Rupert William Simon Allason was born on 8 November 1951 and is a British former Conservative Party politician and author.
23 Facts About Rupert Allason
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Rupert Allason was the Member of Parliament for Torbay in Devon, from 1987 to 1997.
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Rupert Allason writes books and articles on the subject of espionage under the pen name Nigel West.
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Rupert Allason contested Kettering in 1979 and Battersea in 1983 before being elected as Conservative MP for Torbay in 1987.
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Rupert Allason was opposed to integration with the European Union; in 1993 he was the only Conservative to refuse to vote for the Maastricht Treaty when it was made into a motion of confidence.
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The vote was narrowly won, but Rupert Allason's abstention caused him to have the party whip withdrawn for a year.
7.
Rupert Allason left parliament after the landslide 1997 general election in which he lost his seat to Liberal Democrat Adrian Sanders.
8.
In 2000, Rupert Allason was reported to have considered joining the UK Independence Party.
9.
Rupert Allason was voted 'The Experts' Expert' by a panel of other spy writers in The Observer in November 1989.
10.
Rupert Allason's books are peppered with deliberate clues to potential front-page stories.
11.
Rupert Allason has been a frequent speaker at intelligence seminars and has lectured at both the KGB headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square, Moscow; and at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where he once addressed an audience that included the Soviet spy Aldrich Ames.
12.
Rupert Allason continues to lecture to members of the intelligence community at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies in Washington, DC.
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Rupert Allason traced the wartime double agent GARBO, who was reported to have died in Africa in 1949.
14.
However, Rupert Allason found him in Venezuela, and they collaborated on the book Operation Garbo, published in 1985.
15.
Rupert Allason was the first person to identify and interview the mistress of Admiral Canaris, the German intelligence chief who headed the Abwehr, and he was responsible for the exposure of Leo Long and Edward Scott as Soviet spies.
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Rupert Allason published a study of the Comintern's secret wireless traffic, MASK: MI5's Penetration of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and the first of a series of counter-intelligence textbooks, The Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence, The Historical Dictionary of International Intelligence and The Historical Dictionary of Cold War Counter-Intelligence.
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Rupert Allason has been involved in a number of legal cases, in each of which he represented himself without lawyers.
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Rupert Allason was sued for libel by Maxwell but won the case, winning record damages for a litigant in person by counterclaim.
19.
In 1996 Rupert Allason sued Alastair Campbell for malicious falsehood with regard to an article printed in the Daily Mirror in November 1992.
20.
The judge ruled that Rupert Allason had failed to demonstrate that the Daily Mirror article, although inaccurate, had caused him any financial loss.
21.
In 2001, Rupert Allason sued Random House, the publishers of The Enigma Spy, the autobiography of the former Soviet agent John Cairncross.
22.
Rupert Allason claimed he had ghostwritten The Enigma Spy in return for the copyright and 50 per cent of the proceeds.
23.
Rupert Allason is the European Editor of the World Intelligence Review, published in Washington, DC.