Major General Peter Williams

Major General Peter Williams served for over 30 years in the Coldstream Guards, specialising in intelligence and military diplomacy.  His operational experiences included two tours in Northern Ireland, two years in Oman in the mid-1970s in the immediate aftermath of the Dhofar campaign and three tours in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.  His final posting was to Moscow, where in 2002 he set up and ran for three years NATO’s Military Liaison Mission during the brief window of optimism in NATO-Russian relations. Peter also worked for six years in Berlin during the Cold War, firstly in the 1970s as a battalion intelligence officer, covering East Berlin and the Berlin Corridor route to West Germany, and then twice in the 1980s as a member of BRIXMIS (the British Commanders’-in-Chief Mission to the Soviet Forces in Germany), conducting 3-man intelligence collection patrols out on the ground in East Germany.  Among other adventures he was lucky to survive a Stasi-directed deliberate ramming which wrote off his patrol vehicle. In 1982 his duties also included providing interpreter support at Spandau Prison, where he met Rudolf Hess on several occasions. Peter will provide context-setting talks on Prussia and on the Baltic region, including the Hanseatic League, as well as presentations on the activities of BRIXMIS in East Germany. For many years he gave a series of talks on ‘Spying in Cold War East Germany’ annually at the Marlborough College Summer School and he has lectured about BRIXMIS on a number of occasions at King’s College London and at Reading University, as well as on cruises and to many school and charity audiences.