Sinclair, Hugh

He graduated from the Stubbington Preparatory School, in the ranks of KVMS since 1886 ^[1] . During the First World War he served in the Office of Naval Intelligence of Great Britain. In February 1919 he headed the Office, and in 1921 became the commander of the British submarine fleet in the rank of rear admiral ^[2] . In 1923 he headed the Secret Intelligence Service, received the rank of vice admiral on March 3, 1926, and on March 15, 1930 he was promoted to admiral ^{[3] [4]} .

During his work, Sinclair tried to take over the counterintelligence service MI5 by the Secret Intelligence Service in order to nullify the influence of the Communists in the country and stop the attempts of the revolution, but in 1925 this idea was abandoned. In the interwar years, the Secret Intelligence Service was not funded or expanded ^[1] , and in 1936 Sinclair found out about the major failure of British intelligence and the cover of its residency in Germany by the Gestapo , as a result of which Claude Dancy , an MI6 resident in Rome, created his own intelligence service Z, working independently of the Secret Intelligence Service ^[5] . In 1938, Sinclair founded the “D” branch in SIS, which was supposed to engage in sabotage. In the spring of 1938, he bought for his own sum of £ 6,000 Bletchley Park , where during the Second World War there was the Government School of Codes and Ciphers, the predecessor of the Center for Government Communications ^[6] .

In December 1938, Sinclair received an order from the President of the House of Lords, Lord Halifax , Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the Minister for Foreign Affairs to prepare a dossier on Adolf Hitler ^[7] . The Assistant Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Sir George Maunsey, criticized Sinclair’s dossier, stating that the information obtained was not correlated with the British policy of appeasement. Sinclair himself noted in the dossier such characteristics of the Fuhrer as “fanaticism, mysticism, ruthlessness, cunning, vanity, mood swings from elevation to depression, bouts of bitter and unauthorized resentment; what can be called a streak of madness; at the same time, great persistence in striving for a goal, which is often combined with extraordinary clarity of vision ” ^[8] .

In the last years of his life, Sinclair was diagnosed with cancer. On October 19, 1939, Alexander Kadogan noted in his diary that Sinclair "began to fade away." On October 29, Sinclair underwent surgery, but did not suffer the consequences, and died on November 4 at the age of 66. Five days after Sinclair’s death, an incident occurred in Venlo when two MI6 agents were immediately captured by the Germans ^[9] .