Education
Curwen was educated at Sherborne School and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge after which he was commissioned into the 4th Queen"s Own Hussars in 1948, serving in Malaya.
Curwen was educated at Sherborne School and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge after which he was commissioned into the 4th Queen"s Own Hussars in 1948, serving in Malaya.
He joined SIS in 1952 and was posted to Thailand in 1954 and Vientiane, Laos in 1956. He returned to the service"s London headquarters in 1958, had another spell in Bangkok from 1961 and then two years in Kuala Lumpur. Curwen spent three years as SIS liaison officer in Washington District of Columbia from 1968 and was then head of station in Geneva.
He was deputy to Sir Colin Figures from 1980 and succeeded him as Chief of the Service in 1985.
His tenure was notable for the successful exfiltration from Moscow of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) officer and British agent Oleg Gordievsky.