Former MI6 spy joins Armor Group to hunt down new business

Andrew Fulton, a former top M16 spy, has joined Armor Group, the security personnel business that provides bodyguards in Iraq, in a role to bring in new business.

Mr Fulton, 62, is reckoned to have risen through the ranks of the Secret Intelligence Services to become Britain's sixth most powerful spy. He was head of station in Washington in his last posting, from 1995 to 1999.

Mr Fulton was catapulted involuntarily into the limelight in 2000 when, as a Glasgow university law professor, he was forced to step down as legal adviser to the Lockerbie Commission into the 1998 bombing of an airliner, when his MI6 career was revealed.

At the time his sister, who had no idea what Mr Fulton's real career had been, said: "He's no James Bond, he prefers playing golf."

Mr Fulton was recruited into the secret service while a law student at Glasgow University. In his first posting he was sent to Siagon in 1969. He was in East Berlin at the height of the Cold War in the late 1970s. He was part of the British delegation to the United Nations from 1989 to 1992.

In 1999, he was among 116 MI6 agents and officers named on the internet by Mr Tomlinson.

Mr Fulton was appointed chairman of a leading firm of corporate investigators, GPW, earlier this year.

In his role at Armor Group, which is chaired by Tory grandee Malcolm Rifkind, Mr Fulton will have "a mandate to focus on developing new business opportunities in the security consulting market". In a press release, he is described by Armor simply as a "former senior diplomat".

In an unrelated spy connection, Armor's chief operating officer stepped down earlier this year in order to return to the CIA to become its deputy director-general. Steven Kappes had joined Armor just six months earlier from the CIA, where he had been director of operations.

Armor provides protective security, training and weapons reduction and mine clearance services to national governments, inter-governmental organisations and multinational corporations.

The company says it "operates principally in regions of the world with diminished law and order or with a high risk of terrorism, or which were former areas of conflict including the Middle East, Africa, South America, the CIS and Asia".

Armor Group is based in London and employs over 9,000 personnel in 45 countries, with operations across Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa.