Secret Intelligence Service
The
Secret Intelligence Service (
SIS), more commonly known as
MI6 (originally Military Intelligence Section 6), or the
Secret Service or simply
Six, is the
United Kingdom's external security agency. Insiders sometimes refer to it as
box 850 which comes from its old postal box number.
SIS is responsible for the United Kingdom's
espionage activities overseas, as opposed to
MI5 which is charged with internal security within the UK. It was founded in October
1909 (along with MI5) as the Foreign Section of the
Secret Service Bureau. Its first director was Captain Sir George
Mansfield Smith-Cumming, who, often dropping the "Smith", used his initial "C" as a
code name which was also used by all subsequent directors of SIS (compare with "
M" in
Ian Fleming's
James Bond novels).
The organisation's first significant test came with the
First World War, during which it had mixed success. SIS was unable to penetrate
Germany itself, but had some significant successes in military and commercial intelligence; this was achieved mostly by means of agent networks in neutral countries, occupied territories, and
Russia.
After the war, SIS resources were greatly reduced and its consumers such as the
War Office and
Admiralty, were given partial control of its operational activities through the appointment of consumer liaisons or 'Circulating' sections. The Circulating Sections set requirements for the operational 'Group' sections and passed SIS product back to their home departments. This relationship was termed the '1921 arrangement' and provided the basic internal structure of the agency that still prevails today.
During the 1920s it began to operate mainly through a system of sometimes grudging cooperation with the diplomatic service. Most embassies acquired a "Passport Control Officer" who was in fact the SIS head for that country. This gave SIS's operatives a degree of cover and
diplomatic immunity, but the system probably lasted too long and was an open secret by the 1930s. In the immediate post-war years and throughout most of the
1920s, SIS was preoccupied with
Communism, and Communist Russia in particular.
Sidney Reilly was loosely associated with SIS until his capture, and SIS sponsored and supported both his and
Boris Savinkov's attempts to bring down the Communist regime, in addition to running more orthodox espionage efforts within Russia.
Cumming died (in his office) in
1923 and was replaced as "C" by Admiral Sir
Hugh 'Quex' Sinclair, who may have lacked the charisma of his predecessor, but was probably the first C with a coherent vision for the future of the agency. Under his leadership, a wide range of new functions were developed. These included a central foreign counter-espionage Circulating Section (Section V) which liaised with MI5, collated
counter-espionage (CE) information from, and issued CE requirements to, SIS stations abroad; an economic intelligence section dealing with trade, industrial and contraband (Section VII); a clandestine short-wave radio communications organisation for communicating by radio with SIS informants in foreign countries (Section VIII), an intercept unit accessing and reading the contents of foreign diplomatic bags (Section N) and a sub-organisation for political covert actions and
paramilitary operations in time of war, Section D. Section D would eventually serve as one of the foundations of the wartime
Special Operations Executive (SOE).
Along with the rest of the intelligence community and the wider government, SIS switched focus in the
1930s to
Nazi Germany. Again its success was rather modest; although it did acquire several quite reliable sources within the Government and also the German Admiralty, its information was probably less comprehensive than that provided by the rival network of
Robert Vansittart, the permanent undersecretary at the
Foreign Office.
'Quex' Sinclair died in 1939 and was replaced as "C" by Lt. Col.
Stewart Menzies.
During the
Second World War, SIS was overshadowed in intelligence terms by several other initiatives, including the massive
cryptanalytic effort undertaken by the
Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), the bureau responsible for interception and decryption of foreign communications at
Bletchley Park; the extensive "double-cross" system run by
MI5 to feed misleading intelligence to the
Germans; and the work of the
Photographic Reconnaissance Unit. It was also affected by the inflammatory activities of the
Special Operations Executive, which tended to increase the danger to its own agents. Its most famous operation of the war was a spectacular failure known as the
Venlo incident (after the
Dutch town where much of the action took place), in which SIS was thoroughly duped by agents of the German secret service, the
Abwehr, posing as high-ranking Army officers involved in a plot to depose
Hitler. In a series of meetings between SIS agents and the 'conspirators',
SS plans to abduct the SIS team were shelved due to the presence of Dutch police. When a meeting took place without police presence, two SIS agents were duly abducted by the SS. This failure considerably tarnished the service's reputation.
During the Second World War SIS first began to be referred to as 'MI6' when, under a reorganization of military intelligence at the War Office, the War Office circulating section acquired the military designation MI6 (within SIS it was termed Section VI). Despite difficulties at the outset of the war, SIS recovered and began to run substantial and successful operations both in the occupied Continent and in the Middle East and Far East where it operated under the cover name 'Interservice Liaison Department' (ISLD). One of SIS' main functions throughout the war was to operate the secure wireless system that carried the
ULTRA intercepts of Axis
Enigma communications broken by the
Government Codes and Cipher School (GC&CS).
In
1946 SIS absorbed the 'rump' remnant of the
Special Operations Executive (SOE), dispersing the latter's personnel and equipment between its operational divisions or 'controllerates' and new Directorates for Training and Development and for War Planning. The
1921 arrangement was streamlined with the geographical, operational units redesignated 'Production Sections', sorted regionally under Controllers, all under a Director of Production. The Circulating Sections were renamed 'Requirements Sections' and placed under a Directorate of Requirements.
SIS operations against the
USSR were extensively compromised by the fact that the post-war Counter-Espionage Section, R5, was headed for two years by the penetration agent
Harold Adrian Russell 'Kim' Philby. Although Philby's damage was mitigated for several years by his transfer as Head of Station in
Turkey, he later returned and was the SIS intelligence liaison officer at the Embassy in
Washington DC. In this capacity he compromised a programme of joint US-UK paramilitary operations in
Enver Hoxha's
Albania (although it has been shown that these operations were further compromised 'on the ground' by poor security discipline amongst the Albanian
émigrés recruited to undertake the operations). Philby was eased out of office and quietly retired in
1953 after the defection of his friends and fellow members of the '
Cambridge spy ring'
Donald Duart Maclean and
Guy Burgess.
SIS suffered further embarrassment when it turned out that an officer involved in both the
Vienna and
Berlin tunnel operations had been turned as a Soviet agent during internment by the
Chinese during the
Korean War. This agent,
George Blake, returned from his internment to be treated as something of a hero by his contemporaries in 'the office'. His security authorisation was restored, and in
1953 he was posted to the Vienna Station where the original Vienna tunnels had been running for years. After compromising these to his Soviet controllers, he was subsequently assigned to the British team involved on
Operation Gold, the Berlin tunnel, and which was, consequently, blown from the outset. Blake was eventually identified, arrested and faced trial in court for espionage and was sent to prison - only to be liberated and extracted to the USSR in
1964.
Despite these setbacks, SIS began to recover in the early
1960s as a result of improved vetting and security, and a series of successful penetrations, one of the Polish security establishment codenamed NODDY and the other the
GRU Colonel
Oleg Penkovsky. Penkovsky ran for two years as a considerable success, providing several thousand photographed documents, including
Red Army rocketry manuals that allowed US National Photographic Interpretation Centre (NPIC) analysts to recognise the deployment pattern of Soviet SS4
MRBMs and SS5
IRBMs in
Cuba in
October 1962. SIS operations against the USSR continued to gain pace through the remainder of the
Cold War, arguably peaking with the recruitment in the 1970s of
Oleg Gordievsky whom SIS ran for the better part of a decade then successfully exfiltrated from the USSR across the
Finnish border in 1985. The real scale and impact of SIS activities during the second half of the Cold War remains unknown, however, because the bulk of their most successful targeting operations against Soviet officials were the result of 'Third Country' operations recruiting Soviet sources travelling abroad in
Asia and
Africa. These included the defection to the SIS'
Tehran Station in 1982 of KGB officer
Vladimir Kuzichkin, the son of a senior
Politburo member and a member of the
KGB's internal Second Chief Directorate who provided SIS and the British government with warning of the mobilisation of the KGB's Alpha Force during the
1991 August Coup which, briefly, toppled Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev.
SIS activities allegedly included a range of covert political action successes, including the overthrow of
Mohammed Mossadeq in
Iran in 1953 (in collaboration with the US
Central Intelligence Agency), the again collaborative toppling of
Patrice Lumumba in the
Congo in
1961, and the triggering of an internal conflict between
Lebanese paramilitary groups in the second half of the
1980s that effectively distracted them from further hostage takings of Westerners in the region.
A number of "intelligence operatives" (
spies) have left SIS. Usually they have either found new employment in the civilian world or
defected to a friendly country. In the late 1990s, an SIS officer called
Richard Tomlinson was dismissed and later wrote a story of his experiences that was published in Russia by a publisher with links to the successor of the KGB, known as the SVR.
The end of the
Cold War represented less a wholesale change of SIS' operational orientation than a reshuffling of existing priorities. The Soviet Bloc ceased to swallow the lion's share of operational priorities, although the stability and intentions of a weakened but still nuclear-capable Federal Russia constituted a significant concern. Instead, functional rather than geographical intelligence requirements came to the fore such as counter-proliferation (via the agency's Production and Targeting, Counter-Proliferation Section) which had been a sphere of activity since the discovery of
Pakistani physics students studying nuclear-weapons related subjects in 1974; counter-terrorism (via two joint sections run in collaboration with the Security Service, one for
Irish republicanism and one for international terrorism); counter-narcotics and serious crime (originally set up under the
Western Hemisphere Controllerate in 1989); and a 'global issues' section looking at matters such as the environment and other public welfare issues. In the mid-1990s these were consolidated into a new post of Controller, Global and Functional.
During the transition, then-C Sir Collin McColl embraced something of a new, albeit limited, policy of openness towards the press and public, with 'public affairs' falling into the brief of Director, Counter-Intelligence and Security (renamed Director, Security and Public Affairs). McColl's policies were part and parcel with a wider 'open government initiative' developed from 1993 by the government of
John Major. As part of this, SIS' operations, and those of the national signals intelligence agency,
GCHQ were placed on a statutory footing through the 1994 Intelligence Services Act. Although the Act provided procedures for Authorisations and Warrants, this essentially enshrined mechanisms that had been in place at least since 1953 (for Authorisations) and 1985 (under the Interception of Communications Act, for warrants). Under this Act, since 1994, SIS and GCHQ activities have been subject to scrutiny by
Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee.
During the mid-1990s the British intelligence community was subjected to a comprehensive costing review by the Government, and as part of broader defence cut-backs SIS had its resources cut back 25% across the board and senior management was reduced by 40%. As a consequence of these cuts, the Requirements division (formerly the Circulating Sections of the 1921 Arrangement) were deprived of any representation on the Board of Directors. At the same time, the
Middle East and Africa Controllerates were pared back and amalgamated. According to the findings of Lord Butler of Brockwell's
Review of Weapons of Mass Destruction, the reduction of operational capabilities in the Middle East and the weakening of the Requirements division's ability to challenge the quality of the information the Middle East Controllerate was providing the Joint Intelligence Committee's estimates of
Iraq's nonconventional weapons programmes. These weaknesses were major contributors to the UK's erroneous assessments of Iraq's 'weapons of mass destruction' prior to the 2003 invasion of that country. Following September the 11th 2001, funding was increased.
On
May 6,
2004, it was announced that Sir
Richard Dearlove was to be replaced as head of the SIS after his retirement by
John Scarlett, formerly chairman of the
Joint Intelligence Committee. Scarlett is an unusually high profile appointment to the job, and a well known figure on television screens in the
United Kingdom due to his evidence at the
Hutton Inquiry. His predecessor, Sir
Richard Dearlove, is now Master of
Pembroke College, Cambridge and photographs of him are publicly available for the first time.
SIS headquarters, since 1995, is at 85,
Vauxhall Cross, along the
Albert Embankment in
Vauxhall on the banks of the
River Thames by
Vauxhall Bridge,
London. Previous headquarters have been Century House, 100 Westminster Bridge Road,
Lambeth, 1966-95; and 54, Broadway, off
Victoria Street,
London SW1, 1924-66. (Although SIS operated from Broadway, it was actually based at St. James's Street).
Designed by
Terry Farrell, the developer Regalian Properties plc approached the Government in 1987 to see if they had any interest in the proposed building. At the same time MI5 was seeking alternative accommodation and collocation of the two services was studied. In the end this proposal was abandoned due to the lack of buildings of adequate size (existing or proposed) and the security considerations of providing a single target for attacks. In July 1988 Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher approved the purchase of the new building for the SIS. At this stage the government proposed to pay for the building outright in order to maintain secrecy over the intended use of the site. It is important to note that at this time the existence of MI6 was not officially acknowledged.
The building design was reviewed to incorporate the necessary protection for Britain's foreign intelligence gathering agency. This includes overall increased security, extensive computer suites, technical areas, bomb blast protection, emergency back-up systems and protection against electronic eavesdropping. While the details and cost of construction have been released, about ten years after the original
National Audit Office report was written, some of the service's special requirements remain classified. The NAO report
Thames House and Vauxhall Cross has certain details omitted, describing in detail the cost and problems of certain modifications but not what these are. Rob Humprey's
London: The Rough Guide suggests one of these omitted modifications is a tunnel beneath the Thames to
Whitehall.
It has been commented that it is ironic for such a secretive organisation to occupy one of the most high-profile and distinctive buildings in London. The NAO put the final cost at £135.05m for site purchase and the basic building, or £152.6m including the service's special requirements.
The building was featured in the 1999
James Bond film
The World Is Not Enough. In the pre-credits sequence, Bond chases a suspect from the building up the Thames following the explosion of cash which was recovered and brought into the building by him. It is later revealed that the money was dipped in
urea, in effect a
fertiliser bomb. MI6 allowed exterior filming of the building for the first time (under protest, after the government said it had no objections) in tribute to the long-time popularity of the secret agent.
On the evening of
September 20,
2000, the building was attacked by a Russian-built Mark 22
anti-tank missile. Striking the eighth floor, the missile caused only superficial damage. The Anti-Terrorist branch of the
Metropolitan Police attributed responsibility to Irish Republicans, specifically the
Real IRA.
* Sir
Mansfield Smith-Cumming 1909–1923
* Sir
Hugh Sinclair 1923–1939
* Sir
Stewart Menzies 1939–1952
* Sir
John Sinclair 1953–1956
* Sir
Dick White 1956–1968
* Sir
John Rennie 1968–1973
* Sir
Maurice Oldfield 1973–1978
* Sir
Dick Franks 1979–1982
* Sir
Colin Figures 1982–1985
* Sir
Christopher Curwen 1985–1989
* Sir
Colin McColl 1989–1994
* Sir
David Spedding 1994–1999
* Sir
Richard Dearlove 1999–2004
*
John Scarlett 2004–present
*
British Military Intelligence Systems in Northern Ireland*
Special Operations Executive*
MI5*
GCHQ*
Alex Rider, fictional character
*
The Sandbaggers, fictional section
*
Richard Tomlinson*
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) - US
*
Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS)
*
Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS)
*
Communications Security Establishment (CSE) -
Canada's signals intelligence service (within the
Department of National Defence).
*Davies, Philip H.J. (2004).
MI6 and the Machinery of Spying London: Frank Cass, ISBN 9780714654577 (h/b)
*Davies, Philip H.J. (2005) 'The Machinery of Spying Breaks Down' in
Studies in Intelligence Summer 2005 Declassified Edition.
*Dorril, Stephen (2001)
MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations London: Fourth Estate, ISBN 1857027019
*Humphreys, Rob (1999)
London: The Rough Guide, Rough Guides, ISBN 185828404X
*Richard Tomlinson,
The Big Breach - From Top Secret to Maximum Security. Coauthor Nick Fielding, Mainstream Publishing (
1 February 2001) ISBN 1903813018
*
Official homepage*
Information about SIS from the
Foreign and Commonwealth Office's website
*
Entry for MI6 on the
Federation of American Scientists' Intelligence Resource Program
*
UK Secret Bases
