Secret Intelligence Service

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United KingdomUnited Kingdom Secret Intelligence Service
- MI6 -
Secret Intelligence Service - Logo.svg
Supervisory authority (s) Foreign Ministry / Foreign Minister (currently Dominic Raab , Foreign Secretary and First Secretary of State )
Consist since 1909/1919
Headquarters London
Authority management Alex Younger , Chief of the SIS
Website www.sis.gov.uk (English)

The Secret Intelligence Service ( SIS ) is the British foreign intelligence service . It is better known as MI6 . MI6 stands for " Military Intelligence , Section 6".

Richard Moore will be the director of MI6 from autumn 2020.

history

MI6 was founded in 1909 together with MI5 and 17 other military intelligence services as part of the Secret Service Bureau . In the original division of tasks, MI6 was responsible for the navy, but increasingly specialized in foreign espionage and therefore became the SIS foreign intelligence service in the following period.

The first director of MI6 was Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming , who signed correspondence with his initial "C", which became the code name for all subsequent directors.

First World War

The first significant audit of the organization came with the First World War , in which the SIS was able to achieve some success. It was not possible for the SIS to penetrate Germany with agents, but it had some considerable success in military and economic reconnaissance. These successes are primarily the work of agent networks in neutral countries, occupied territories and Russia (see, inter alia, Rasputin ).

After the war, the resources of the SIS were greatly reduced and those who received the information from the SIS, such as the Admiralty , were given some control over the operations of the SIS - this relationship continues to this day.

During the 1920s, the SIS worked primarily with the diplomatic service. Most embassies hired a passport control officer who was actually the head of the SIS in that country. This gave the operations some protection through the diplomatic immunity of the embassy staff, but this system had apparently been in practice for too long and was eventually an open secret in the 1930s. In the years after the war and into the 1920s, the SIS was mainly concerned with communism (and especially with Russia). The SIS also supported attempts to overthrow the communist regime in Russia.

In the 1930s, Nazi Germany then caught the attention of the SIS. As in the First World War, the SIS's successes in Germany were limited, even if it was able to gain some reliable sources within the German government and the military.

Second World War

During the Second World War , the work of the SIS in the intelligence sense was overshadowed by some initiatives by other intelligence services. This includes:

The SIS suffered a heavy defeat in November 1939 in the Venlo incident . German agents of the SD had presented themselves as high-ranking army officers who wanted to carry out an assassination attempt on Hitler . At a meeting with the alleged conspirators in the Dutch border town of Venlo , two SIS agents were kidnapped by the SS from the Netherlands and into the German Reich .

Despite the difficulties encountered at the beginning of the war, the SIS recovered and carried out some successful operations in mainland Europe as well as in the Middle and Far East. From 1941 onwards, the SIS worked extensively through the British Security Coordination in the establishment of the American Office of the Coordinator of Information .

The successful MI6 companies include a. the Operation Mincemeat and Operation Jedburgh . The secret service was deceived at the England game .

Cold War

The operations of the SIS against the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Cold War were for some time compromised by the activities of the Soviet spy Kim Philby , who was, among other things, the SIS liaison officer at the British Embassy in Washington, DC . In this position, for example, he betrayed a program of joint British and American paramilitary operations in Albania (although it has been shown that this program was also compromised by the poor security guidelines “on the ground”). In the Baltic States , the SIS used a cover organization from 1949 to around 1955, the British Baltic Fishery Protection Service , which partly consisted of former members of the Navy and operated with former German speedboats .

The SIS suffered further embarrassment when it emerged that an officer involved in both tunnel operations in Vienna and Operation Gold in Berlin was a Soviet agent. George Blake was "turned over" by the Chinese while imprisoned in the Korean War . When he returned from Korea, his contemporaries received him like a hero; his security powers have been restored. In 1953 he was transferred to the MI6 station in Vienna, where the tunnels there had been active for four years. After betraying this - unnoticed - to the Soviet side, he was assigned to a British team that was involved in Operation Gold - a tunnel construction in divided Berlin . Accordingly, the tunnel was demolished quickly. Blake was then identified as a Soviet agent; He was tried for espionage and was sent to prison - he broke out in 1964 and fled to the Soviet Union.

With improved security checks and some good sources in the USSR, the SIS recovered from these setbacks in the early 1960s. One of these sources was Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky , an officer in the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence Service). Over two years, Penkowski provided thousands of photographs of secret documents. These included Red Army missile manuals that enabled American analysts to identify Soviet missiles stationed in Cuba in 1962 .

The actions of the SIS increased towards the end of the Cold War. A highlight was the recruitment of Oleg Antonowitsch Gordijewski in the 1970s, who provided the SIS with information for a decade and successfully escaped Moscow in 1985.

The SIS apparently also succeeded in recruiting Soviet officials for trips to third countries, for example in Africa or Asia. One agent won in this way was Vladimir Anatoljewitsch Kusitschkin, the son of a member of the Politburo and a high-ranking KGB employee: he informed the SIS about the mobilization of the KGB's ALFA unit during the August coup in Moscow in 1991, when this unit took over shortly afterwards Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev wanted to overthrow.

The true extent of the SIS's activities in the second half of the Cold War remains largely unknown.

The SIS's activities during the Cold War also included a range of covert political interference, including the 1961 coup d'état against Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and the sparking of an internal conflict between Lebanese paramilitary groups in the second half of the 1980s that prevented them from continuing to take Western hostages to take.

End of the Cold War - present

Since 1994, a committee of Parliament has been responsible for overseeing the activities of the SIS.

The SIS had no official domicile until 1994. Since 1995 the headquarters have been at Vauxhall Cross on the Thames in London.

MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall Cross in the London Borough of Lambeth

The SIS has had its own website since October 13, 2005.

Former Head of Authority (2004-2009) John Scarlett was very prominent in the UK media following the trial of David Kelly's suicide . Scarlett was Oleg Gordiewski's command officer , whose escape he organized in 1985.

At the end of December 2007, the Russian domestic secret service, the FSB , reported that MI6 had recruited the former Russian secret service agent Vyacheslav Kharkov and commissioned him with the procurement of secret data. Kharkov, however, volunteered to surrender to the FSB in June 2007 and exposed four other MI6 agents.

management

Media reception

James Bond from the novel and film series of the same name is a Secret Service agent (only referred to as MI6 in later films). Fleming himself, creator of Bonds and author of the first novels, worked as personal assistant to John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI) for the Naval Intelligence Department (NID) during World War II . In this role, he was responsible for the management of various secret operations and the organization of commando units, including the 30 Assault Unit (30 AU).

The real SIS building has appeared sporadically in the film series since the film GoldenEye with Bond actor Pierce Brosnan . To this end, the SIS has allowed exterior shots of the building for the first time as a tribute to the worldwide fame of the films. In addition, in the film Skyfall, the outer facade of the building in London's Vauxhall is shown from the river, which then explodes. In the sequel Specter , the ruin, which was provided with explosive devices for demolition purposes, finally becomes the setting for the showdown of Bond and his opponent. The building is completely destroyed and Bond escapes at the last second.

Up until this point, the exterior shots of various buildings in the series served as the headquarters of the Secret Service, which Fleming had referred to in his books as a building on Regent's Park . For the recordings in the entrance area, the facades were each provided with a discreet brass plate with the inscription "Universal Exports", the front company of the Secret Service devised by Fleming.

In the English television series Die Profis and Mit Schirm, Charme und Melone , the work and tasks of MI5 and MI6 are presented, sometimes under other names such as CI5.

See also

literature

  • Philip HJ Davies: MI6 and the Machinery of Spying. Frank Cass, London 2004, ISBN 0-7146-8363-9 (h / b).
  • Philip HJ Davies: The Machinery of Spying Breaks Down. In: Studies in Intelligence. Declassified Edition. Summer 2005.
  • Stephen Dorril : MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations. Fourth Estate, London 2001, ISBN 1-85702-701-9 .
  • Rob Humphreys: London: The Rough Guide. Rough Guides, 1999, ISBN 1-85828-404-X .
  • Keith Jeffery : MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949, Bloomsbury, London 2010, ISBN 978-0-7475-9183-2 .
  • Alan Judd: The quest for C: Sir Mansfield Cumming and the founding of the British Secret Service. HarperCollins, London 1999, ISBN 0-00-255901-3 .
  • Kirsten Olstrup Seeger: Friendly Fire. Biography. Denmark 2008, ISBN 978-87-7799-193-6 .
  • Richard Tomlinson, Nick Fielding: The Big Breach - From Top Secret to Maximum Security. Mainstream Publishing, 2001, ISBN 1-903813-01-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Guy Faulconbridge: UK names new MI6 chief: enter diplomat (and spy) Richard Moore. In: Reuters. July 29, 2020, accessed on July 29, 2020 .
  2. ↑ Peter Koblank: The Venlo incident , online edition Mythos Elser 2006.
  3. ^ Official website of the SIS.
  4. ^ Iraq inquiry backs new MI6 chief . In: CNN . July 14, 2004. Retrieved June 15, 2008.
  5. ↑ Guy Faulconbridge: UK names new MI6 chief: enter diplomat (and spy) Richard Moore. In: Reuters. July 29, 2020, accessed on July 29, 2020 .
  6. ↑ Was there a license to kill? In: Tages-Anzeiger of September 22, 2010.


Coordinates: 51 ° 29 '14 "  N , 0 ° 7' 28"  W.