Laurence Grand

Laurence Douglas Grand (often misspelled as Lawrence) was a British military officer who served as the first head of Section D at the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) during World War II, and was one of the co-founders of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), alongside his childhood friend and counterpart John Charles Francis Holland. Even though Grand is largely responsible for the creation of SOE, he was forced out of the unit by its new director, Hugh Dalton. After the war, one of his former colleagues, Colin Gubbins, due to the jealousy of a forced retirement, took to creating a revisionist history by downplaying Grand's contributions to the war effort.

The Soviet double agent Kim Philby wrote in his posthumous memoir:

"The head of the section was Colonel Lawrence Grand, to whom I was introduced a few days after joining his staff. Tall and lean, he looked startlingly like the dream-figure who should have approached me in Germany or Spain. The difference was that his mind was certainly not clipped. It ranged free and handsome over the whole field of his awesome responsibilities, never shrinking from an idea, however big or wild."