John Alexander Symonds

John Alexander Symonds (born July 13, 1935) is an English former Metropolitan Police officer and KGB agent.

Symonds was born in the Soke of Peterborough. He was commissioned in the Royal Artillery, serving from 1953 to 1956.

He joined the Metropolitan Police in 1956, becoming a detective sergeant at New Scotland Yard. In 1969, after having been a police officer for 15 years, John Alexander Symonds was one of three officers charged with corruption following a newspaper investigation into bribery at Scotland Yard. He skipped bail and fled to Morocco in 1972. Symonds claimed later that he had been 'fitted up' and forced to leave under pain of death after having threatened to expose during any trial "the endemic and systemic corruption within the Metropolitan Police service" at the time.

In Morocco, Symonds served as a mercenary, making use of his police and military expertise to train African troops to use the 25-pounder howitzer, an artillery piece that was, by that time, obsolete by British Army standards and had been sold off as surplus to several African countries. It was at this point that Symonds was recruited by the KGB.

Between 1972-80, he was a KGB agent employed as a "Romeo spy" with the codename SKOT. He was directed by his Soviet masters to seduce women working in Western embassies with the aim of obtaining secrets. In 1981, he returned to England.

Symonds revealed himself as a spy to the police and security services in the 1980s, and appeared on the front page of the Daily Express (1985) and in the News on Sunday (1987), but was dismissed as "a fantasist". It was only with the defection of Major Vasili Mitrokhin in 1992 and the subsequent publication of the Mitrokhin Archive in 1999, in which Symonds was named as a spy for the Soviet Union, that his claim gained credence.

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