"Stephen de Mowbray was born on August 15 1925 at Lymington, where his father, Ralph Marsh de Mowbray, was an eminent surgeon. After Winchester de Mowbray joined the Fleet Air Arm in 1943, training as an observer on a torpedo squadron, but arriving too late to see any action. His service was enlivened, however, by the disinclination of his pilot, Laurence Olivier, to take naval discipline seriously. Demobbed in 1946, de Mowbray went up to New College, Oxford, where he read PPE and was taught by Isaiah Berlin. For someone who saw himself as a “thinker” rather than a doer, it was an invaluable experience. Berlin was a significant influence on the young de Mowbray’s life. Having decided during the war against following his father into medicine, de Mowbray felt that he could make a career for himself as a diplomat. But Berlin advised against it: “I think you had better be a spy.” De Mowbray joined MI6 in 1950, working initially in the Economic Section run by George Young, one of the Service’s towering influences in the early period of the Cold War." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2016/10/07/stephen-de-mowbray-last-of-the-great-cold-war-molehunters--obitu/
