Sir David Rolland Spedding KCMG CVO OBE (7 March 1943 – 13 June 2001) was Head of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) from 1994 to 1999.
David Spedding was the son of a Border Regiment lieutenant colonel,[1][2] and grew up comfortably middle class.[3] He was initially educated at Sherborne School and then read history at Hertford College, Oxford.[4]
David Spedding joined the Secret Intelligence Service in 1967,[4] while a postgraduate student at Oxford.[2] He then attended the Middle East Center for Arabic Studies in Beirut, becoming a specialist on Middle East affairs.[4] He also served in Santiago and Abu Dhabi.[5]
In 1971 Spedding was named as the local SIS station commander in Lebanon, and was later posted to Abu Dhabi in 1977.[2] Following his Middle East Directorate appointment in 1983, he was made the Amman Jordan station head,[2] and was subsequently commended in that position for uncovering an Abu Nidal plan to assassinate the Queen during an upcoming Jordan visit.[6] For this he was made Commander of the Royal Victorian Order.[6]
In 1993, Spedding became Director of Requirements and Operations. In 1994 he became Chief of the Service,[4] becoming the first chief to have never served in the armed forces, and the youngest to have held the position to that date.[7] During Spedding's tenure the SIS faced some degree of negative publicity due to unauthorized disclosures in the wake of Richard Tomlinson's dismissal.[8]
Sir David Spedding died of lung cancer on 13 June 2001, aged 58.[4]
The son of a lieutenant colonel in the British Border Regiment, Spedding grew up in comfortably middle class surroundings. He went to Sherborne, a public school in Dorset remarkable for the fact that le Carre, the spy-thriller master, and Christopher Curwen, another future MI6 chief, also went there. At Oxford, Spedding listed as his chief interests walking, medieval history and golf. But he was a run-of-the-mill duffer, with a handicap, Adams noted, of 20.