Gill Bennett

Gill Bennett was Chief Historian of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office from 1995-2005, and Senior Editor of the UK's official history of British foreign policy, Documents on British Policy Overseas. As a historian in Whitehall for over forty years, she provided historical advice to twelve Foreign Secretaries under six Prime Ministers, from Edward Heath to Tony Blair. A specialist in the history of secret intelligence, she published a ground-breaking biography, Churchill's Man of Mystery: Desmond Morton and the World of Intelligence, in 2006.

Since leaving the FCO in 2005 Gill has continued to advise Whitehall departments on historical issues, particularly on intelligence-related topics, She was part of the research team working on the official history of the Secret Intelligence Service by Professor Keith Jeffery, published in 2010. In Six Moments of Crisis: Inside British Foreign Policy, published in 2013 by Oxford University Press, she drew on her experience as a Whitehall insider, using examples from the Korean War to the Falklands, to show how complex foreign policy-making is, and how ministers faced with difficult decisions are subject to pressures from all sides, domestic, international and personal.

Gill's most recent book, The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy that Never dies, was published by Oxford University Press in August 2018. In 1998, she was commissioned by then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to investigate this classic case of disinformation, with full access to British intelligence archives. Her new book brings the investigation up to date, and shows why a story of political dirty tricks in the 1920s is still relevant today. The Zinoviev Letter was listed in the Daily Telegraph as one of the History Books of the Year. See https://youtu.be/Y0oJvQ1HQWQ for a talk given by Gill about the book, at Google HQ.