In real life Bill Fairclough was an intelligence agent or spook and was the author of Beyond Enkription, the first of six fact based autobiographical spy novels forming The Burlington Files series.

Bill lived a remarkable maverick double existence throughout much of his career. Covertly he specialised in infiltration and investigatory assignments while working for intelligence agencies including MI5, MI6, the CIA and Faire Sans Dire (see later). Overtly, he was a British Chartered Accountant and became a director of several well-known businesses in the regulated international financial services sector. Before that, he worked as an accountant at Coopers & Lybrand (now PricewaterhouseCoopers) for 14 years until 1983.

He was born in England in 1950. In the early seventies Bill qualified as a Chartered Accountant and unwittingly started working for MI5 and MI6. In 1978 he, along with Colonel Alan Pemberton CVO MBE and Barrie Parkes BEM from British Intelligence, co-founded a niche global intelligence agency known as “Faire Sans Dire”. Since then that organisation has operated under many guises, as has the author.

Apart from running Faire Sans Dire for over forty years, Bill has also worked as a bean counter in both practice and industry. During his career he has been a director and executive of several renowned international businesses (in the Barclays Bank Group, the Reuters Group and Citigroup). He’s trod on the tails of many fat cats and investigated and despatched some household name villains over the decades.

For more information about Bill Fairclough please visit the websites etc referred to below and check out Wikipedia for any relevant articles:

Some of Bill's published biographies et al: TheBurlingtonFiles website https://theburlingtonfiles.org/#/the-..., WikiTree https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Fairclo..., WikiSpooks https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Bill_Fair... and https://wikispooks.com/wiki/User:Doub..., LinkedIn http://uk.linkedin.com/in/billfairclough, Instagram photographs https://www.instagram.com/fairclough_...

Background material on The Burlington Files: http://www.theburlingtonfiles.org, https://everipedia.org/wiki/the-burli..., https://everipedia.org/wiki/edward-bu..., https://everipedia.org/wiki/beyond-en...

POSTSCRIPT

PwC, MI6 and Bill Fairclough – an extraordinary disclosure

An intriguing and unusual revelation has emerged about PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), MI6 and Bill Fairclough, who was an employee of Coopers & Lybrand (now PwC) from 1969 to 1983. According to PwC’s own “Subject Access Request Disclosure Bundle” (GDPR SAR 25:84, dated 14 October 2025), issued under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) in response to a Subject Access Request dated 1 October 2025, PwC disclosed and confirmed that:

In May 2022 PwC had requested Bill Fairclough to submit his memoirs for inclusion in a PwC publication. However, in May 2024 PwC decided not to publish them and stated for the record that:
(a) he was a "career spy"; and
(b) his dual career as both a covert intelligence agent (spy) and a PwC employee was so notable that publication of his memoirs by PwC might cause reputational damage to PwC.

Even John le Carré (who was an MI6 employee as opposed to an agent) never had such independent confirmation of his MI6 connection from a globally recognised institution. It is of course an unbroken convention that, apart from the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, commonly referred to simply as “C”, MI6 never confirm or deny who worked for them whether as an employee or an agent.

See https://theburlingtonfiles.org/news_2....