Educated at Rossall School, Fleetwood, Lancashire and Sandhurst. Extract from Obituary in Daily Telegraph Brigadier Bill Magan, who died on January 21 aged 101, was transferred from the Indian cavalry at the beginning of the Second World War to serve in British intelligence, and later became one of the leading intelligence officers of the postwar era. While he was serving in India in 1940, a mutiny broke out among Sikhs in the Central India Horse at Bombay. Magan began his report with a description of one of the mutineers: "Bishan Singh sat slumped in his chair in the middle of the cell under a bare electric light bulb." This so captured the interest of the Director of Military Intelligence's secretary in Quetta, Maxine Mitchell (daughter of Sir Kenneth Mitchell, Engineer-in-Chief to the government of India), that she read the report right through to the end and married Magan later that year. This success led to his appointment in 1946 as deputy head of SIME (Security Intelligence Middle East) in Jerusalem. He arrived in the post soon after the Irgun attack on the King David Hotel, and watched the fighting between Jews and Arabs grow as Pax Britannica faded. He enjoyed visiting the Biblical sites, seeing the river Jordan where John baptised Jesus and sitting on the wall at Jacob's Well, where Jesus was given water by a Samaritan woman. In 1951, after the embarrassing defection of Burgess and Maclean, Magan was appointed director of MI5's E Branch, responsible for liaising with the Service's many overseas representatives. He played a key role in the colonial emergencies in Malaya, Kenya, Nyasaland, Aden and Borneo. Within MI5, Magan was regarded as a safe pair of hands who could handle the most delicate issues, with the result that he was asked to direct F Branch, the counter-subversion department, and C Branch, the protective security division. Sir Dick White, who headed both MI5 (1953-56) and MI6 (1956-68), told Magan in 1989: "Of all my colleagues, I always regarded you as the most stalwart and the healthiest and best influence we had among us." Others, too, spoke highly of Magan's judgment and leadership qualities, and of his ability to generate harmonious relations within and between departments. Commissioned in 1928, Magan first did a year with the 60th Rifles, then joined the 12th Frontier Force Cavalry (Sam Browne's) at Rawalpindi in the Punjab. Attached to the 15th/16th Hussars for auxiliary duties during the campaign against the Afridi tribe in 1930, he discovered the serious threat posed by locusts and cholera. Harder-working, and with more intellectual curiosity than many of his fellow officers, Magan was sent on a year's leave in Persia to learn Farsi, settling at Shiraz. A circle of Persian women called him "Mullah" Magan because he did not drink. Coming home on leave in 1938, he took over the mastership of the South Westmeath Hunt for a season before finding himself transferred - against his will - to an intelligence course which was to signal the end of his regimental career. After Magan's retirement from MI5 in 1968, he first ran a fruit farm in Kent and helped his wife, a gifted artist, build up a cottage industry using local women with domestic sewing machines to make fabrics to her own design. This eventually produced work for 100 people, and they exported to markets worldwide as well as supplying hundreds of shops in Britain, among them Harrods, Liberty's and Fortnum & Mason. The book, which included a particularly vivid portrait of life during the closing years of the Ascendancy, did much to explain Britain's long-term historical debt to Ireland, and became required reading for members of the American Embassy staff in Dublin. "Umma-More" took its name from the once substantial family lands, the last vestige of which - Killyon Manor and its demesne - Magan reluctantly sold in 1967. He was therefore delighted when his son George, a banker, decided to re-establish the family in Ireland by buying and restoring Castletown in Co Kilkenny, which has been called "Ireland's most beautiful house". He was appointed OBE (Military) in 1946, was mentioned in despatches in 1947 and appointed CBE in 1958.