Sir Dick Goldsmith White, KCMG, KBE (20 December 1906 – 21 February 1993) was a British intelligence officer.
[1]: 29 [4] He was described by Peter Wright as resembling David Niven: "the same perfect English manners, easy charm, and immaculate dress sense."
[1]: 29 He was employed at MI5 in 1936 to monitor the rise of Nazism in Germany and spent a year in Munich attempting to recruit Germans.
[1]: 29 White and MI5 were still in denial of the state of the Soviet penetration until the FBI discovered a spy via the Venona project called "Homer" working in British government.
Under a cloud of suspicion raised by his highly visible and intimate association with Burgess, Philby returned to London.
[1]: 29 There, he underwent MI5 interrogation by White aimed at ascertaining whether he had acted as a "third man" in Burgess and Maclean's spy ring.
[1] This was especially true when MI6 recruited Oleg Penkovsky, a GRU Colonel that led to the identification of MI6 officer George Blake in 1963 as Soviet spy.
[2]: 29 After a long illness he died from intestinal cancer at his home,[10] "The Leat" in Burpham, near Arundel in Sussex, on 21 February 1993; his wife, Kathleen, survived him.