Colonel David de Crespigny Smiley, LVO, OBE, MC & Bar (11 April 1916 – 9 January 2009) was a British special forces and intelligence officer.
He fought in the Second World War in Palestine, Iraq, Persia, Syria, the Western Desert and with Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Albania and Thailand.
[3] While based in Windsor, Berkshire, with the Blues, he was seen as a "man-about-town", owning a Bentley car and a Miles Whitney Straight aircraft.
After the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Smiley's regiment sailed for Palestine, where one of his first jobs was to shoot his troop of forty horses when it became clear they were of no use in modern combat.
After the war, he held the record for the most falls in one season on the Cresta Run in St Moritz; bizarrely, he represented Kenya (where he owned a farm) in the Commonwealth Winter Games of 1960.