Bill Fairclough in Nice, France in August 2024
If you are too busy to read any of Bill Fairclough’s
biographies freely available on the web, this article includes many intriguing
facts about him. As you probably know by now, Bill Fairclough was a real as
opposed to a fictitious secret agent and worked for several intelligence
agencies including the CIA, MI5 and MI6 whilst ostensibly making his living as
a Chartered Accountant and businessman.
As a child Bill went to Red House School in Norton
Green, Stockton-on-Tees in the North of England. He later obtained a top
scholarship to St Peter’s School in York. To date neither school has publicly acknowledged
Bill went there which is somewhat strange given he is indisputably one of their
most famous pupils. … apart from Guy Fawkes of course! Many of his oft
hilarious exploits at school have been detailed in his bios on the web such as
at https://theburlingtonfiles.org/#/the-author or were as noted in this news article.
As for Bill’s university education he almost went to
Keble College, Oxford where he had apparently obtained a scholarship but was
expelled before it was awarded as explained in Beyond Enkription, the first of six fact based espionage thrillers based on his life. He also attended the University of
East Anglia for a few days as well as Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumbria
University) for a year where he achieved top marks in his accountancy exams.
His covert career in espionage started soon after that and spanned more than 50
years from the early 1970s. During those 50 plus years he visited and operated
in more than 50 countries and was involved in operations and assignments in
circa 120 countries in total.
Overtly Bill was a qualified British Chartered
Accountant for more than 50 years. He was a Manager in Coopers & Lybrand
(now PwC) from 1969 to 1983, a Vice President in Citicorp (now Citi) from 1983
to 1986 and a Director in the Barclays Bank and Reuters Groups from 1986 to
1999. Thereafter he was a Director of many other companies including some that
were the subject of his investigations.
In the 1970s whilst simultaneously involved in
espionage and working for Coopers & Lybrand, Bill was engaged in the music and
night club industries. He acted as an accountant for numerous promoters,
agents, managers, artists and night clubs. He even co-managed two rock groups
in Europe, namely Ange and Little Bob Story but he turned down offers to manage
a couple of extremely famous British and American rock bands on the grounds
that he was too busy!
By the mid-seventies, the highlights of Bill’s involvement
in the music industry included a few impressive feats such as: (1) producing a
number one single for Ange; (2) drumming with Keith Moon of The Who; (3)
performing on stage with George Melly; (4) pretending to whip Stacia Blake of
the band Hawkwind on stage at many of their London concerts for which he was
made an honorary Hells Angel; (5) hiring Wembley Stadium after reaching an oral
agreement with Colonel Tom Parker for a weekend performance by Elvis Presley:
it never happened; and (6) helping Malcolm McLaren get the Sex Pistols back on
the road after most of their gigs were cancelled following the "Bill
Grundy interview".
In 1978, with the help of Colonel Alan Brooke Pemberton CVO MBE and Barrie Parkes BEM, Bill established FaireSansDire, a niche global
intelligence agency. In 2010, for obscure and complex security reasons,
FaireSansDire went public with the opening of a website called FaireSansDire.org. In 2014 Bill
published the first of six fact based espionage
thrillers based on his life and opened TheBurlingtonFiles.org website. Since 2010 these websites have had several
million unique visitors including recurring visits from most if not all of the
world’s national intelligence agencies et al.
During Bill’s career in espionage he became embroiled
in investigations into the wrongdoings of several dictators and/or corrupt
politicians including Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Milton Obote, Jean-Claude
Duvalier, Oswaldo Enrique López Arellano, Reginald Maudling, Sir Lynden
Pindling and even tangentially Ronald Reagan (courtesy of the Iran Contra
scandal). He also investigated some of the world’s most notorious and infamous criminals
such as Osama bin Laden, Robert Vesco, Luckner Cambronne, Carlos Lehder,
Jeffrey Archer and Edward Snowden. Little wonder he worked closely with and was
advised by some of the world’s leading law enforcement officers and judges etc as explained in some of his bios under
the heading “Web-links & Other Data”.
Finally and most astonishingly, as noted in a news article written by Charles Fairclough (the Operations Director of FaireSansDire and Bill’s
son), Bill Fairclough survived almost 60 death defying moments throughout his
life and more than half of those were attempted murders or assassinations. That
beats all the fictitious fictional life threatening moments that either Bourne
or Bond survived on film to date but unlike those, Bill’s death defying
incidents were for real. Shame no one has made a film about all this … yet.
Anyway, for more
details on any of the matters referred to in this article please see one of
Bill Fairclough’s biographies on the web such as at https://theburlingtonfiles.org/#/the-author. Alternatively just
search the web for news about him, TheBurlingtonFiles, FaireSansDire, Edward
Burlington and/or Beyond Enkription. Bill also features on most of the popular social
media websites and he is most active on LinkedIn and X (Twitter) where his main account is listed as Bill
Fairclough (aka #JJ & #EdwardBurlington) @BurlingtonFiles.
This article was
first published on 31 August 2024.