---

Hamilton McMillan OBE, CMG, intelligence officer, was born October 28, 1946. He died of heart disease on April 20, 2021, aged 74"

MI6 officer who was based in Vienna during the Cold War and later ‘outed’ in Rome by Howard Marks, aka Mr Nice

Hamilton McMillan, admired by many of his colleagues as one of the most innovative and effective British intelligence officers of his generation, was particularly at home during his two postings to Vienna.

It helped that he was bilingual in German, having spent much of his childhood in Hamburg, where his father had been posted as a banker. He also, with his passion for wearing hats, rather looked the part.

Some thought he resembled Orson Welles, the trilby-wearing star of the 1949 film The Third Man, which created a powerful image of post war Vienna as a place of great international intrigue.

Chess, played by correspondence from whichever part of the world he found himself in, was a lifelong hobby that he pursued at a high level. The habits of mind developed in this field, along with his study of chemistry at university, informed his approach to the procuring of intelligence.

Thinking outside the box hardly described McMillan’s style as he would not even have recognised the existence of a box when presented with a new problem.

His approach to his work went well beyond pure analytics or what he criticised as mere “spying by numbers”. He was always mindful of the need to stand outside the game to understand individuals, “getting into the fabric” of a country or culture and its players.

His powerful intellect might have led to a scientific research career but he became frustrated with the limitations of the particular line he was studying. Instead he responded to the traditional tap on the shoulder by Balliol’s resident talent-spotter for MI6.

While at Oxford he met his future wife, who survives him along with their two children. Their names have not been included here for security reasons.

Balliol had given McMillan the opportunity to meet and observe a wide range of colourful characters. The college had at that time a reputation as a hotbed of left-wing politics amid the ferment of 1960s student and social radicalism.

Among his college friends was Howard Marks, later a notorious drug smuggler and subject of the film Mr. Nice.

His most influential appointment was as head of MI6’s newly established counterterrorism section, where he formed a close bond with Duane Clarridge, the flamboyant head of the CIA’s counterterrorism centre. McMillan’s imaginative strategy, supported by the CIA’s resources, led to the neutralisation of the main international terrorist threat of the day, just as that threat was becoming focused on Britain.

He built on that success by adapting techniques invented for counterterrorism to tackle weapons of mass destruction proliferation and organised crime. McMillan’s last appointment before his retirement in 1997 put him in charge of European operations.

During that time he advanced MI6’s integration in the Whitehall community by instituting a lunch club of under-secretaries from the main civil service departments. In the last phase of his career his robust style of management attracted criticism.