Major General Peter Williams

My presentations reflect my experiences as an intelligence officer, an operational commander and a military diplomat during the Cold War and in the years after the Iron Curtain fell. All are lavishly illustrated with PowerPoint images and anecdotes. The most popular of my topics at schools and for more mature audiences has tended to be:

‘My Life as a Military Spy – BRIXMIS in Cold War East Germany’

This talk examines the three Allied military liaison missions that operated as intelligence collection agencies in Cold War East Germany from 1946-90. It is based on my lengthy involvement in the 1980s with the British mission (BRIXMIS) as one of its ‘licensed spies’.

Since 2013 I have spoken annually on this topic to the King’s College London British Intelligence Studies MA course. From 2017-24 I gave a 10-lecture series on ‘Spying in Cold War East Germany’ at the Marlborough College Summer School. This topic also includes an opportunity for the audience to handle 1980s-vintage ‘military spying’ cameras.

After studying History at Cambridge University, Peter Williams spent over 30 years in the Coldstream Guards and enjoyed an unusually varied career.

During the Cold War he specialised in intelligence, serving first in Berlin from 1973 to 1975 as a Regimental Intelligence Officer. After two years in Dhofar (Oman) he went on to study Russian and German before spending more than four years in the 1980s in Berlin and East Germany as an officer in the British Commanders’-in-Chief Mission to the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany (known as BRIXMIS), in effect working as a military spy. In 1983 he was awarded an MBE for his success as an intelligence collector and analyst.

From 1993 to 1994 he commanded his Coldstream Guards battalion in central Bosnia on UN peacekeeping operations during the civil war there (OBE). In the late 1990s he did two more 6-month tours in the former Yugoslavia, as the Deputy Chief UN Military Observer and then in Sarajevo as a senior NATO officer liaising with the Bosnian general staffs.

After serving on the European Union’s Military Committee, his final posting (2002-05) was in Moscow, where he led NATO’s Military Liaison Mission to the Russian Federation; as such he was (and remains) the most senior British officer to serve in Moscow since 1945. On leaving Russia he was made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George. He retired from the Army in December 2005.

He now enjoys giving talks on cruise ships and to military, academic and charity audiences about the Cold War and other current and historical issues; he also gives talks under the Government-sponsored pro bono ‘Speakers for Schools’ scheme.

He is the Chairman of the BRIXMIS Association and the Patron of the British Ex-Services Association of Western Australia, and a former member of the International Guild of Battlefield Guides. For five years he was the editor of The Guards Magazine and for a decade or so he also helped to train British military diplomats.

He is married to Anne, a language teacher and jewellery designer. They live in North Wiltshire and have three grown-up children and five grandchildren.