bribery noting that 'I had always found the value of including in my kit a certain amount of good plain chocolate, half a dozen pairs of ladies silk stockings and two or three boxes of the more expensive kind of Parisian toilet soap. My experience was that, presented at the right psychological moment they would unlock doors which neither wine nor gold would open'〔Russian Roulette by Giles Milton p49〕 When the British landed in Murmansk he was obliged to flee to Finland with the Soviet secret service, the Cheka in hot pursuit. He returned briefly to Russia before being posted by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) to the Middle East. SIS being short of funds, he left after three years and lived in a caravan in Sussex with his wife. His service had earned him a DSO and an MBE, and he was mentioned in dispatches three times. Hill took a series of jobs, with Royal Dutch Shell, he was manager of the Globe Theatre in London, and deputy general manager to the theatrical impresario C. B. Cochran. He also wrote two volumes of memoirs, ''Go Spy the Land'' (1933) and ''The Dreaded Hour'' (1936) as well as two unpublished plays. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「George Alexander Hill」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|