Patrick Vaughan Stanley Heenan (29 July 1910 – 13 February 1942) was a captain in the British Indian Army who was supposedly convicted of treason, after spying for Japan during the Battle of Malaya of World War II.

[1] Heenan's mother, Annie Stanley (born 1882), was not married at the time of her son's birth at Reefton, New Zealand.

[1] A year later, both mother and son moved to Burma with a mining engineer named George Charles Heenan (1855–1912).

The older Heenan is described by some sources as an Irish republican,[4] although he seems to have had a long association with New Zealand, including selection for regional representative cricket teams in the 1880s and 1890s.

[4] From 1923 to 1926, Patrick was a boarder at Sevenoaks School in Kent, and in 1927 proceeded to Cheltenham College, as a day boy, in a stream of students preparing for military careers.

Accounts of his time at Sevenoaks and Cheltenham show Heenan to have been a poor student and – in the words of the Dictionary of National Biography — a "gloomy, resentful misfit disliked by other pupils".

[citation needed] During 1941, as fears of a Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia grew, Heenan's unit was sent to Malaya.

Following the completion of air liaison training, Heenan was stationed at Alor Setar, in Kedah, northern Malaya, in June 1941.

Sydney Tavender, chairman of the Cotswold branch of the Far East Prisoners of War, and who served in the AIL unit with Heenan, said the Japanese aircraft always seemed to know the correct recognition codes, despite the fact that they were changed every 24 hours.

[1] Among other espionage equipment, he reportedly had a morse code transmitter operated by an alphanumeric keyboard — similar to a Traeger Transceiver — which was disguised as a typewriter.

Elphick added that Heenan "must have passed on much helpful information pre-war and he pushed the rate of aircraft destruction along a bit after the war began".

[1] Elphick also says that word of Heenan's actions spread quickly among British Commonwealth officers, which had a significant effect on morale.