Top British spy who served in Cyprus dies
A TOP British spy who served in Cyprus in the 1960s and once worked as Britain’s “Q” has died of cancer, it has been announced.
Oxford-born John Clibborn died in December aged 76. Details of his escapades on the island at the height of tensions between Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots were revealed in an obituary published in the Times earlier this month.
According to the paper, “quintessentially English” Mr Clibborn was sent to Cyprus in 1967 by the Special Intelligence Service (SIS) — the official name for MI6.
“The first Turkish Cypriot he introduced to his wife . . . was murdered three weeks later,” the obituary said. “Soon afterwards, Mr Clibborn found himself on an IRA hit list and the couple were given a bodyguard.”
It is reported that Mr Clibborn “cheated death” when he was thrown from a sports car which he crashed while “speeding along Cyprus’s narrow roads”.
“He had not, however, been a James Bond character racing to meet an agent, but [was] hastening to see his newborn daughter in hospital,” the added.
A highlight of Mr Clibborn’s time in the capital, where he was based, was a dinner party he gave for “prominent Cypriots” from both communities.
“Months in the planning, its outcome was a source of great worry to him,” the article said. “No sooner had the guests arrived that it transpired they had all been at the British School together. They warmly embraced one another and stayed until four in the morning.”
Described as “cerebral” and a “classical scholar who spent weeks before his death reading Greek verse”, Mr Clibborn was next stationed article in Bonn, Germany, in the early 1970s before a spell in Brussels.
He spent much of the 1980s as MI6’s controller for Africa but served in Washington DC first between 1988 and 1991, during the period when the Soviet Union collapsed.
He returned to Britain to become the SIS’s director of technology — its “Q” — but later went back to Washington for another year, the Times said, where he was presented with the CIA’s Seal medallion on leaving his post.
Following his final return from the US, Mr Clibborn spent a further 15 years in senior MI6 roles before leaving the service in 2011.