36 Facts About Richard Tomlinson

Richard John Charles Tomlinson was born on 13 January 1963 and is a former officer of the British Secret Intelligence Service.

Richard Tomlinson argued that he was subjected to unfair dismissal from MI6 in 1995, and attempted to take his former employer to a tribunal.

Richard Tomlinson served six months of a twelve-month sentence before being given parole, whereupon he left the country.

Richard Tomlinson then attempted to assist Mohamed al-Fayed in his privately funded investigation into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and al-Fayed's son Dodi.

Richard Tomlinson claimed that MI6 had considered assassinating Slobodan Milosevic, the president of Serbia, by staging a car crash using a powerful strobe light to blind the driver.

Richard John Charles Tomlinson was born in Hamilton, New Zealand, and raised in the nearby town of Ngaruawahia.

Richard Tomlinson was the middle child in a family of three brothers.

Richard Tomlinson's father came from a Lancashire farming family and he worked for the Ministry of Agriculture, and had met his wife whilst studying agriculture at Newcastle University.

The young Richard Tomlinson won a scholarship for the independent Barnard Castle School in County Durham, where he was a contemporary of Rory Underwood and Rob Andrew, who went on to become England rugby internationals.

Richard Tomlinson excelled at mathematics and physics, and won a scholarship to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1981.

Richard Tomlinson completed flying training with Cambridge University Air Squadron and won a Half Blue for Modern Pentathlon.

Richard Tomlinson graduated from the University of Cambridge with a starred First Class honours degree in aeronautical engineering in 1984, and was approached by MI6 shortly afterwards, whose offer he turned down.

Richard Tomlinson continued to pursue his aeronautical interests and qualified as a glider pilot with the Fuerza Aerea Argentina.

Richard Tomlinson represented Britain in the 1990 Camel Trophy, competing in Siberia, and crossed the Sahara desert solo on a motorcycle.

Richard Tomlinson enjoyed the experience, and subsequently applied to join MI6, and officially joined the Service on 23 September 1991.

Richard Tomlinson completed his training with MI6 and claims he was the best recruit on his course, being awarded the rarely given "Box 1" attribute by his instructing officers including Nicholas Langman.

Richard Tomlinson was posted to a diplomatic role in Moscow, and was one of the agents responsible for the retrieval of the valuable Mitrokhin Archive in 1992.

From 1994 to 1995, Richard Tomlinson worked in the operational counter-proliferation department.

Richard Tomlinson's first posting in this capacity was to work as an undercover agent against Iran, where he succeeded in penetrating the Iranian Intelligence Service.

Richard Tomlinson posed as a British businessman, and infiltrated a network of arms dealers that included Nahum Manbar.

On 13 May 1994, Richard Tomlinson resigned from MI6, suggesting in his letter of resignation that he had lost the motivation for a career with the organisation.

Richard Tomlinson argued that his supervisors had unfairly disregarded his personal circumstances.

Richard Tomlinson disputed the reasons for and legality of his dismissal and attempted to take MI6 before an employment tribunal.

Richard Tomlinson moved to the Costa del Sol in Spain for 18 months from early 1996.

Richard Tomlinson accepted the offer but retained the job for only a few months before he emigrated to Australia, where his younger brother lived.

Richard Tomlinson returned to Britain, and in October 1997 was arrested and accused of breaking the Official Secrets Act 1989, after delivering a seven-page synopsis of The Big Breach to the Australian office of Transworld, a British publisher.

Richard Tomlinson set about completing The Big Breach, which was published in 2001 in Russia.

In September 2008, MI6 ended all legal objection to the publication of The Big Breach, released the proceeds from the publication to Richard Tomlinson, and admitted that the organisation's previous legal actions against him were disproportionate.

Since 2009, Richard Tomlinson has been able to travel freely to the UK.

Richard Tomlinson removed the references to Mandela in the British edition of the book, conceding that Mandela was probably unaware that the officials with whom he spoke were affiliated with MI6.

Richard Tomlinson had suggested that MI6 was monitoring Diana before her death and that her driver on the night she died, Henri Paul, may have been an MI6 informant, and that her death resembled plans he saw during 1992 for the assassination of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, using a bright light to cause a traffic accident.

At the Coroner's Inquest into the death of the Princess, on 13 February 2008, speaking by video-link from France, Richard Tomlinson conceded that, after the interval of 16 or 17 years, he "could not remember specifically" whether the document he had seen during 1992 had in fact proposed the use of a strobe light to cause a traffic accident as a means of assassinating Milosevic, although use of lights for this purpose had been covered in his MI6 training.

Richard Tomlinson said he believed MI6 had an informant at the Paris Ritz but he could not be certain that this person was necessarily Henri Paul.

Richard Tomlinson moved to Germany until he was hounded out by officials, whereupon he moved to Italy.

From 2006 to 2007, Richard Tomlinson maintained a series of blogs detailing his treatment.

In 1998, Richard Tomlinson was described as possessing "the air of slight arrogance that goes with good looks, a hard-trained body and a sharp intellect".