Foundation The service derived from the Secret Service Bureau, which was founded on 1 October 1909. Its first director was
Captain Sir Mansfield George Smith-Cumming, who often dropped the
Smith in routine communication. He typically signed correspondence with his initial
C in green ink. This usage evolved as a
code name, and has been adhered to by all subsequent directors of SIS when signing documents to retain anonymity.
First World War The service's performance during the
First World War was mixed, because it was unable to establish a network in Germany itself. Most of its results came from military and commercial intelligence collected through networks in neutral countries, occupied territories, and Russia. During the war, MI6 had its main European office in
Rotterdam from where it coordinated espionage in Germany and occupied Belgium. A crucial element in the war effort from the British perspective was the involvement of Russia, which kept millions of German soldiers that would otherwise be deployed on the Western Front, engaged on the Eastern Front. On 7 November 1917 the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin overthrew the Provisional government in Petrograd and signed an armistice with Germany. The main objective for the British was to keep Russia in the war, and MI6's two chosen instruments for doing so were
Sidney Reilly, who despite his Irish name was a Russian-Jewish adventurer, and
George Alexander Hill, a British pilot and businessman. Officially, Reilly's mandate was to collect intelligence about the new regime in Russia and find a way to keep Russia in the war, but Reilly soon became involved in a plot to overthrow the Bolsheviks.
Inter-war period , SIS headquarters from 1924 until 1964 After the war, resources were significantly reduced but during the 1920s, SIS established a close operational relationship with the diplomatic service. In August 1919, Cumming created the new passport control department, providing diplomatic cover for agents abroad. The post of
Passport Control Officer provided operatives with
diplomatic immunity. Circulating Sections established intelligence requirements and passed the intelligence back to its consumer departments, mainly the
War Office and
Admiralty. Recruitment and the training of spies in the interwar period was quite casual. Cumming referred to espionage as a "capital sport", and expected his agents to learn the "tradecraft" of espionage while on their missions instead of before being dispatched on their missions. One MI6 agent Leslie Nicholson recalled about his first assignment in Prague: "nobody gave me any tips on how to be a spy, how to make contact with, and worm vital information out of unsuspecting experts". It was not until the Second World War that the "methodical training" of agents that has been the hallmark of British intelligence started. A number of MI6 agents – like MI5 agents – were former colonial police officers while MI6 displayed a strong bias against recruiting men with university degrees as universities were considered within MI6 to be bastions of "effete intellectualism".
Claude Dansey, who served as the MI6 Deputy Chief in World War II wrote: "I would never willing employ an university man. I have less fear of Bolshies and Fascists than I have of some pedantic, but vocal university professor". The debate over the future structure of British Intelligence continued at length after the end of hostilities but
Cumming managed to engineer the return of the Service to Foreign Office control. At this time, the organisation was known in
Whitehall by a variety of titles including the
Foreign Intelligence Service, the
Secret Service,
MI1(c), the
Special Intelligence Service and even ''C's organisation''. Around 1920, it began increasingly to be referred to as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), a title that it has continued to use to the present day and which was enshrined in statute in the Intelligence Services Act 1994. During the Second World War, the name MI6 was used as a flag of convenience, the name by which it is frequently known in popular culture since. in 1918 by SIS agents
Sidney George Reilly and
Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, as well as more orthodox espionage efforts within early Soviet Russia headed by Captain George Hill. Smith-Cumming died suddenly at his home on 14 June 1923, shortly before he was due to retire, and was replaced as
C by Admiral Sir
Hugh "Quex" Sinclair. Sinclair created the following sections: • A central foreign counter-espionage Circulating Section, Section V, to liaise with the Security Service to collate
counter-espionage reports from overseas stations. • An economic intelligence section, Section VII, to deal with trade, industry and contraband. • A clandestine radio communications organisation, Section VIII, to communicate with operatives and agents overseas. • Section N to exploit the contents of foreign
diplomatic bags •
Section D to conduct political covert actions and paramilitary operations in time of war. Section D would organise the Home Defence Scheme resistance organisation in the UK and come to be the foundation of the
Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War. In 1936, in a sign that he lacked confidence in his own agents, Sinclair founded the semi-autonomous Z section under
Claude Dansey for economic intelligence about Germany. Working alongside the Z section was the British Industrial Secret Service headed by a Canadian businessman living in London,
William Stephenson that recruited British businessmen active in Germany for intelligence about German industrial production. For intelligence on German military plans, MI6 largely depended upon Czechoslovak military intelligence from 1937 onward as
Paul Thümmel, aka "Agent A-54", a senior officer in the German intelligence service, the
Abwehr, had been bribed into working for Czechoslovakia. Thus most of what MI6 knew about German plans during both the Sudetenland crisis and the Danzig crisis came from the Czechoslovak military intelligence, which continued to run Thümmel even after the dissolution of Czecho-Slovakia in March 1939 and a government-in-exile was set up. Sir
Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador to Germany from 1937 to 1939, was actively hostile towards MI6 running agents out of the British embassy in Berlin as he made it clear his belief that espionage against Germany would hamper the "general settlement" he was seeking with the
Reich. The focus on collecting intelligence on German aircraft production led MI6 to be confused about the wider strategic question of what were the aims of German foreign policy. On 18 September 1938, a memo entitled "What Shall We Do?" written by Malcolm Woollcombe, the chief of the Political Intelligence, declared that the best way of resolving the Sudetenland crisis was for the Sudetenland to be peacefully annexed to Germany. The report concluded that allowing the Sudetenland to be annexed would allow Britain to finally discover "what
really legitimate grievances Germany has and what surgical operations are necessary to recify them". In January 1939, MI6 played a major role in the "Dutch War Scare" when it reported to London that Germany was about to invade the Netherlands with the aim of using the Dutch airfields to launch a strategic bombing campaign that would achieve a "knock out blow" by destroying London along with the rest of Britain's cities. The intelligence behind the "Dutch War Scare" was false, intended to achieve a change in British foreign policy and had its desired effect on the Chamberlain government. The
Deuxième Bureau had manufactured the story as a way to force Britain to make a stronger commitment to defend France. The "limited liability" rearmament policy pursued by the Chamberlain government had intentionally starved the British Army of funds to rule out the "continental commitment" (i.e. Britain sending a large expeditionary force) from ever being made again, with the majority of military spending being devoted to the RAF and the Royal Navy. As such, Britain simply did not possess the military force to save the Netherlands, leading to urgent requests being made to Paris to ask if France would be willing to assist with the defence of the Netherlands. In response, the French replied that Britain would need to do more for France if the British wanted the French to do something for them. On 6 February 1939 in a beginning of a shift in British foreign policy, Prime Minister Chamberlain announced in the House of Commons that "any threat to the vital interest of France" would lead to a British declaration of war. One of MI6’s most successful operations before the war started in April 1939 when an Australian businessman living in London,
Sidney Cotton, who was already engaged in aerial photographic espionage for the
Deuxième Bureau was recruited to fly missions over Germany. Under the cover story that he was a sales agent for a dummy corporation, the Aeronautical Research and Sales Corporation, Cotton flew over Germany, Italy and the Italian colony of Libya in his Lockheed 12A aircraft, taking numerous high-quality aerial photographs of German and Italian military bases that proved immensely useful for Britain during the war. , Tibet, photographed by
Ernst Schäfer in 1939 On 26 and 27 July 1939, in
Pyry near
Warsaw, British
military intelligence representatives including
Dilly Knox,
Alastair Denniston and Humphrey Sandwith were introduced by their allied Polish counterparts to their
Enigma-decryption techniques and equipment, including
Zygalski sheets and the cryptologic "
Bomba", and were promised future delivery of a reverse-engineered, Polish-built duplicate Enigma machine. The demonstration represented a vital basis for the later British continuation of the war effort. During the war, British cryptologists decrypted a vast number of messages enciphered on Enigma. The intelligence gleaned from this source, codenamed "
Ultra" by the British, was a substantial aid to the
Allied war effort.
Second World War Sinclair died on 4 November 1939, after an illness, and was replaced as
C by Lt Col.
Stewart Menzies (Horse Guards), who had been with the service since the end of World War I. On 9 November 1939, MI6 was embarrassed by the
Venlo incident. The Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, was unenthusiastic about the prospect of war, and clung to the hope all through the
Phoney War that the Wehrmacht generals would overthrow Hitler, after which the war would end. Two MI6 officers,
Sigismund Payne Best and
Henry Stevens had been dispatched to a café in Venlo almost on the German border to meet a representative of the Wehrmacht generals, but the meeting proved to be an ambush as instead a party of the
Sicherheitsdienst officers crossed over the border. The SS shot and killed a Dutch intelligence officer, Dirk Klop, who assisted with settling up the meeting and kidnapped Best and Stevens at gunpoint. The Venlo incident made the British government wary for the rest of the war with any more contact with the Wehrmacht generals. During the
Second World War the
human intelligence work of the service was complemented by several other initiatives: • The
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. (See above.) • The extensive
'double-cross' system run by
MI5 to feed misleading intelligence to the
Germans. •
Imagery intelligence activities conducted by the RAF Photographic Reconnaissance Unit (now
JARIC, The National Imagery Exploitation Centre). GC&CS was the source of
Ultra intelligence, which was very useful. The chief of SIS,
Stewart Menzies, insisted on wartime control of codebreaking, and this gave him immense power and influence, which he used judiciously. By distributing the
Ultra material collected by the
Government Code and Cypher School, MI6 became, for the first time, an important branch of the government. Extensive breaches of Nazi
Enigma signals gave Menzies and his team enormous insight into
Adolf Hitler's strategy, and this was kept a closely held secret. In 1940, the British intelligence services entered into a special agreement with their Polish counterparts. This collaboration between the two nations played a significant role in shaping the course of World War II. In July 2005, the governments of the United Kingdom and Poland jointly produced a comprehensive two-volume study that shed light on their bilateral intelligence cooperation during the war. This study, which unveiled information that had been classified as secret until that point, was known as the Report of the Anglo-Polish Historical Committee. The report was authored by leading historians and experts who were granted unprecedented access to the archives of British intelligence. One of the most remarkable findings was that 48 percent of all reports received by British secret services from continental Europe during the years 1939–45 had originated from Polish sources. This significant contribution from the Polish intelligence was made possible by the fact that occupied Poland had a long-standing tradition of insurgency organizations, which had been passed down through generations. These organizations maintained networks in emigrant Polish communities in Germany and France. The liaison between the British and Polish intelligence was facilitated by SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) officer
Wilfred Dunderdale. The reports exchanged between the two parties included critical information such as advance warnings of the '
Afrikakorps' departure for Libya, insights into the readiness of
Vichy French units to either fight against the Allies or switch sides during
Operation Torch, and early warnings regarding both
Operation Barbarossa and
Operation Edelweiss, the German
Caucasus campaign. Polish-sourced reporting on German secret weapons began in 1941, and
Operation Wildhorn enabled a British special operations flight to airlift a captured
V-2 Rocket with the assistance of the Polish resistance. Notably, Polish secret agent
Jan Karski played a crucial role in delivering the first Allied intelligence on the
Holocaust, providing the British with harrowing information about Nazi atrocities. Moreover, through a female Polish agent, the British established a channel of communication with the anti-Nazi chief of the Abwehr,
Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. This alliance allowed for the exchange of critical intelligence information and further strengthened the cooperation between the British and Polish intelligence services during this pivotal period in history. In 1940, journalist and Soviet agent
Kim Philby applied for a vacancy in Section D of SIS, and was vetted by his friend and fellow Soviet agent
Guy Burgess. When Section D was absorbed by
Special Operations Executive (SOE) in summer of 1940, Philby was appointed as an instructor in
black propaganda at the SOE's training establishment in
Beaulieu, Hampshire. In May 1940, MI6 set up
British Security Co-ordination (BSC), on the authorisation of Prime Minister
Winston Churchill over the objections of Stewart Menzies. This was a covert organisation based in New York City, headed by
William Stephenson intended to investigate enemy activities, prevent sabotage against British interests in the Americas, and mobilise pro-British opinion in the Americas. BSC also founded
Camp X in Canada to train clandestine operators and to establish (in 1942) a telecommunications relay station, code name Hydra, operated by engineer
Benjamin deForest Bayly. SIS operations in Asia were hindered by the fact that Europeans tended to stick out in Asia along with an inability to recruit Asian agents. The SOE had more success in both recruiting agents in Asia and in sending agents into the Japanese-occupied areas in China and southeast Asia, which caused tensions with MI6 who were jealous of the ability of the upstart SOE to do what they could not. SOE was more open to recruiting from within the Commonwealth, recruiting Chinese-Canadians and Australian-Chinese, to operate behind the Japanese lines under the grounds Asian agents would less likely to be arrested by the
Kempeitai, the much feared Japanese military police. In 1944, about 90% of the human intelligence in Burma came from the SOE while 70% of the human intelligence in Malaya, Thailand and French Indochina came from the SOE. General
William Slim, the GOC of the 14th Army, complained about the low quality of SIS intelligence in late 1943 as he stated that the intelligence he received from MI6 was "far from being complete or accurate". In late 1944-early 1945, Slim attempted to have the 14th Army take over all intelligence operations in Burma with both SIS and SOE agents to be subordinate to the 14th Army under the grounds the Army was more capable of running intelligence operations in southeast Asia than MI6. Menzies who fiercely defended the prerogatives of MI6 was able to block this proposal despite the way it was universally accepted by officers serving in the China-Burma-India theater that SIS was unsuitable to operating in that part of the world. MI6 was able to keep operating in Asia by making the argument that the SOE was only a temporary organisation that was to be disbanded after the war ended while MI6 was the permanent intelligence service that would continue after the war, and that to exclude MI6 from Asia would weaken British intelligence in the post-war world. In early 1944, MI6 re-established Section IX, its prewar anti-Soviet section, and Philby took a position there. He was able to alert the
NKVD about all British intelligence on the Soviets—including what the American
OSS had shared with the British about the Soviets. Despite these difficulties the service nevertheless conducted substantial and successful operations in both occupied Europe and in the Middle East and Far East where it operated under the cover name Inter-Services Liaison Department (ISLD).
Cold War In August 1945 Soviet intelligence officer
Konstantin Volkov tried to defect to the UK, offering the names of all Soviet agents working inside British intelligence. Philby received the memo on Volkov's offer and alerted the Soviets, so they could arrest him. 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. Following the Second World War, tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors attempted to reach Palestine as part of the
Aliyah Bet refugee movement. As part of British government efforts to stem this migration, Operation Embarrass saw the SIS bomb five ships in Italy in 1947–48 to prevent them being used by the refugees, and set up a fake Palestinian group to take responsibility for the attacks. However, some in SIS wanted the policy to go further, noting that "intimidation is only likely to be effective if some members of the group of people to be intimidated actually suffer unpleasant consequences" and criticising the decision to not take stronger action against
Exodus 1947 (which was, instead, seized and returned to mainland Europe). : the Berlin tunnel in 1956 SIS operations against the
USSR were extensively compromised by the presence of an agent working for the Soviet Union,
Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby, in the post-war Counter-Espionage Section, R5. SIS suffered further embarrassment when it was revealed 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. In 1956, SIS Director
John Sinclair had to resign after the botched affair of the death of
Lionel Crabb. SIS activities included a range of covert political actions, including the overthrow of
Mohammed Mossadeq in Iran in the
1953 Iranian coup d'état (in collaboration with the US
Central Intelligence Agency). Despite earlier Soviet penetration, SIS began to recover as a result of improved vetting and security, and a series of successful penetrations. From 1958, SIS had three moles in the Polish
UB, the most successful of which was codenamed NODDY. The CIA described the information SIS received from these Poles as "some of the most valuable intelligence ever collected", and rewarded SIS with $20 million to expand their Polish operation. Within the
GRU, in a joint operation with the American CIA, the MI6 recruited 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 Center (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 who SIS ran for the better part of a decade, then successfully exfiltrated from the USSR across the Finnish border in 1985. During the
Soviet–Afghan War, SIS
supported the Islamic resistance group commanded by
Ahmad Shah Massoud and he became a key ally in the fight against the Soviets. An annual mission of two SIS officers, as well as military instructors, were sent to Massoud and his fighters. Through them, weapons and supplies, radios and vital intelligence on Soviet battle plans were all sent to the Afghan resistance. SIS also helped to retrieve crashed Soviet helicopters from Afghanistan. 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.
After the Cold War The end of the
Cold War led to a reshuffle 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
Colin McColl embraced 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. As part of broader defence cut-backs SIS had its resources cut back twenty-five percent across the board and senior management was reduced by forty percent. 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 of the Requirements division's ability to challenge the quality of the information the Middle East Controllerate was providing weakened the
Joint Intelligence Committee's estimates of
Iraq's non-conventional 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 one occasion in 1998, MI6 believed it might be able to obtain 'actionable intelligence' which could help the CIA capture
Osama bin Laden, the leader of
Al Qaeda. But given that this might result in his being transferred or rendered to the United States, MI6 decided it had to ask for ministerial approval before passing the intelligence on (in case he faced the death penalty or mistreatment). This was approved by a minister 'provided the CIA gave assurances regarding humane treatment'. In the end, not enough intelligence came through to make it worthwhile going ahead. In 2001, it became clear that working with
Ahmad Shah Massoud and his
forces was the best option for going after Bin Laden; the priority for MI6 was developing intelligence coverage. The first real sources were being established, although no one penetrated the upper tier of the Al Qaeda leadership itself. As the year progressed, plans were drawn up and slowly worked their way up to the
White House on 4 September 2001-which involved increasing dramatically support for Massoud. MI6 were involved in these plans.
War on terror During the
Global War on Terror, SIS accepted information from the CIA that was obtained through
torture, including the
extraordinary rendition programme.
Craig Murray, a UK ambassador to
Uzbekistan, had written several memos critical of the UK's acceptance of this information; he was then sacked from his job.
Afghanistan and Iraq Following the
September 11 attacks, on 28 September the British Foreign Secretary approved the deployment of MI6 officers to Afghanistan and the wider region, using people involved with the mujahadeen in the 1980s and who had language skills and regional expertise. At the end of the month, a handful of MI6 officers with a budget of $7 million landed in northeast Afghanistan, where they met with General
Mohammed Fahim of the
Northern Alliance and began working with other contacts in the north and south to build alliances, secure support, and to bribe as many
Taliban commanders as they could to change sides or leave the fight. During the
United States invasion of Afghanistan, the SIS established a presence in
Kabul following its
fall to the coalition. MI6 members and the British
Special Boat Service took part in the
Battle of Tora Bora. After members of the 22nd
Special Air Service (SAS) Regiment returned to the UK in mid-December 2001, members of both territorial SAS regiments remained in the country to provide close protection to SIS members. In mid-December, MI6 officers who had been deployed to the region began to interview prisoners held by the Northern Alliance. In January 2002, they began interviewing prisoners held by the Americans. On 10 January 2002, an MI6 officer conducted his first interview of a detainee held by the Americans. He reported back to London that there were aspects of how the detainee had been handled by the US military before the interview that did not seem consistent with the
Geneva Conventions. Two days after the interview, he was sent instructions, copied to all MI5 and MI6 officers in Afghanistan, about how to solve concerns over mistreatment, referring to signs of abuse: "Given that they are not within our custody or control, the law does not require you to intervene to protect this." It went on to say that the Americans had to understand that the UK did not condone such mistreatment and that a complaint should be made to a senior US official if there was any coercion by the US in conjunction with an MI6 interview. Claims by former weapons inspector
Scott Ritter suggest that similar propaganda campaigns against Iraq dated back to the 1990s. Ritter says that SIS recruited him in 1997 to help with the propaganda effort, saying "the aim was to convince the public that Iraq was a far greater threat than it actually was." Shortly before the
Second Battle of Fallujah, MI6 personnel visited
JSOCs TSF (Temporary Screening Facility) at
Balad Air Base to question a suspected insurgent. Afterwards, they raised concerns about the poor detention conditions there. As a result, the British government informed JSOC in Iraq that prisoners captured by British special forces would only be turned over to JSOC if there was an undertaking not to send them to Balad. In spring 2005, the SAS detachment operating in Basra and southern Iraq, known as Operation Hathor, escorted MI6 case officers into Basra so they could meet their sources and handlers. MI6 provided information that enabled the detachment to carry out surveillance operations. MI6 were also involved in resolving the
Basra prison incident; the SIS played a central role in the British withdrawal from Basra in 2007. The first MI6 knew of the US carrying out the
mission that killed Osama bin Laden on 2 May 2011 was after it happened, when its chief called his American counterpart for an explanation. In July 2011 it was reported that SIS had closed several of its stations, particularly in Iraq, where it had several outposts in the south of the country in the region of Basra. The closures have allowed the service to focus its attention on Pakistan and Afghanistan, which are its principal stations. On 12 July 2011, MI6 intelligence officers, along with other intelligence agencies, tracked two British-Afghans to a hotel in
Herat, Afghanistan, who were discovered to be trying to establish contact with the Taliban or al-Qaeda to learn bomb-making skills; operators from the SAS captured them and they are believed to be the first Britons to be captured alive in Afghanistan since 2001. By 2012, MI6 had reorganised after 9/11 and reshuffled its staff, opening new stations overseas, with
Islamabad becoming the largest station. MI6's increase in funding was not as large as that for MI5, and it still struggled to recruit at the required rate; former members were rehired to help out. MI6 maintained intelligence coverage of suspects as they moved from the UK overseas, particularity to Pakistan. In October 2013, SIS appealed for reinforcements and extra staff from other intelligence agencies amid growing concern about a terrorist threat from Afghanistan and that the country would become an "intelligence vacuum" after British troops withdraw at the end of 2014. In March 2016, it was reported that MI6 had been involved in the
Libyan Civil War since January of that year, having been escorted by the
SAS to meet with Libyan officials to discuss the supplying of weapons and training for the Syrian Army and the militias fighting against
ISIS. In April 2016, it was revealed that MI6 teams with members of the
Special Reconnaissance Regiment seconded to them had been deployed to Yemen to train Yemeni forces fighting
AQAP, as well as identifying targets for drone strikes. In November 2016,
The Independent reported that MI6, MI5 and GCHQ supplied the SAS and other British special forces a list of 200 British jihadists to kill or capture before they attempt to return to the UK. The jihadists are senior members of ISIS who pose a direct threat to the UK. Sources said SAS soldiers have been told that the mission could be the most important in the regiment's 75-year history.
Other activities Operations in the Balkans On 6 May 2004 it was announced that Sir
Richard Dearlove was to be replaced as head of SIS by
John Scarlett, former chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. Scarlett was an unusually high-profile appointment to the job, and gave evidence at the
Hutton Inquiry. On 27 September 2004, news emerged of a significant incident involving British intelligence officers in the Balkans. It was reported that several British spies operating in the region, including SIS officers stationed in Belgrade and Sarajevo, were either relocated or compelled to withdraw from their posts. This development was a consequence of their public identification in various media reports, a situation that arose due to the actions of disgruntled local intelligence services, especially in Croatia and Serbia. Two British intelligence officers stationed in Zagreb managed to maintain their positions despite having their covers exposed in the local press. This revelation of the agents' identities in the three capital cities significantly undermined British intelligence operations. The primary focus of British intelligence activities in the Balkans included efforts by the SIS to capture individuals sought by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, most notably, alleged war criminals. Sir
John Sawers became head of the SIS in November 2009, the first outsider to head SIS in more than 40 years. Sawers came from the Diplomatic Service, previously having been the
British Permanent Representative to the United Nations. On 7 June 2011, John Sawers received Romania's President
Traian Băsescu and George-Cristian Malor, the head of the Serviciul Roman de Informatii (SRI) at SIS headquarters.
Libyan Civil War Five years before the
Libyan Civil War, a
UK Special Forces unit was formed called E Squadron which was composed of selected members of the 22nd SAS Regiment, the
SBS and the
SRR. It was tasked by the
Director Special Forces to support MI6's operations (akin to the CIA's
SAC – a covert paramilitary unit for SIS). It was not a formal squadron within the establishment of any individual UK Special Forces unit, but at the disposal of both the Director Special Forces and the SIS; previously, SIS relied primarily on contractor personnel. The Squadron carried out missions that required 'maximum discretion' in places that were 'off the radar or considered dangerous'; the Squadron's members often operated in plain clothes, with the full range of national support, such as false identities at its disposal. In early March 2011, during the Libyan Civil War, a covert operation in Libya involving E Squadron went wrong: The aim of the mission was to cement SIS's contacts with the rebels by flying in two SIS officers in a
Chinook helicopter to meet a Libyan Intermediary in a town near Benghazi, who had promised to fix them up a meeting with the
NTC. A team consisting of six E Squadron members (all from the SAS) and two SIS officers were flown into Libya by an RAF Special Forces Flight Chinook; the Squadron's members were carrying bags containing arms, ammunition, explosives, computers, maps and passports from at least four nationalities. Despite technical backup, the team landed in Libya without any prior agreement with the rebel leadership, and the plan failed as soon as the team landed. The locals became suspicious they were foreign mercenaries or spies and the team was detained by rebel forces and taken to a military base in Benghazi. They were then hauled before a senior rebel leader; the team told him that they were in the country to determine the rebels' needs and to offer assistance, but the discovery of British troops on the ground enraged the rebels who were fearful that Gaddafi would use such evidence to destroy the credibility of the NTC. Negotiations between senior rebel leaders and British officials in London finally led to their release and they were allowed to board
HMS Cumberland. On 16 November 2011 SIS warned the national transitional council in Benghazi after discovering details of planned strikes, said foreign secretary
William Hague. 'The agencies obtained firm intelligence, were able to warn the NTC of the threat, and the attacks were prevented,' he said. In a rare speech on the intelligence agencies, he praised the key role played by SIS and GCHQ in bringing Gaddafi's 42-year dictatorship to an end, describing them as 'vital assets' with a 'fundamental and indispensable role' in keeping the nation safe. 'They worked to identify key political figures, develop contacts with the emerging opposition and provide political and military intelligence. 'Most importantly, they saved lives,' he said. The speech follows criticism that SIS had been too close to the Libyan regime and was involved in the extraordinary rendition of anti-Gaddafi activists. Mr Hague also defended controversial proposals for secrecy in civil courts in cases involving intelligence material.
2015 onwards In February 2015,
The Daily Telegraph reported that MI6 contacted their counterparts in the South African intelligence services to ask for help in recruiting a North Korean "asset" to spy on
North Korea's nuclear programme. MI6 had contacted the man who had inside information on North Korea's nuclear programme, he considered the offer and wanted to arrange another meeting, but a year passed without MI6 hearing from him, so the outcome is unknown. In July 2020, it was revealed that intelligence officials from a number of
repressive regimes received training from senior officials of MI6 and
MI5. In 2019, an 11-day International Intelligence Directors Course was attended by top intelligence officers from 26 countries, including
Saudi Arabia, the
United Arab Emirates,
Egypt,
Jordan,
Oman,
Nigeria,
Cameroon,
Algeria,
Afghanistan and others. A
British academic,
Matthew Hedges questioned the
UK's training programme for allowing officials of the UAE, where he was
detained on false charges and faced psychological
torture. ==Personnel==