MI6


The Secret Intelligence Service, commonly known as MI6, is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of human intelligence on foreign nationals in support of its Five Eyes partners. SIS is one of the British intelligence agencies and the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service is directly accountable to the foreign secretary.
Formed in 1909 as the Foreign Section of the Secret Service Bureau, the section grew greatly during the First World War, officially adopting its current name around 1920. The name "MI6" originated as a convenient label during the Second World War, when SIS was known by many names. It is still commonly used today. The existence of SIS was not officially acknowledged until 1994. That year the Intelligence Services Act 1994 was introduced to Parliament, to place the organisation on a statutory footing for the first time. It provides the legal basis for its operations. Today, SIS is subject to public oversight by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal and the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament.
The stated priority roles of SIS are counter-terrorism, counter-proliferation, providing intelligence in support of cyber security, and supporting stability overseas to disrupt terrorism and other criminal activities. Unlike its main sister agencies, the Security Service and Government Communications Headquarters, SIS works exclusively in foreign intelligence gathering; the ISA allows it to carry out operations only against persons outside the British Islands. Some of SIS's actions since the 2000s have attracted significant controversy, such as its alleged complicity in acts of torture and extraordinary rendition.
Since 1994, SIS headquarters have been in the SIS Building in London, on the South Bank of the River Thames.

Structure and mission

The main mission of SIS is to collect foreign intelligence for the United Kingdom. It provides the British government with vital intelligence regarding foreign events and informs concerning global covert capabilities to uphold national interests, security and protect the country's economic well-being. SIS works with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office and therefore falls under the supervision of the Foreign Secretary.
SIS officers and agents engage in operations and missions all around the world. The SIS regularly cooperates and works with MI5 and GCHQ regarding domestic and cyber intelligence. SIS has three primary tasks:
  • Counter Terrorism – preventing terrorism and extremism in the UK, against national interests within the realm or overseas, and supporting the UK's allies
  • Espionage – protecting the national security
  • Cyber – using cyber technology and digital expertise to reduce threats.
The impact and success in these situations helps to prevent hostile influence, keep the UK's defences on alert to reduce serious and organised crime, and to detect violations of international law.

Organisation

Governance

SIS is governed under the laws of the United Kingdom. The government sets the necessary laws, regulations and funding needed to keep the SIS operating and to conduct its activities.
Under these rules, SIS is accountable to the government of the day and the SIS carry out their work in accordance to the government's foreign policy. The Prime Minister is ultimately responsible for intelligence and security, with day-to-day ministerial responsibility with the Foreign Secretary, to whom the SIS report directly. The Foreign Secretary appoints the head of SIS, to oversee SIS daily management and work.
The Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service has a twofold responsibility within SIS. Internally, they oversee the continuous gathering of intelligence from agents, which involves making complex decisions about risk, resource allocation, and technological adaptation. In today's interconnected, data-driven world, maintaining secrecy and conducting undercover operations have become increasingly challenging.
Externally, the chief also operates as a secret diplomat, tasked with maintaining vital alliances that support intelligence cooperation. Additionally, they may need to establish discreet communication channels with countries where traditional diplomatic relations are delicate. Successfully navigating these dual roles requires a nuanced understanding of both internal operations and international relations. Blaise Metreweli has been the chief of SIS since 2025.
Command and control over SIS is through four main government entities: the Central Intelligence Machinery, the Ministerial Committee on the Intelligence Services, the Permanent Secretaries' Committee on the Intelligence Services, and the Joint Intelligence Committee.

Joint Intelligence Committee

The Joint Intelligence Committee assesses the intelligence gathered by GCHQ, MI5, and SIS and presents it to cabinet ministers, who in turn, enable the government's policies to help achieve national security and defence. The JIC also reports the intelligence analysis to the Cabinet Office itself.
Committee members are required to bring the reports and findings to their respective ministers and departments, so as to make appropriate assessments that help in planning, preparing operational activities, planning or making policy decisions. The Chairman of the Committee is responsible specifically with ensuring the Committee's monitoring and oversight over intelligence data are conducted effectively and responsibly. Permanent and temporary sub-committees and working groups are constituted by the Committee to carry out its duties responsibly.

Budget

has directed the security and intelligence agencies to prepare financial statements for each financial year in accordance with the Government Resources and Accounts Act 2000.
Due to security concerns, the Government does not publish these financial statements, which are audited by the Comptroller and Auditor General and then shown to the chair of the Public Accounts Committee in accordance with the Intelligence Services Act 1994.
The annual Parliamentary financial statements for 2021–2022 indicated that the combined British intelligence services spending was £3.44 billion, with some $1.09 billion being further allocated to staff pay and agents and a further £636 million allocated to capital spending.

Legislation

The following legislation regulates the SIS:
  • Intelligence Services Act 1994
  • Investigatory Powers Act 2016
  • Human Rights Act 1998
Oversight is undertaken by Parliament through the following organisations:

Foundation

The service derived from the Secret Service Bureau, which was founded on 1 October 1909. The Bureau was a joint initiative of the Admiralty and the War Office to control secret intelligence operations in the UK and overseas, particularly concentrating on the activities of the Imperial German government. The bureau was split into naval and army sections which, over time, specialised in foreign espionage and internal counter-espionage activities, respectively. This specialisation was because the Admiralty wanted to know the maritime strength of the Imperial German Navy. This specialisation was formalised before 1914. During the First World War in 1916, the two sections underwent administrative changes so that the foreign section became the section MI1 of the Directorate of Military Intelligence.
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

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, the Special Intelligence Service and even C's organisation. Around 1920, it began increasingly to be referred to as the Secret Intelligence Service, 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 the immediate post-war years under Sir Mansfield George Smith-Cumming and throughout most of the 1920s, SIS was focused on Communism, in particular, Russian Bolshevism. Examples include a thwarted operation to overthrow the Bolshevik government 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 during the Second World War.
In 1924, MI6 intervened in the general election of that year by leaking the so-called Zinoviev letter to the Daily Mail, which published it on its front page on 25 October 1924. The letter, which was a forgery, was supposedly from Grigory Zinoviev, the chief of the Comintern, ordering British Communists to take over the Labour Party. The Zinoviev letter, which was written in English, came into possession of the MI6 resident at the British Embassy in Riga on 9 October 1924 who forwarded it to London. The Zinoviev letter played a key role in the defeat of the minority Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald and the victory of the Conservatives under Stanley Baldwin in the general election of 29 October 1924. It has been established the MI6 leaked the Zinoviev letter to the Daily Mail, but it remains unclear if MI6 was aware at the time that the letter was a forgery.
With the emergence of Germany as a threat following the ascendence of the Nazis, in the early 1930s attention was shifted in that direction. In 1934, a defense requirements commitment that consisted of Sir Robert Vansittart of the Foreign Office, Sir Warren Fisher of the Treasury, General Sir Maurice Hankey of the Committee for Imperial Defense, and the three service chiefs produced an influential memo that labelled Germany the "ultimate potential enemy". The memo noted that Germany had the world's second largest economy, was a world leader in science and technology, and was capable of mobilising millions of men for war. However, it was generally believed in the United Kingdom at the time that the arms race before 1914 had caused the Great War, and consequently there was a belief that British rearmament would increase international tensions and would make a war more likely than less likely. On the converse, there was the possibility if Germany rearmed while Britain did not, it would leave the Reich in a strong position to launch a war. It was decided that British rearmament would be linked to the extent of German rearmament with British rearmament to be reactive rather than preemptive. The primary request from decision-makers in the government regarding Germany was for MI6 to collect intelligence about German rearmament in order to establish the level of British rearmament that was to be pursued in response. British decision-makers were especially concerned about the prospect of German strategic bombing of British cities as contemporary experts vastly exaggerated the power of strategic bombing to kill millions within a few days. Harold Macmillan later recalled: "We thought of air warfare in 1938 rather as people think of nuclear warfare today". As a result, MI6's number one priority with regard to Germany was collect intelligence on the Luftwaffe, the branch of the Wehrmacht that British decision-makers feared the most. To assist with studying German industrial production, the Industrial Intelligence Centre under Desmond Morton was founded in 1934 with a special mandate to study German aircraft production. However, Admiral Sinclair complained in 1935 that MI6's annual budget for operations around the world was equal to the cost of maintaining one destroyer in home waters, and that the demands placed upon his service exceeded its budget. The focus on the Luftwaffe along with MI6's relatively small budget led to constant complaints from both the War Office and the Admiralty that MI6 was neglecting both the German Army and the Kriegsmarine. The Asian branch of the SIS was known as the "Cinderella branch" owing to its neglect by London.
MI6 assisted the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, with "the exchange of information about communism" as late as October 1937, well into the Nazi era; the head of the British agency's Berlin station, Frank Foley, was still able to describe his relationship with the Gestapo's so-called communism expert as "cordial". 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" 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.
File:Bundesarchiv Bild 135-S-06-07-32, Tibetexpedition, Junger Engländer.jpg|thumb|A young Englishman, member of the Secret Intelligence Service, in Yatung, 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.