By John Donovan
Some corporate connections have to be inferred from board minutes, company filings and careful cross-referencing. Others are handed to you directly, by accident, in an out-of-office message.
This is the story of one such message.
A test email, and an unexpected answer
On 12 April 2011, I sent a one-line test email to Ian McCredie, then recently departed from Shell, simply to check whether his corporate address still worked:
From: John Donovan ([email protected]) To: [email protected] Subject: Test Date: 12 April 2011 at 21:19
Test to see if email address operational
One minute later, an automated reply came back — and it answered a different question than the one I’d asked:
From: [email protected] Subject: Out of Office AutoReply: Test Date: 12 April 2011 at 21:20
I retired from Shell on 31 Dec 2010 but can be contacted on [email protected] or +44 (0) 20 7491 5213.
Nico den Boer will be acting Vice President for Corporate Security until my successor assumes the role.
Two things stand out. First, the reply itself confirms McCredie’s Shell role: it comes from a working Shell.com mailbox, and names the person taking over his responsibilities as “acting Vice President for Corporate Security” — establishing that McCredie himself had held that position, or one equivalent to it, before his retirement on 31 December 2010. Second, and more strikingly, Shell’s own systems were still routing enquiries for its former head of corporate security straight to a hakluyt.co.uk email address and a Hakluyt telephone number — four months after he’d left the company.
The title itself is not in doubt. McCredie’s own professional biography, submitted for a 2012 industry conference — the Oil & Gas Critical Infrastructure & Asset Security Forum — states in his own words: “2004 – 2011 VP Corporate Security for Royal Dutch Shell. Accountable to the CEO for security risk management and resilience for Shell’s operations, personnel, assets, merchant fleet, confidential information and reputation in 110 countries.” The same bio sets out his earlier career: UK Foreign Service from 1975 to 2004, including five years in Washington DC as “senior coordinator between UK & US intelligence agencies,” with postings in London as head of intelligence assessments for the Middle East and head of the Iran Task Force. This is not an allegation about McCredie’s background — it is how he described himself, publicly, for a professional audience.
None of this rests on inference, a leaked document, or a secondary source repeating an allegation. It’s a corporate auto-reply, generated by Shell’s own mail server, pointing a journalist directly at Hakluyt & Company — corroborated by the subject’s own published account of the job he’d just left.
Confirmation, six years later
The connection didn’t fade with time. In 2017, while researching the Nigerian OPL 245 (Malabu) scandal — in which Shell and ENI were accused of channelling hundreds of millions of dollars toward a bribery scheme — I found McCredie’s name surfacing again, this time in reporting on Shell’s use of former British intelligence officers to gather commercial intelligence during the OPL 245 negotiations.
That reporting named a body referred to as the Shell Intelligence Network Committee, said to have been “set up by Ian McCredie,” alongside other former MI6 officers including Guy Colegate and John Copleston. I later obtained a 22-page confidential 2009 document — internally titled SINC, for Security Information Network Centre — showing the committee’s involvement in Shell security operations in Nigeria, including monitoring of activists linked to the late Ken Saro-Wiwa and MOSOP.
On 8 March 2017, I emailed McCredie again — this time at the Hakluyt address his 2011 auto-reply had given me — offering him the chance to comment on a draft article before publication:
From: John Donovan To: [email protected] Subject: SHELL OPL 245 STORY Date: 8 March 2017 at 22:49
Dear Mr McCredie,
Reference my earlier email, I have supplied below the draft article I mentioned. If I do not receive a response by 11am UK time tomorrow, 9 March, I will assume that the content is all factually accurate as far as you are concerned…
The email was not returned as undelivered. Six years after his out-of-office message first pointed me to Hakluyt, the address was still live.
What this does and doesn’t prove
It’s worth being precise about what this correspondence establishes and what it doesn’t.
Established directly, by primary-source evidence:
- Ian McCredie was Shell’s VP Corporate Security from 2004 to 2011 — confirmed both by his own auto-reply’s reference to a successor “Vice President for Corporate Security,” and independently by his own published conference biography, which states the title and dates without ambiguity.
- Immediately upon leaving Shell, correspondence directed to him was routed through a Hakluyt & Company email address and phone number — a direct, contemporaneous professional link between Shell’s outgoing head of corporate security and the private intelligence firm.
- That Hakluyt connection remained active at least as late as March 2017.
Not established by this correspondence, and not claimed here:
- Whether McCredie held any formal position, directorship, or board seat at Hakluyt & Company. No public record has been located that confirms this, and it should not be inferred from the auto-reply alone.
- Any wrongdoing on McCredie’s part. His involvement in Nigeria-related intelligence work, as described in third-party reporting, is presented there without any suggestion of impropriety, and nothing here changes that.
Separately, and outside the scope of this email correspondence, McCredie has been described elsewhere in print — in a 2015 New York Times piece about his wife, the writer Katherine Heiny — as a former intelligence figure who had once been under threat from the KGB. That is a background detail from an unrelated feature article, not evidence of the Shell–Hakluyt relationship, but it’s consistent with the broader picture of a career intelligence professional moving between government service, Shell’s corporate security apparatus, and a firm — Hakluyt — founded by former MI6 officers and repeatedly linked to Shell at board level.
That board-level link is itself independently documented, separately from anything involving McCredie. The trade publication Intelligence Online (Issue no. 473, 25 March 2004, “London the Oil Intelligence Cap”) reported that Sir William Purves — Hakluyt’s boss — sat on the board of Shell Transport & Trading, while Sir Peter Holmes, Shell T&T’s chairman for nearly ten years, chaired Hakluyt’s Foundation until 2002. That account, independent of and earlier than the Wikipedia and Powerbase material already cited elsewhere on this site, corroborates the same overlap from a different angle: a specialist intelligence-industry publication naming both men in the same roles, in the same year the overlap was current.
The pattern
Taken on its own, one auto-reply is a small thing. Taken alongside the documented board-level overlaps between Shell and Hakluyt, and alongside reporting that places McCredie at the centre of Shell’s Nigeria-era intelligence-gathering committee, it’s another data point in a consistent pattern: the line between Shell’s internal corporate security function and Hakluyt’s outside “strategic advisory” work has, at multiple points and multiple levels, been thinner than either company’s public presentation would suggest.
Email correspondence quoted above is drawn from the author’s personal records.
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