| Looking back at the extraordinary saga of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, who flew to Scotland in 1941 |
After studying History at Cambridge University, Peter Williams spent over 30 years in the Coldstream Guards and enjoyed an unusually varied career.
During the Cold War he specialised in intelligence, serving first in Berlin from 1973 to 1975 as a Regimental Intelligence Officer. After almost two years in Dhofar (Oman) he went on to study Russian and German before spending more than four years in the 1980s in Berlin and East Germany as an officer in the British Commanders’-in-Chief Mission to the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany (known as BRIXMIS), in effect working as a military spy. In 1983 he was awarded an MBE for his success as an intelligence collector and analyst.
From 1993 to 1994 he commanded his Coldstream Guards battalion in Bosnia on UN peacekeeping operations during the civil war there (OBE). In the late 1990s he did two more 6-month tours in the former Yugoslavia, as the Deputy Chief UN Military Observer and then in Sarajevo as the senior NATO officer liaising with the Bosnian general staffs.
After serving on the European Union’s Military Committee, his final posting (2002-05) was in Moscow, where he led NATO’s Military Liaison Mission to the Russian Federation; as such he was (and remains) the most senior British officer to serve in Moscow since 1945. On leaving Russia he was made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George. He retired from the Army in December 2005.
