Milicent Bagot

Milicent Jessie Eleanor Bagot, CBE (28 March 1907 – 26 May 2006) was a British intelligence officer, and the model for the character Connie Sachs, the eccentric Sovietology expert who appeared in John le Carré's novels Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People.

The daughter of Cecil Frederick Villiers Bagot and his wife Ethel Garratt, Bagot was educated at Putney High school and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (MA). She was attached to the Ministry of Defence, performing work for both MI5 and MI6. She was the first person to warn MI5 that Kim Philby, MI6 officer and Soviet KGB double agent, had been a member of the Communist party. Philby's denial of this fact led to his eventual resignation from MI6, and his flight to Moscow.

Bagot also wrote a definitive account of the 1924 Zinoviev Affair in which a forged letter purported to be from Grigory Zinoviev, president of the executive committee of the Comintern, urged the British working class to rise up in an armed insurrection. The publication of the letter ensured the subsequent electoral defeat of the Ramsay MacDonald-led Labour Government, and it has been suggested that MI5 or MI6 may have been involved in leaking the forged letter.

Bagot was made an MBE in 1949 and a CBE in 1967.