* Gervase Cowell; British Anti-Soviet Spy

Gervase Cowell, 73, British operative who was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1963 after the KGB identified him as the case officer who ran Oleg Penkovsky, Britain’s most valuable double agent during the Cold War. Cowell joined the British Foreign Office in 1951. He spoke several languages, including Russian, and was posted to the Moscow Embassy in 1962. The next year he was declared persona non grata by Soviet authorities after they discovered that one of their own secret agents had switched sides and was supplying the British and the Americans with vital information about Soviet weaponry and its deployment during the Cuban missile crisis. Penkovsky confessed after his arrest by KGB agents and was executed after a highly publicized trial. After Cowell was expelled, he was posted to Bonn. Later assignments sent him to Paris and Tel Aviv. In 1988 he took charge of the archives of the British Special Operations Executive, the army of spies unleashed against the Nazis by Winston Churchill during World War II, opening many of the top-secret files to researchers. In his last years he was chairman of the history subcommittee of the Special Forces Club, where he was often called upon to verify or debunk individuals’ claims of heroism as members of the old secret service. British newspapers reported that Cowell, a resident of Sutton, England, died May 2, but they did not give the cause or place of his death.