John Clibborn
Oxford classicist who played a crucial role behind the scenes at the end of the Cold War as MI6 Head of Station in Washington
JOHN CLIBBORN, who has died aged 76, was a senior officer with MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, and was Head of Station in Washington during the critical years in which the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed, playing a pivotal role in maintaining the special intelligence relationship with the United States.
Soon after Clibborn was recruited in the 1960s, his wife Juliet attended an initiation course for secret service spouses, at which she was told she would spend the next few decades pretending to be the wife of a failed diplomat.
So it proved, and in Washington Clibborn was nominally a Counsellor at the British Embassy, a comparatively modest rank for someone of his abilities.
In reality he was playing a crucial role behind the scenes at a time of high hopes that the Soviet Union would accept the loss of its empire in Eastern Europe and that a new era of cooperation could be established between the West and Moscow.
There were even the first glimmerings of collaboration between western intelligence agencies and those of the Eastern Bloc.
Clibborn’s first posting to Washington was in 1988, when Margaret Thatcher and President Reagan were sizing up the possibilities presented by the rise of the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. He presided over the exchange of intelligence between London and Washington that played a major role in determining Western policy towards Russia.
In 1991 he returned to London, where he became head of technology or, as he would jokingly say, Q, before being posted to Washington again from 1993 to 1995.
It was during this second posting that the collapse of the Soviet Union into the chaos of the Yeltsin years – preparatory to the gathering of Eastern Europe into Nato and the European Union – created great challenges for the intelligence community.
Clibborn was a wellknown and much liked figure in Washington. He worked with people at the highest levels of the White House, the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency. He and his wife met three presidents – George Bush Senior, Bill Clinton (who liked to have breakfast meetings) and George W Bush. Not being an early riser (unlike the Americans), he detested having to get up for 5am meetings with Newt Gingrich after his morning jog.
Oleg Gordievsky, the former KGB officer who became an MI6 agent and was exfiltrated to Britain in 1985, was a frequent visitor to the Clibborns’ house. He relished the spy’s tradecraft and would arrive disguised in a long-haired wig and beard, which he would whip off on arrival, embracing Juliet Clibborn and giving her a bunch of roses.
John Donovan Nelson dalla Rosa Clibborn was born in Oxford on November 24 1941 into a family that had arrived in England with William the Conqueror and fled after supporting the Royalist cause in the Civil War; his branch of the family had returned to Britain from Ireland after losing their lands in the 19th century.
His father, Donovan Clibborn CMG, worked in intelligence at Bletchley Park and on General Montgomery’s staff in the Western Desert before joining the Foreign Office, ending up as ambassador to El Salvador; his mother Margaret (née Nelson) descended from an Italian noble family from Parma, a connection which Clibborn, who spoke fluent Italian, cherished.
His childhood was peripatetic as he accompanied his father on postings; when he was five he witnessed a gang shoot-out in Chicago, and later spent time at a school in Madras that taught nothing but Tamil and sewing.
He went to Worth prep school and then Downside, both Benedictine foundations. He would retain his strong Catholic faith throughout his life, but in later years did not receive Communion because he could not reconcile it with some of the professional decisions he had made. In 1960 he won a scholarship to Oriel College, Oxford, to read Classics.
He was awarded a congratulatory First in both Mods and Greats as well as prizes for translation and verse composition, despite having been rusticated for a term for having a girl in his rooms after permitted hours.
He played bridge nearly every day and was a member of the college’s Ran Dan dining club. On one occasion he and some friends were fined £5 each by the Dean after bottles were thrown from his rooms during a bump supper (to celebrate the college becoming Head of the River).
In the summer of 1963 Clibborn and a group of friends drove a Land Rover to Iran – his father was at the embassy in Tehran – venturing as far south as Shiraz with a detour to look at the remains of Persepolis, where John treated his companions to a one-man re-enactment of the city’s sacking by Alexander the Great.
After Oxford he taught in a prep school for a year, but in 1966 he received the “tap on the shoulder” and joined MI6. His first overseas posting was to Nicosia, before the Turkish invasion of 1974 and the division of Cyprus. Office hours lasted from 7am to 1pm, after which he and his wife would drive over the UN border to the beach at Kyrenia, although, left to his own devices, he would have spent every afternoon playing with the High Commission Bridge Club.
He was much involved in trying to bring the two Cypriot communities together. With considerable apprehension, he and his wife once organised a party for a mixture of Greek and Turkish friends; it turned out that their guests had been at school together and there was much hugging and laughter.
After Cyprus there were postings to Bonn and Brussels (where he successfully lobbied for Oxford to be the location for the EEC’S new JET fusion research facility), but his main work, based in London, was on Africa. He knew many of the leaders of the independence movements in Angola and Mozambique and of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.
After leaving Washington he was on the board of directors of SIS while working ostensibly at the FCO in London for 15 years, before retiring in 2011. Noting that many colleagues who had decided to leave the Diplomatic Service had struggled to find suitable new employment, he then worked successfully as a careers manager, doing much to dispel ingrained scepticism among business employers about the advantages of hiring ex-diplomats.
Clibborn was invariably immaculately turned out, softly spoken and never seen to speak ill of anyone. There was a maverick side to his temperament, which was expressed in his liking for fast cars: he tried (successfully) to impress his future wife by buying a second-hand Jaguar XK 150, and later crashed his Triumph TR4 in Cyprus rushing to the birth of his eldest daughter.
To his regret he could never afford another sports car. In the 1990s he and his family lived on a houseboat in Chelsea.
He was a kind and generous man for whom people loved to work; one senior intelligence officer remarked of Clibborn that he “was so good at what he did without ever touching the pomposity and vanity that many in his profession succumb to”. Many of his colleagues felt that he should have become Head of the Service, and would have, if he had been more self-aggrandising.
He never sought public recognition of his work, and maintained a strict silence about his political views. He was, however, dismayed by the Referendum vote in 2016 to leave the European Union, having devoted so much of his career to building Europe, containing Russia and strengthening British-american relations.
He never voted in elections, except on one occasion for the Green Party, being fond of animals.
His love of the ancient world never diminished and he reread Catullus, his favourite poet, during his final illness.
He was appointed CMG in 1997, and his work in Washington was acknowledged by the award of the Seal Medallion by the CIA; at the award ceremony he thanked the Americans “for giving us TS Eliot”.
John Clibborn married Juliet Pagden in 1968. She survives him with a son and two daughters.
John Clibborn, born November 24 1941, died December 16 2017