Richard B. Tinsley

Richard Bolton Tinsley CBE (14 November 1875 – 3 July 1944) was a British secret agent and station chief of MI6 in Rotterdam during World War I.

A gunnery officer in the Royal Naval Reserve, Tinsley had come to Rotterdam in 1909 as a maritime agent of the Cunard Line, but soon changed jobs. In 1910 he became manager of the Rotterdam branch of the Canadian owned Uranium Steamship Company. The company specialised in cheap transatlantic passages for mostly impoverished East European, often Jewish, emigrants.

In March 1911, Tinsley created an affair that became known as the "Nieuwe Waterweg Incident". When fifty Jewish Russian emigrants returned from a failed attempt to enter the United States, they were refused transit visas by Germany, possibly out of fear of illegal emigration. The Rotterdam police forbade the passengers to disembark from the Uranium's SS Volturno as long as it was not clear where they wanted to go next. Tinsley ignored the police's embargo and on 23 February he tried to put the Russians on shore illegally with the assistance of two hired tugboats. Tinsley's plot was thwarted by the Rotterdam river police. As a result of this action, Tinsley was charged with endangering public order. On 28 February, he was declared an "unwanted alien" by royal decree. He was ordered to leave the Netherlands. This was the first time since the creation of the Dutch Alien Act in 1849 that it had been used to expel a foreigner. It created quite a stir and was picked up in England by The Times, who on 15 May published an article titled "The Case of Mr Tinsley".

When World War I broke out, the British government requisitioned the Uranium's ships for troop transport. Tinsley turned the Rotterdam office of the Uranium Steamship Co. into a front company for the Foreign Section of the Secret Service Bureau, nowadays SIS (MI6), under command of Mansfield Smith-Cumming or C. Tinsley would operate under the codename T.

During the First World War Tinsley developed into the most successful Allied station chief of the war. Because of his good relations with the Dutch authorities, represented by police inspector François van 't Sant, he was granted freedom to operate (within the law) in return for the sharing of intelligence on the Germans. Tinsley ran Britain's most important spy in Germany, Karl Krüger alias TR16 (Tinsley Rotterdam nr. 16). Through various Belgian resistance groups, of which La Dame Blanche was most important, Tinsley gained good knowledge of German troop movements behind the Western Front. In 1919 he was appointed a CBE.

Tinsley, arguably the most successful British spy master of the Great War, continued to spy on Germany until 1923, when the SIS considered him redundant and he was retired. The Uranium shipping company was taken over by Cunard Lines but Tinsley kept working in Rotterdam as a shipping agent for the Royal Mail Line. He left Holland in 1928 for Britain. Tinsley died in 1944 while on a sales trip in Scotland.