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The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS),
more commonly known as MI6 (originally Military
Intelligence [section] 6), or Her Majesty's Secret Service or
just the Secret Service, is the British external security agency.
SIS has a remit to conduct espionage activities overseas, as
opposed to MI5 which is charged with internal security within
the United Kingdom. It was founded (along with MI5) as part of
the Secret Service Bureau in 1909. Its first director was Sir
Mansfield Smith-Cumming, who, often dropping the "Smith",
used his initial "C" as a codename which was also used
by all subsequent directors of SIS ("M" in the James
Bond stories).
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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 busted out and escape 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.
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End of Cold War - Present |
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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, the 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 (now Sir) 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.
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.
- Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming 1909 –1923
- Admiral Hugh Sinclair 1923 –1939
- Lt Col Stewart Menzies 1939 –1952
- Sir John Sinclair 1953 –1956
- Sir Richard 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 –
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