Paul Dukes

Sir Paul Dukes KBE (1889–1967) was a British author and MI6 officer.

Early life
Born Paul Henry Dukes on 10 February 1889 in Bridgwater, Somerset, England, the son of a Congregationalist clergyman, Rev. Edwin J. Dukes, and his wife, the former Edith M. Pope. He was educated at Caterham School in England, and Petrograd Conservatoire in Russia.

Career
As a young man he took a position as a language teacher in Riga, Latvia. He later moved to St. Petersburg, where he was a secret agent in Imperial Russia. During this time he worked at the Petrograd Conservatoire as a concert pianist and deputy conductor to Albert Coates. He set up elaborate plans to help prominent White Russians escape from Soviet prisons and smuggled hundreds of them into Finland.

Known as the "Man of a Hundred Faces," Dukes continued his use of disguises, which aided him in assuming a number of identities and gained him access to numerous Bolshevik organizations. He successfully infiltrated the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Comintern, and the political police, or CHEKA. Dukes also learned of the inner workings of the Politburo, and passed the information to British intelligence.

He returned to Britain a distinguished hero, and in 1920 was knighted by King George V, who called Dukes the "greatest of all soldiers." To this day, Dukes is the only person knighted based entirely on his exploits in espionage. He briefly returned to service in 1939, helping to locate a prominent Czech businessman who disappeared after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. He was also a leading figure in introducing yoga to the Western World.

Writing
His book Red Dusk and the Morrow chronicles the rise and fall of Bolshevism and he toured the world extensively giving lectures pertaining to this subject.

Personal life
Duke was married first to Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherford, former wife of Ogden Livingston Mills, and then to Diana Fitzgerald.

Death
He died on 27 August 1967 in Cape Town, South Africa, aged 78.