PART 1
1. Initial greeting
Thank you for inviting me to take part in your program. I hope all your Spanish speaking listeners enjoy this interview as much as those who get a chance to read the English transcript which will be published on TheBurlingtonFiles website.
2. If you had to define yourself professionally, how would you do it?
If I had to define myself, I would describe myself as an altruistic intelligent maverick, an indefatigable perfectionist and on occasion an adrenaline junkie. These traits explain how I could simultaneously juggle multiple lives, whether as an accountant by day, a spy by night, or whatever else I found myself immersed in.
If you or your audience want to try and define me, I suggest you read Beyond Enkription. It’s the only published book out of six stand-alone autobiographical books comprising TheBurlingtonFiles espionage series based on my life. The other books are in various stages of drafting but cannot yet be published for security and legal reasons.
It is worth noting that Beyond Enkription is apparently mandatory reading in some European countries’ intelligence agencies' induction programs. Why? Maybe because the book is not only realistic but has been heralded by those who should know as “being up there with My Silent War by Kim Philby and No Other Choice by George Blake”. It is an enthralling read as long as you don’t expect fictional agents like Ian Fleming's incredible 007 to save the world or John le Carré’s couch potato yet illustrious Smiley to send you to sleep with his delicate diction, sophisticated syntax and placid plots!
3. Have you ever been a terrible man? What is the most difficult thing you have had to do in
your professional life?
I wouldn’t call myself a “terrible man” but I’ve certainly crossed
paths with a few. Let me explain. Within intelligence circles, I was known as
one of the mavericks referred to as Pemberton’s
People in MI6 led by the legendary Colonel Alan Pemberton CVO MBE. They were a
bunch of unconventional
MI6 operatives, including war heroes and intelligence legends, who often
operated outside traditional boundaries. (You can
learn more about Pemberton’s People from TheBurlingtonFiles website.) When at war, their enemies would definitely have labelled them
as “terrible men”.
They included:
(a) Peter "Scrubber" Stewart-Richardson OBE CDG, an eccentric British Brigadier who was once refused permission to join the Afghan Mujahideen to fight the Russians.
(b) Peter Goss, an SAS Colonel, who had headed up intelligence for the British Army in Northern Ireland. He was a UK Joint Intelligence Committee member and was involved in the Clockwork Orange Plot to get rid of UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson.
(c) Barrie Parkes BEM, an ex-British Military Intelligence enforcer who headed up my security for decades, worked with Peter Goss and was “best man” at my second wedding.
(d) Major Freddy Mace, ex-British Intelligence Corps, who used to highlight his cat-burgling and silent killing skills in his CV and listed Colonel Quadhafi among his clients.
(e) Roy Astley Richards OBE, an MI6 operative, who was best known for being Winston Churchill’s wartime bodyguard.
(f) Major General Sir John Evelyn Anderson KBE, who had headed up the British Royal Corps of Signals as Signals Officer-in-Chief. He held various positions in the War Office.
(g) Me, who MI6 codenamed JJ because that was Guy Fawkes’ codename and we both went to one of the oldest schools in the world, St Peter’s in York (founded in AD 627).
Before I forget, I will be referring to FaireSansDire during this interview so I will explain it now. In 1978 Alan Pemberton and Barrie Parkes helped me establish this risk management consultancy business which in reality was a private intelligence agency. We called it FaireSansDire because that was my family’s motto and features in my family’s coat of arms which you can see in TheBurlingtonFiles website. Over the decades, FaireSansDire transformed into a niche intelligence agency with global clout.
A news article about me dated August 2023 in TheBurlingtonFiles website details some 60 death defying incidents I survived during my life including over two dozen attempted murders. Surviving some of those incidents proved on occasion to be some of the most difficult situations I have had to cope with. I would not be alive today save for the dedication and heroics of Pemberton’s People. I will cite a few of those mind boggling occurrences. I am not sure what I would rank as the most difficult I have had to deal with but one of the scariest was the barracuda incident.
(a) First, I vividly recall in the Bahamas in the 1970s that I once grabbed a carving knife by the blade and ripped it from the grasp of a CIA trained operative who had just stabbed me in the thigh while trying to murder me. This dramatic encounter happened in mid-air as I leapt to counter the attack.
(b) On another occasion in the Bahamas in the 1970s, the CIA Station Chief in Nassau stood in the shallow waters off what was Governor’s Beach New Providence Island trying to becalm me while I was swimming in deep water surrounded by a shoal of barracudas. He implored me to try to stay still and remain calm while my knees literally clutched my chest to stop my legs flailing as I desperately tried to keep my hands out of the water so that the refractions from my rings did not excite the voracious fish. That was the only time I have ever sweated in the sea. By the way, the CIA Station Chief had a huge gash or scar across his chest. It was a shark bite.
(c) On another less terrifying occasion, I covertly and silently broke into an apartment in London to photograph some documents with my faithful Minox camera. Unfortunately, the owner returned unexpectedly and sat down to work at the large table I had hidden under on hearing him approach the front door. For a few tedious hours, I remained motionless, waiting for him to turn his TV off and retire to bed so I could make my escape. The real challenge, however, was controlling my bursting bladder, having foolishly consumed too much lager before breaking into his flat.
4. Have you ever had to take the side of those who lie? The higher up you are, the more lies
you tell? What place do you give to strategic lying, lying by design, within your profession?
These questions are the stuff that could easily trip up a polygraph! Yes, I have had to take the side of liars when I perceived it was for the “greater good” though usually only in life or death situations. Incidentally, I think the more senior I got in big business like Barclays, the harder it was to tell lies because the higher up you get the more people listen to what you say, read what you write or watch what you do.
As for spies “lying,” my view is that the less you lie, the lower the probability of being caught out. Rather than fabricating falsehoods, I have found it far safer, when put on the spot, to be both economical with the truth and adept at hiding in plain sight. If you do have to lie … be bold and mimic Richard Burton in the film Where Eagles Dare. If you haven’t seen it you should, especially if you are into all things espionage.
That film reminds me of an incident when I was cornered and interrogated upon arriving at a foreign airport. Thinking quickly, I claimed that they must be referring to my risk management consultancy, FaireSansDire, which had once been employed by their nation’s equivalent of MI6. Of course, FaireSansDire was really a global intelligence agency but they would not have known that. In those days it had no Companies House filings, no website and you could not even Google anything. After my interrogators contacted someone whose name I had kept in reserve for just such a situation, the tension dissipated. In fact, I ended up spending the next hour or so with one of them at the airport bar.
5. How many times have you had to become exactly what you were trying to fight?
If you are talking about fighting physically, ignoring self-defence, never even in unfortunate situations such as the carving knife incident referred to earlier. If talking about fighting metaphorically, rarely if at all because I never doubted I had the moral upper hand.
6. Tell me about that moment in your career that you will never forget, Mr. Fairclough.
They are too many memorable moments to mention but your audience can easily access them. Many of my memorable moments in the 1970s are spelt out in Beyond Enkription. Details of my memorable minutes in other decades have been published in news articles about me in TheBurlingtonFiles website and in my biographies such as the one in that website. One specific article I would draw your audience’s attention to is the one posted in August 2023 which I referred to earlier that details about 60 death defying moments that I have survived including over 24 attempted murders.
7. As a professional in secrecy, a specialist in infiltration, have you ever been singled out,
detected, discovered?
During my career I have infiltrated numerous organizations including rogue state sponsored crime syndicates and global conglomerates in the international financial services sector such as banks. Some of the time my involvement was frenetic but more often than not I was like a sleeper agent awaiting a wake-up call but let us not forget "quien espía, espía será" (he who spies will be spied upon). Unfortunately while undertaking assignments I have been detected a few times albeit almost invariably through no fault of mine. As a result I have been physically assaulted, shot at and even poisoned. I can recall one less traumatic but bizarre incident when I was peculiarly “exposed” after I had infiltrated a global financial organization and been appointed to their board of directors.
I was telephoned at work by a well-known senior UK Civil Servant. She kept on asking me to explain why certain directors of that organization were providing British Intelligence with disinformation concerning an alleged fraud. MI5 deemed it to be a matter of national security. I declined to comment and suggested she seek answers elsewhere but she kept droning on about it thus implying that I was a regular source of covert information for the UK Government’s Cabinet Office. What she did not know was the organization I had infiltrated had only recently started bugging its directors’ phones. The next day I was unceremoniously sent on leave. Shortly afterwards the UK’s Chancellor of The Exchequer went berserk commenting that “she must have lost her marbles”. Talk about “tales of the unexpected”. It remains a mystery to this day why she called me but it wrecked years of clandestine work.
8. How important is collaboration between intelligence agencies or organizations? Is it realistic to think that relevant and sensitive information is shared?
Collaboration between intelligence agencies is vital: hence the existence of the Five Eyes collaboration between the USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In passing, the Five Eyes name originates from the way information was shared under the heading “AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US Eyes Only”.
An interesting aspect of international intelligence collaboration is the practice of monitoring each other’s citizens, allowing nations to bypass legal restrictions on domestic surveillance and the collection of sensitive private data. This approach helps avoid potential violations of privacy laws while still gathering critical intelligence. Given these close partnerships, it would be highly unrealistic to assume that sensitive information is not routinely shared between allied intelligence agencies.
9. What relationships or experiences have you had with other secret services, for example the Spanish CNI, that you can share with us?
I and/or FaireSansDire have knowingly and maybe unwittingly undertaken assignments acting as secret agents for various nations’ intelligence agencies. I say “unwittingly” because I may have carried out assignments for clients unaware that those clients were “cut outs” for other nations’ agencies. As noted in Beyond Enkription and my bios, those agencies included the CIA and British intelligence agencies but I cannot deny that I have never knowingly or unwittingly worked with the Spanish CNI.
10. What do you think is your greatest contribution to Intelligence? What makes you more
satisfied with your career as a secret service professional?
My greatest contribution to intelligence? Demonstrating that a 'boring' accountant can excel as a secret agent without the theatrics of a James Bond. My MI6 recruiter, Colonel Alan Pemberton, and my colleagues in intel, deplored the likes of Ian Fleming and his fabrication, James Bond. We believed Fleming discredited the intelligence community through his creating such an imperfect spy. Mind you, some MI6 executives liked 007 because he was a good recruiting tool (albeit for all the wrong reasons) and raised global awareness of MI6. In reality, Bond utterly muddied most people’s understanding of what a “secret agent” was.
Ian Fleming dubbed James Bond a "secret" agent yet simultaneously depicted 007 as an employee on MI6's payroll. Even in a fictional novel, a realistic MI6 secret agent would never have submitted expense claims, reported directly to the Head of MI6, had annual appraisals or annual holiday entitlements, have been on first name terms with many MI6 employees, been a frequent visitor to MI6 HQ and other MI6 buildings and stupidly used his own name when he met ministers et al in Whitehall. Can you imagine a real spy behaving like 007? It’s laughable, isn’t it?
Given Ian Fleming's background in British naval intelligence in the Second World War, that contradictory classification of 007 was about as absurd as calling a Brain Surgeon a Hair Dresser or a Navy Seal a Coastguard as noted in an intriguing news article in September 2024 in TheBurlingtonFiles website which read as follows: “since everybody knew ... his favourite drink was shaken not stirred, I’m surprised he wasn’t poisoned more often … especially as he insisted on letting everyone know his name was Bond, James Bond”. Perhaps Bond’s true skill lay in being so conspicuously ostentatious that no one believed he could genuinely be a spy.
What’s more, if you argue that since Ian Fleming only wrote fiction it does not matter then you have completely missed the point. Simply put, Fleming naively mis-labelled his protagonist. Ian Fleming wanted Bond to be as real as possible and even described him as being extremely realistic because 007 was "a compound of all the secret agents and commando types I met during the war". Portraying Bond as an employee is about as stupid as saying Alan Turing was only a maths teacher or Neil Armstrong was only a pilot.
11. Farewell greeting
Thank you for having me on your program thus far.
Transcript of Bill Fairclough’s Interview by Sasi Alami for the Código Crystal Program
Broadcast on Radio Televisión Española (RTVE) on 22 March 2025
PART 2
12. Initial greeting
Good to be back.
13. What has gone wrong in the world to bring us to the current situation, in an increasingly
hostile international political and strategic situation?
Today's global troubles stem from a tangled web of deep-rooted issues, including global warming. The diminishing credibility of the United Nations and lack of youthful visionary leadership don’t help matters.
The re-emergence of American/Chinese/Russian rivalries and more warfare via proxies, cyberattacks and AI increase the risk of unintended conflicts and the ensuing emigrations combined with climate-induced migrations strain host countries’ resources and fuel xenophobia.
The weaponization of economic strategies (through sanctions, tariffs etc) combine with ever present ethnic, religious and cultural divides and historical injustices like slavery, colonialism and arbitrary borders to further increase the risks of global conflict.
The spread of nationalism/populism as exemplified by Brexit and America First along with disinformation result in political polarization in democracies thereby undermining their strengths and generate growth in the numbers of economically failed authoritarian regimes with links to corrupt and criminal organizations.
With Trump now controlling the USA many now look to the UK as the bastion of democracy. Woe betide them because with all these global issues to contend with, democracy has become it’s worst enemy. In January 2025, a reliable poll of 13 to 27 year olds (called Generation Z in the UK) revealed that more than half of them thought “the UK would be a better place if a strong leader was in charge who [did] not have to bother with parliament and elections”.
14. His speciality is one of the riskiest in the field of espionage: infiltration. Is it easier than it seems to be detected and singled out, with all the consequences that this entails.
Infiltration is perhaps the most effective intelligence manoeuvre, for example in the fight
against the terrorism?
Despite this century’s exponential growth in the use of cyber/electronic comms/intelligence, “old school” infiltration is still extremely effective as evidenced of late by Mossad infiltrating the highest echelons of intelligence agencies run by Iran and its proxies. Nevertheless, infiltration remains one of the riskiest forms of espionage. It’s like playing chess in the dark. Every move carries risk, and one misstep can be catastrophic. Luckily, I had Pemberton’s People available to protect and extract me when necessary even though I rarely operated in conflicts between warring nations.
15. Is it easy to return to being a so-called 'normal' citizen after having lived under various
identities as an undercover agent? What professional and personal consequences has this
profession left on you.
Living a double or triple life had become such a natural part of my existence for so many decades that it had become the “norm” whether I was an accountant in PwC, a vice president in Citicorp or a director in the Barclays, Reuters groups and more besides. To this day I irrationally continue to live as though almost everything I do or say (particularly on the phone or via a computer) is still being monitored one way or another by goodies for my own protection and baddies from time to time for less appealing reasons.
It is far safer and easier to live assuming that everywhere around you is bugged rather than to try and work out what is and what isn’t. You will inevitably make mistakes if you go bug hunting. Films depicting searches for bugs fail to show how futile such searches are in reality. As for salesmen selling counter-intelligence equipment, bug discoveries are only of any real use nowadays when the bugs discovered are used to disseminate disinformation.
Pemberton’s People once discovered that a flat I owned in Maida Vale, London had been bugged using parallel wire taps in the days before mobile phones were in common use. That discovery meant we could use the bug to spread disinformation from the flat. Anyway, I said it wasn’t a big problem because I could use a nearby public phone booth for contact purposes instead of making calls from the apartment. I could not have been more wrong. Pemberton’s People advised against that saying I was one step behind my adversaries’ thought process. Why? Pemberton’s counter-intelligence experts had already discovered that the nearby phone booth had also been bugged possibly as a disaster contingency measure in the event the parallel wire taps were discovered.
16. Have you ever felt like you were losing your soul along the way?
No and I never empathised with those whose lives I was monitoring or destroying. Some of the villains I have had to deal with would not have been out of their depth had they been appointed commandants of Nazi concentration or extermination camps such as Auschwitz in the Second World War. If you don’t believe me, read Beyond Enkription. As for dealing with the less vicious villains I came across, most had lost their sick souls in search of bigger bank accounts. Whilst dosh can give comfort, in my book it is not worth living or dying for in its own right.
17. In this New World Order, it will be increasingly difficult and risky to place a spy in a
privileged position of access to information. What do you think?
I don’t know what you mean by this new world order but as already noted, Mossad recently infiltrated the top ranks of Iranian intelligence. As long as there exist people prepared to die for their beliefs, infiltration will always be an option open to spy masters. Aldrich Ames, Oleg Penkovsky or Kim Philby and his four Cambridge compatriots all spied from privileged positions. We only hear about them because they were caught out. Have you ever tried to estimate how many successful spies there are who have been clever and lucky enough not to have been exposed?
18. How many politicians or big businessmen could a good spy replace, Mr. Fairclough?
Since spies (and others) operating for national intelligence agencies typically have access to information that is not readily available to politicians or business executives, they are arguably better equipped to make more informed and effective decisions. Obtusely, that is one reason why industrial espionage has flourished in recent decades. In particular, certain aspects of “due diligence” undertaken in respect of proposed mergers and acquisitions are now usually conducted by specialist firms such as FaireSansDire which are often run by retired intelligence agency executives.
I could make a reasonable argument as to why most large businesses and organizations should have a Director of Intelligence on their boards. The trouble with that is it would prove difficult to have the equivalent of a government appointed Military Attaché on any multinational organization’s board because it would sour their relations with entities in countries politically or otherwise opposed to the host country. The way round this is for the CEO and Chairman of such organizations to be able to call upon businesses like Control Risks, FaireSansDire, Hakluyt and Kroll or if in Spain, businesses like Aristeo, Athena, Audea, Avisa and i2 to undertake sensitive research or investigations discreetly on their behalf.
19. Beyond Enkription, the story of Roger and Sara Burlington, is your way of telling the world what this profession is like, including real life characters and identities of espionage? Because many of the characters in Beyond Encryption are real life espionage professionals.
The characters in Beyond Enkription are authentic and based on real spies and criminals I’ve encountered. Before reading the book, it’s worthwhile browsing through an article in TheBurlingtonFiles website published in September 2021 that explains “Who’s who” in the book. What is interesting is that article was released seven years after the book was first published in 2014. Why? For legal and security reasons we could not release that information before 2021 because of death threats, potential Slapps (or vexatious lawsuits) and other intimidating harassment. It is for not dissimilar reasons that we have sadly had to defer the release of any further books for an indeterminate period although films may be on the horizon.
20. What is that question that you have never been asked, but would like to answer in this
program?
There are countless questions I’ve never been asked, yet their answers are scattered across TheBurlingtonFiles website which includes the archived FaireSansDire website now frozen in time since 1 January 2018. Also on the website is an AI Chatbox that you can interrogate all day long. I will now cover a few basic questions I have never or rarely been asked.
QUESTIONS ABOUT MY MI6 RECRUITMENT
Would you believe that I have never been told why, when or how I was recruited by MI6 and whether or not my father was somehow involved. I will never know the answers to these elementary questions but I suspect it was a mixture of events in the 1960s that shaped my subsequent career as a secret agent. These events might have included:
(a) my scholarships particularly when spurned after my Oxford follies
(b) my teenage involvement with organized crime, night clubs and casinos
(c) being the youngest person ever subjected to a legally authorised phone tap
(d) my repatriation by the British Consul in Nice, France from the Negresco Hotel
(e) my involvement in unlawful raids on Poulson’s offices during the early days of the infamous Poulson and Maudling corruption investigations.
As for my father’s involvement in my recruitment, bearing in mind he was a confidante of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan during the Cuban missile crisis and worked on and off in British Intelligence (1939/1947) which he never talked about, he could easily have been involved. My father was almost certainly involved, maybe unwittingly, in my being headhunted and recruited by Citicorp in 1983 but that is too long a winding road to go down now.
Nevertheless, my father certainly influenced my becoming a Chartered Accountant. We once had dinner with the Finance Director of ICI (at that time the largest ever European conglomerate). He roused my interest in becoming an accountant after intimating that as such I could work in a Greek brothel or a Brazilian nightclub. How on earth did he know what the future had in store for me!
QUESTIONS ABOUT MY MI6 REMUNERATION
Would you have guessed that I was never paid a penny by British Intelligence let alone reimbursed any expenses? MI6’s Colonel Alan Pemberton thought that as an accountant in my twenties I was already paid too much bearing in mind I earned more than he did as a Colonel in British Intelligence in his forties. In those days in the 1970s I not only worked full time with Coopers & Lybrand (now PwC) but also moonlighted as an accountant, tax adviser et al in the music, casino and night club industries.
Accordingly, I was never paid by British Intelligence for any of the work I did for them. That looks dreadfully miserly from their perspective in the light of a news article dated September 2024 in TheBurlingtonFiles website written by my son Charles Fairclough (FaireSansDire’s Operations Director) who stated: “In real life, it has been estimated that the funds my father recovered for HM Treasury et al from fraudsters, mobsters and enemies of the state over five decades were ample to fund the whole of British Intelligence for a few years in the seventies.”
QUESTIONS ABOUT MY WORK IN HAITI
In the 1970s, I was employed by Coopers & Lybrand (now PwC) based in Nassau in the Bahamas. While ostensibly working for them, I conducted an investigation into Haiti Air Inter, the Haitian airports it operated from and the involvement if any of Jean-Claude Duvalier and Luckner Cambronne in running them. I was to determine whether the airline met the prevailing international aviation standards set primarily by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a specialized agency of the United Nations. As part of this inquiry, I was also tasked with trying to verify whether Haitian airports handling international flights adhered to ICAO regulations. At the time, only two such airports existed: François Duvalier International Airport in Port-au-Prince and a smaller facility in Cap-Haïtien, in northern Haiti.
Armed only with my trusty Minox camera and a Panasonic tape recorder I flew on Haiti Air Inter from Cap-Haïtien to Port-au-Prince. I photographed what transpired and questioned the only official working for Haiti Air Inter I could locate along with a handful of airport staff that dared talk to me with recorder in hand. It was soon obvious that almost every basic ICAO and related global aviation standard and regulation was either being breached or intentionally ignored.
International airlines were subject to a range of regulations under ICAO’s Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation (1944), which set global aviation standards. The key requirements relating to airlines were in respect of: safety and security standards including hijack preparedness, aircraft airworthiness, air traffic control procedures and fiscal regulations. Airports handling international flights also had to comply with ICAO regulations, the core requirements of which related to airport facilities, passenger handling, security and fiscal arrangements.
It was clear to me that I was being used as a rubber stamp to simply evidence why Haiti should be shut down, so to speak. As expected, I reported that all Haiti Air Inter’s planes should be immediately grounded and that all commercial air traffic to/from and inside Haiti should cease at once. Three unanswered questions reared their ugly heads:
(a) Why was nothing done after I reported that 80% plus of ICAO standards and regulations applicable to both Haiti Air Inter and Haiti’s airports were being blatantly flouted?
(b) As noted in Beyond Enkription, why were there so many US troops at Port au Prince’s international airport when I was scheduled to fly out and coincidentally just when I needed to escape the grim clutches of the TonTon Macoutes who had captured and started to torture me?
(c) Was my assignment to investigate Haiti’s airlines and airports the prelude to a CIA sponsored Haitian equivalent to the Cuban Bay of Pigs which was subsequently aborted?
We will never know definitive answers to these questions. As for my investigations into Luckner Cambronne, who was nicknamed the vampire of the Caribbean, and Jean-Claude Duvalier, Haiti’s President Baby Doc, I obtained proof of some of their felonies. Cambronne’s businesses supplied blood and cadavers to the USA for medical use. If there were insufficient available for shipment, he would allegedly use Jean-Claude Duvalier’s henchmen (the Tonton Macoutes) to murder anyone they could find on the streets of Port-au-Prince at night. Well, they had to meet the quotas demanded of them by their US clients, mostly being high-class segregated all white hospitals. Did the hospitals’ patients know where their blood transfusions and body transplants came from in the 1960s and 1970s? I doubt it.
21. Farewell greeting
Thank you for having me on your program. Remember on planet “espionage” deception is honourable but getting caught is a sin.
If you wish to listen to the interview it can be accessed from this link on the Código Crystal website.