M.I.6

Pre-M.I.6 intelligence tended to be gathered from military attach s. It is reputed that one officer who had been stationed in Berlin declined to do so because such an action as being distasteful .

Both the Army and the Navy sought to acquire control of M.I.6. The Foreign & Commonwealth Office gave its backing to successive heads in their efforts to retaining their independence and ultimately the Office acquired control of the service.

M.I.6 is focussed on Britain's external security. Between the two World Wars the service was a small, clubby organisation that was run in an amateurish manner.

Initially, C did not even resources such as typewriter or a file cabinet. Within Whitehall, he was highly recognisable because of his monocle and wooden leg. Therefore, they moved to a residential area in West London.

C s privileges included being allowed to drive through Admiralty Arch. He used to drive his Rolls-Royce around London at high-speed hoping that the police would give chase.

C loved gadgetry and invisible ink.

The first head of M.I.6 was Manfield Smith-Cumming who was a naval commander. Within M.I.6 he was known as c. This became the appellation that his successors were also known by.

In 1924 the forged Zinoviev letter had its origin in M.I.6's Riga station.

In the late 1930s S.I.S. was less inclined towards Appeasement than the Foreign Office was, however, Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair accepted the policy on the pragmatic grounds that it bought Britain time in which to rearm.

In spring S.I.S. 1939 learned of the negotiations between the Soviets and the Nazis. The service found itself unable to believe that the two entities could align themselves to one another and so did not pass information about this development to the Foreign Office. In August the Pact was unveiled.

In 1939 Hugh Quex Sinclair's deputy, Colonel Stewart Menzies, succeeded him. This upset the Navy, which had come to believe that the post should have been awarded to a naval officer. Rear Admiral John Godfrey, the director of naval intelligence, and Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, the head of the navy, came to the view that the service should run its own intelligence service. They raised the matter with Winston Churchill, who had been the First Lord of the Admiralty.

At the war's start Ian Fleming had been appointed as Godfrey's assistant. His duties included liaising between the Navy and M.I.6. He was of the view that if the navy were given its own intelligence service then neither either it nor M.I.6 would have the resources with which to operate effectively. He succeeded in persuading his superiors that they should drop their demand and that there should be an infusion of new blood into M.I.6. This intake included both Kim Philby and John Cairncross.

Churchill authorised M.I.6 to inform the Americans that the Enigma code had been broken despite the fact that the United States was still neutral at the time.

In 1944 a Foreign Office report was issued under the name of the Sir Neville Bland. This stated that, after the war, S.I.S. should become a civilian governmental agency, that military should be seconded to it but should not lead it, and that it must avoid focusing solely on countering Communists, which might expose it to the risk of becoming right-wing.

Its experience of the Second World War left it with an institutional taste for covert operations rather than systematic information gathering. The absorption of S.O.E. led to M.I.6. having a buccaneering strand to its character. During the late 1950s a nucleus of professionalism developed within the service's Sovbloc section. As these individuals were promoted within M.I.6 so their attitudes came to pervade the rest of the organisation.

While stationed in Montevideo Stephen de Mowbray identified a Russian couple whom he thought might be K.G.B.. They disappeared.

In December 1961 Anatoliy Golitsyn defected to the c.I.A.. He furnished information that enabled Blunt and several other double-agents to be identified. He revealed that the K.G.B. received lists of illegals whom M.I.6 had identified or suspected. These could only be derived from a mole within the service. He discovered that two colleagues were trying to identify who it was.

In 1961 Anatoly Golitsyn defected to the West.

Dick White moderated the adventurist inclinations.

The service used to occupy a towerblock that was by the No. 159 bus route. Whenever one particular bus conductor's bus drew close to either of the two nearest bus stops, he was given to exclaiming loudly, Lambeth North. All spies alight here .

The intelligence work against the I.R.A. during the 1970s and 1980s was led by the police. S.I.S. did the overseas stuff.

In the early 1970s Philip Agee (1935-2007), a former CIA agent, settled in Cambridge. In 1975, in his book Inside The Company: c.I.A. Diary, he made public the Agency's support of oppressive, military regimes in Central America and South America. For a period he wrote for Time Out magazine. M.I.6 ascribed the murder of two of its agents in Poland to be the end result of information that Agee had exposed. The American government requested that he be deported. An attempt to do so was set in process by the British government which utilised an arcane legal process. A campaign was established to resist this development, it was also mounted in defence of Mark Hosenball, an American journalist who had antagonised the American government. In 1977 he was deported and spent a peripatetic period. Eventually, he settled in Germany, taking German citizenship, as well spending time in Cuba.

The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. This led to a revival of the gung-ho element within M.I.6.

In the 1980s M.I.6 used branded carrier bags as signalling devices. In 1985 the KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky concluded at risk of being exposed as a double agent. He contacted his Moscow-based M.I.6 controller by standing on a particular street corner at a particular time carrying a Safeway carrier bag. The British spy whom he met signalled his identity by carrying a Harrods carrier bag and eating a Mars bar. Subsequently, Gordievsky was successfully exfiltrated.

In 1993 the Cabinet decided that M.I.6 should be placed on a statutory footing. The move came in the wake of the alleged bugging of private telephone conversations that had been made by the Prince and Princess of Wales. It had not been long before this that the government had acknowledged that M.I.6 even existed.

The service's Vauxhall Cross (1998) building was designed by the architect Sir Terry Farrell. It is reputed that some of those who work within the edifice refer to it as Legoland .

In 1992 the government acknowledged that M.I.6 existed,

In 2009 Sir John Sawers was appointed to succeed John Scarlett as the head of M.I.6. A D-notice was circulated to media editors that asked them to be discreet about publishing any personal details that might assist terrorists or hostile organisations to identity a target. However, in parallel, Lady Sawyer was uploading a series of family photographs onto her Facebook page. These included her husband playing with a frisbee on a beach. The material was freely available for inspection by at least 200m people. This became a story in media. The response of the Foreign Secretary David Miliband was It's not a state secret that he wears Speedo swimming trunks.

Scarlett gave an interview in which he disclosed that the service's head was still known as C and that as such he had maintained the tradition of writing hand written notes with green ink.

In 2021 M.I.6 declared that its ban on gay staff up until 1991 had been misguided .

Location: Vauxhall Cross, 85 Albert Embankment, SE1 7TP (purple, yellow)

54 Broadway, SW1H 0BL. The headquarters of the secret intelligence service in the 1930s through to the 1960s. (blue, orange)

Whitehall Court, SW1A 2EJ. M.I.6's initial home. (red, blue)

George Blake

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Blake was born in Rotterdam to a Dutch mother and Egyptian Jewish father who had acquired British citizenship. He arrived in Britain in 1943. He joined the Royal Navy. The following year he joined M.I.6.

Following the war Blake served in naval intelligence in Hamburg. He was sent to Korea. From 1950 to 1953 he had been a prisoner of the North Koreans. He underwent an ideological conversion to believing in Communism. In 1955 he returned to Europe and ran bugging operation against Soviet embassies. From his base in Berlin he was able to garner information. His value to the K.G.B. was so high that it was prepared to tolerate operations that were against it. His actions led to the deaths of at least 40 British agents in Eastern Europe.

In April 1961 the Polish defector Michael Goleniewski (1922-1993) revealed that Blake was working for the K.G.B.. Blake was recalled to London from the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies in Beirut. He was interrogated in the M.I.6 building that stood opposite the Foreign Secretary's residence in Carlton Gardens.

Blake regarded his trial as having been fair.

At the urging of Harold Macmillan, Lord Chief Justice Lord Parker handed out consecutive sentences rather than concurrent ones.

In Wormwood Scrubs Blake came to know Michael Randle, a peace campaigner. Randle was not a Communist but regarded Blake's sentence as being unnecessarily punitive. He arranged Blake's escape from the prison and then smuggled him out of the country.

Blake hid out in Willow Road before escaping overseas.

In 1991 Michael Randle and his wife tried at the Old Bailey. They were acquitted.

In exile Blake continued to be an Anglophile. He was graetful that when relatives visited him from Britain or The Netherlands they were not harrassed by the security services upon their return to the West.

Location: Willow Road, NW3 1TJ

The Hothouse

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In 1944 Muriel Spark moved to London from Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). She found work in the Foreign Office s intelligence section. She became well-known as a writer following the publication of her sixth novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). She fictionalised her period with M.I.6 in The Hothouse By The East River (1973).

Arthur Ransome

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During the period 1914-24 Arthur Ransome worked in Russia. He was a M.I.6 agent, his codename was S76. He was trusted by no one; the War Office was of the view that he was a traitor, while Trotsky was prepared to view him as being a British spy. The service's papers on Ransome were released in 2005.

In 1917 Sir William Wiseman of the Secret Intelligence Service (later M.I.6) asked Somerset Maugham to try to keep Alexander Kerensky's provisional, post-Tsarist Russian government in power. Lots of money with but too late. It came to be appreciated that the provisional government was doomed. It was realised that the Bolsheviks would probably achieve power.

Rasputin s murder: Oswald Reyner worked with Yuspitov, with whom he had been a student at the University of Oxford. Rasputin's autopsy report reveals that the bullet that he was finally dispatched with was delivered by a Webley-Scott pistol.

Arthur Ransome had known idealistic aspect to his character. He sympathised with aspects of the Revolution, therefore, he was regarded with suspicion by M.I.6. However, his lover Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina was Trotsky's secretary. The Bolsheviks achieved power.

The S.I.S. continued to regard Ransome with deep suspicion. Whenever he was back in Britain he was tailed, his calls were listened into, etc.. C had to ask the Service to desist from this heavy surveillance. Ransome turned against the Revolution. London learnt everything that went across Trotsky's desk.

Sidney Reilly was a quadrilingual arms dealer who had made 2m. A master of disguise, however, he was over-ambitious and concocted a plot for members of the Latvian Rifle Division to assassinate the Bolshevik leadership (he may have been lured into this scheme by Soviet counter-espionage). He was the only one of S.I.S.'s spies who was executed by the Soviets. It was the White Russian couriers who had the highest attrition rate.

Robert Bruce Lockhart was sent to Moscow to run an informal communication line between the Soviets and Britain. However, he was inclined to involve himself in espionage and a susceptibility to beautiful women. He made the mistake of involving himself in Reilly's anti-Lenin plot and fell out of favour with the Soviets.¹

Following the Archangel landings Britons were extracted swiftly. It was Bruce Lockhart who applied pressure on London to ensure that Shelepina was able to leave.

Paul Dukes was the only spy to be knighted for services to espionage. He operated under four different identities (Reilly had only three). He went quiet. Augustus Agar had had a very war in the Great War. He had commanded a force of high-speed skimmer boats. C sent him on a rescue mission into Petrograd to rescue Dukes. Dukes sent information that there was a subsea minefield that had been set so that its top rested a metre below the water. The skimmers hulls went 2ft. 9in. down.

Thanya assassination attempt upon Lenin failed through poor timing. Geshinki, Trotsky, and Lenin responded by unleashing the Red Revolution against anyone whom they suspect might oppose the revolution. Hill and Reilly left.

Website: https://arthur-ransome.org (The Arthur Ransome Society)

¹. Lockhart's mistresses included Moura Budberg.

Greville Wynne

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Greville Wynne was an engineer and trade negotiator. In 1961, while dining in a Moscow restaurant, he was approached by Colonel Oleg Penkovsky of the G.R.U., who wished to convey Soviet secrets to the West but who had already been rebuffed by both the Canadians and the Americans.

Wynne s S.I.S. handler was Dick Franks (1920-2008).

In 1963 Penkovsky and Wynne were tried. The former was executed and the latter given an eight-year prison sentence. The following year he was exchanged for Gordon Lonsdale (n Konon Molody).

David Backhouse 2024