"Brian Stewart, who has died aged 93, spent more than 50 years as a shrewd and determined intelligence officer committed to the defence of Britain’s interests around the world. Drawing on his training as a Second World War infantry officer, he entered the Malayan Civil Service for 12 years then, with a sharp nose for trouble, worked under diplomatic cover in Asia. In 1968 he became the first MI6 officer appointed secretary of the Joint Intelligence Committee in Whitehall before returning to Hong Kong as the Secret Intelligence Service’s Far East Controller. On retiring from government service, he took commercial posts in Malaysia and China while still retaining an unofficial intelligence watch and continuing his Chinese studies. The son of a Calcutta jute merchant whom he only saw twice in his first 16 years, Brian Thomas Webster Stewart was born in Edinburgh on April 27 1922. He went to Glenalmond, and Worcester College, Oxford, where he read History, fenced and did judo. After being commissioned into the Black Watch, he became an anti-tank gun instructor. “My five years in the Army made me a different person,” Stewart told The Telegraph earlier this year. “It made a normal, quiet chap really into an extremely confident chap.” He landed in Normandy in the wake of D-Day. “They had a bad habit of sticking snipers up trees. But I had a bad habit of shooting at snipers up trees,” he recalled. His platoon scored 12 “hits” against Panzers at Rauray on July 1 1944. “It was very awe-inspiring. Grey dawn, first light. Rumble, rumble: Panther armoured group. It was an ominous sound.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11896713/Brian-Stewart-intelligence-officer-obituary.html
