Allen joined the
British Foreign Service, where he worked for 30 years. After studying at the
Middle East Centre for Arab Studies, he was posted to
Abu Dhabi in 1974. There he developed his love of
falconry from his contacts with the
Bedouin, to the extent that he wrote a series of books on the subject, including
Falconry in Arabia (1980). He then spent much of the rest of his operational career in the Middle East. In 2003, as head of
MI6’s counter-terrorism unit, Allen and
Stephen Kappes of the
CIA led talks that resulted in an end of support for terrorist activity by Colonel
Muammar al-Gaddafi and of international sanctions against Libya. Confidential documents discovered by
Human Rights Watch in Libyan Government offices, following the fall of the Gaddafi regime, suggested the involvement of the British Government in
rendition operations. These included a fax apparently sent from Sir Mark to the Libyan authorities in March 2004, saying: After losing out to
John Scarlett in his bid to become head of MI6, in which he was supported by his friend
Jack Straw, Allen resigned in 2004. After a six-month sabbatical, Allen became a senior advisor to the Monitor Group, a global consulting and private equity firm. In 2007, he helped broker the release of Bulgarian nurses imprisoned in Libya on charges of having
injected HIV virus into children. On 6 September 2011,
The Independent newspaper claimed that Allen had been implicated in the arrest of
Abdelhakim Belhaj in March 2004 in Thailand, and the subsequent torture of Belhaj by Gaddafi's regime in
Abu Salim prison in
Tripoli, Libya. In 2014 Britain's
Crown Prosecution Service decided not to charge Allen for his role, on the grounds they had insufficient evidence, even though the Metropolitan Police had provided them with a 28,000 page dossier. found in the offices of
Moussa Koussa the head of
Muammar Gaddafi's Intelligence service, after those offices were stormed by opposition forces, when Gaddafi was overthrown. Allen is a Senior Associate and honorary fellow of
St Antony's College, Oxford, ==Personal life==