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Richard Dearlove

Sir Richard Dearlove is a career intelligence officer and, until May 6 2004, head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).

Dearlove's tenure as the head of MI6, or "C", saw many momentus events for the service,

• 2000 - MI6 Headquarters at Vauxhall Cross is attacked by an anti-tank guided missile.
• 2001 - Service criticised for failing to establish and warn that Al-Qaida was planning anything on the scale of the September 11th attacks
• The resulting War on Terror, Afghanistan and Iraq
• Tension with Government over the evidence for war on Iraq. It has been suggested that many within the intelligence community were uneasy that their qualified judgements on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were presented as hard facts in various dossiers.

Dearlove's successor as C is John Scarlett, the former head of the Joint Intelligence Committee. Scarlett's appointment has not been without controversey, in his role at the JIC Scarlett worked closely with Alastair Campbell on the dossier which would form the centre of the Dr. David Kelly affair.

Preceded by: Sir David Spedding

Head of SIS 1999–2004

Followed by: John Scarlett