In a career that took him to some of the more interesting troublespots in which the British Army was involved in “peace time” — ranging from the Cold War in Europe to trouble on its own doorstep — Harry Baxter served in Palestine in the last years of the British Mandate; was active in liaison during the Greek civil war; won a George Medal in Northern Ireland; was involved in a most ingenious hush-hush deception of the Soviet Union in Berlin; and then returned to Northern Ireland to command the Ulster Defence Regiment in the 1970s.

All this was the more remarkable in that he had lost the sight of one eye in a shooting accident in childhood, and was turned down for a commission in the British Army during the Second World War. Undaunted, he applied to enlist in the Indian Army.

There he successfully repeated the ploy that had failed him at the British army medical — namely when told to “cover the other eye” merely changing hands over his blind eye. The ruse was subsequently spotted, but the Indian Army, mindful that so many conscripts were trying to cheat their way out of service, rather than vice versa, relented and allowed its acceptance of him to stand.

Harry Baxter was born in Folkestone in 1921 and educated at Churcher’s College, Hampshire, from where, in 1940, he turned down a proffered scholarship to Oxford to try to join up. His father and grandfather had both served in the family regiment, the Royal Irish Fusiliers, but with his sight, his route into their ranks was necessarily circuitous.

It was only later, when serving with the Indian Army in wartime Burma, that he was offered a commission in the regiment, effective from the end of the war. He joined its 2nd Battalion in Palestine in 1947.

Fluent Greek, acquired from his Greek mother whom his father had met in the Middle East at the end of the First World War, came into play after the end of the British Mandate. With the brutal Greek civil war being fought to a finish between government forces and communist ELAS guerrillas, he was sent to liaise with the Greek Army in the mountains. There he made many contacts who were to prove useful to him when he returned to Athens 20 years later as British defence attaché.

In 1952 he was summoned to Malaya where the colonel of his regiment, General Sir Gerald Templer, had recently arrived to combine the posts of High Commissioner and director of operations in the battle against the communist insurgency that had been in progress since 1948. During the period in which Templer’s celebrated “hearts and minds” policy began to bear fruit with the local populace, Baxter served for a year with the 1st Battalion Malay Regiment. After attending the Staff College Camberley in 1954 he was to return to Malaya for a tour on the staff, and was mentioned in dispatches.

In 1957 he returned to the UK to take command of his regiment’s depot in Armagh. There he won the George Medal for removing an IRA bomb which had been discovered beside the wall of a room in which a number of service families were meeting.

There was no safe exit via which any of these men and their wives could have left the building before the bomb could be attended to, so Baxter simply picked up the device, took it to his car and sat with it on his knee as he was driven away from the building by his adjutant, Captain Hal Chevasse. The pair took the bomb to a nearby field where it was detonated.

An appointment in 1966 as principal staff officer to the British Commandant in Berlin propelled him into the front line of the Cold War as it was constantly being silently waged in and around the city. On April 6 that year, a top-secret supersonic Soviet all-weather fighter, a Yak28 Firebar, crashed into the Havelsee, going to the bottom in the part of the lake that lay in the British sector of Berlin.

The Yak was known to be equipped with an advanced lookdown, shoot-down radar which the British and Americans were dying to examine. Under the noses of the Soviet forces, and while they apologised profusely for the “difficulty” involved in getting the two dead aircrew from their cockpit, the British military team in Berlin mounted an operation to remove the cockpit radar display, nose radar cone, and for good measure the engines, under water.

Brought surreptitiously to the surface, the parts were then got ashore, flown to the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farn-borough, for a thorough analysis and returned to the wreck site within 48 hours. The wreckage of the aircraft was then brought to the surface, the delay in its recovery being explained away by the difficulty in extracting the plane from deep mud. It was one of the most audacious and satisfying Cold War espionage coups of its kind. Baxter was appointed OBE for his efforts.

After a period as defence and military attaché in Athens during the difficult time of the junta — when his Greek nevertheless stood him in good stead — in 1973 Baxter was given command of the Ulster Defence Regiment.

To take on the leadership of this newest regiment in the British Army, which, though it drew membership from both communities, was strongly identified with the Protestant and Unionist one, was a great challenge, but one he relished. A Roman Catholic himself, he sought to recruit throughout Northern Ireland and to increase the regiment’s impartiality and effectiveness. He was instrumental in the inauguration of its female “Greenfinch” element, whose assumption of clerical and signals duties freed up more men for patrols.

He was appointed CBE on retirement in 1976, but continued to serve the UDR for another ten years, becoming its colonel commandant. Living in Co Down, he was also security director of the Northern Ireland Electricity Service. In retirement he fished, painted and was a keen birdwatcher.

He is survived by his wife Anne and by four sons.

Brigadier Harry Baxter, CBE, GM, commander Ulster Defence Regiment, 1973-76, was born on April 8, 1921. He died on January 10, 2007, aged 85