MI6

MI6   (Intelligence agency)
MI6 HQ Building London, viewed from the North bank of the River Thames
Abbreviation	SIS
Motto	Semper Occultus (Always Secret)
Predecessor	Secret Service Bureau
Formation	1909
Parent organization	UK
Headquarters	SIS Building, London
Leader	Chief of the SIS
Type	Intelligence agency
Subgroups	•  Irish Joint Section •  Global Issues Controllerate
Staff	3,200
Interest of	Richard M. Bennett, Katherine Horton, Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, UK/Home Office/Investigatory Powers Tribunal, Hamilton Whyte
Exposed by	Compton Mackenzie, Richard Tomlinson
Subpage	•MI6/Black budget •MI6/Chief •MI6/Director of Counterintelligence and Security •MI6/Director of Security and Public Affairs •MI6/Directorate of Counter-Intelligence and Security •MI6/Directorate of Security and Public Affairs
British foreign secret intelligence service.

Not to be confused with MI5, which has more of a UK focus.

MI6 (formally known as the Secret Intelligence Service, SIS) is a UK intelligence agency charged with foreign intelligence and operations. Its headquarters (right) are at 85 Vauxhall Cross, London, on the South Bank of the river Thames Map.

Official Narrative

The group became known publicly in the 1932 book Greek Memories, by MI6 agent Compton Mackenzie, though the book was banned and Mackenzie fined for breaching the Official Secrets Act 1911. Until 1994, the organisation was not officially acknowledged to exist. The official narrative was written in 2010 by Keith Jeffery and launched with help of John Scarlett. Jeffery states that MI6 has a "remarkable level of achievement" and that "I looked very hard for 'bad stuff'.. in the end I found less evidence than perhaps we might have expected, certainly less evidence than I might have expected as the amateur espionage fiction buff that I was." Impressed by documents relating to Operation Embarrass, he appears not to have considered that this revelation might be a limited hangout or to have learnt of the MI6 black budget.

Problems

Full article: MI6/Black budget

Before it was even officially admitted to exist, on 9 December 1993, the Lord Chancellor, James Mackay remarked that in the post-Cold War era, the UK’s SIS was "not purely an information-gathering service" but also "tasked by Government to carry out other valuable services". Its claims of accountability are undermined by the multi-million pound MI6 black budget, personally operated in the 1940s for off-the-books operations. Its uncritical promotion of narratives such as the "war on terror" indicate that the group remains a tool of the supranational deep state. In December 2016, Alex Younger told journalists that "terrorism" was the most immediate threat to the UK.

Staff

Full article: Chief of the SIS

The Chief of the SIS is the only publicly acknowledged position of MI6. Since David Spedding held the position (1994-1999) it has been held for 5 years at a time. The Chief tends to appoint the deputies.

Expansion

A 2017 story in the Telegraph stated that "MI6 has created its first-ever cinema advert aimed at attracting more women and ethnic minorities into the secret service", and that it "is expected to grow from 2,500 people to close to 3,500 by 2020."

State sponsored murder

On 19th February 2008 at inquest about the premature death of Lady Diana Spencer, former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove publicly confirmed that MI6 agents may be granted a licence to kill (contradicted by the 2010 Guardian report of the official narrative). Dearlove admitted that, under the UK's Intelligence Services Act, MI6 agents were allowed to conduct illegal activities in the interests of national security, if given the written permission of the UK Foreign Secretary for a "Class Seven authorisation". However, to the clear disbelief of some in the public gallery, Dearlove claimed that this had never happened during his career in the service and that lethal force "played no part in the policy of Her Majesty's government". In April 2009 the former shadow home secretary, David Davis, asked how many such authorisation have been signed in recent years, he was told that the figure was confidential because "it would assist those unfriendly to the UK".

Demand for public disclosure

On 13 May 2014, Patrick Haseldine emailed David Cameron to request he "open all MI6 files on state sponsored murders".

Activities

Playing Dirty - MI6 Documentary

Operation Gladio

Full article: Operation Gladio

MI6 set up Operation Gladio in conjunction with the US Deep state at the end of WW2.

After denial at first in the 1990s, revelations began to mount and a picture emerged of a NATO Clandestine Planning Committee, responsible for the Gladio armies; of protocols which actively protected right-wing extremists from pursuit since they would be useful in anti-Communist activities. The CPC was run by the US with the UK and France as junior partners, with CIA members present at their meetings. Despite numerous revelations from those who took part, the official NATO position was (and is) one of denial. Official CIA response to information requests has been to neither confirm nor deny. In the UK, MI6 was even more cagey, prompting John Simpson on BBC 2’s Newsnight programme in April 1991 to say

'Britain's role in setting up stay-behinds throughout Europe was absolutely fundamental... it has emerged that other European countries had their own stay-behind armies - Belgium, France, Holland, Spain, Greece, Turkey. Even in neutral Sweden and Switzerland there has been public debate. And in some cases enquiries have been set up. Yet in Britain, there is nothing. Save the customary comment of the ministry of defence that they don't discuss matters of national security.'

(DG p.36)

Paradoxically, despite the secrecy, an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum tacitly admitted the existence of the stay behind networks, and subsequent to this, two former Royal Marine officers admitted to having spent time at Fort Monckton near Portsmouth where MI6 and members of the SAS trained foreign gladiators.

Operation Mass Appeal

Full article: Operation Mass Appeal

MI6 worked on Operation Mass Appeal, designed to facilitate public acquiescence about the illegal invasion of Iraq. The principal means whereby this was achieved was the production of a "dodgy dossier" of claims that Iraq had WMD which posed an imminent threat to the UK.

Exposure

Gareth Williams was a talented mathematician who worked in a highly sensitive and crucial position within GCHQ. His death was surrounded by mystery and controversy, as it occurred under suspicious circumstances.

2017 Cold War Slush Fund

Full article: MI6/Black budget

In 2017, a declassified document from the UK national archives revealed that Stewart Menzies had a multi-million pound personal "unofficial reserve" as MI6 chief for almost a decade. He only revealed the slush fund on his retirement in 1952. A significant part of the fund was used for black operations in the Middle East.

1999 List of MI6 agents

On 14 May 1999 a list of 116 MI6 agents, together with supporting commentary, was published on Lyndon LaRouche's now archived "Executive Intelligence Review" site. It was immediately replicated on other sites and in spite of efforts by MI6 to have the information removed, as of February 2014, it remains posted on Cryptome. It has been alleged that Richard Tomlinson was the source of the list, but he has consistently denied this. In The Big Breach he wrote "If MI6 had set out to produce a list that caused me the maximum incrimination, but caused them the minimum damage, they could not have done a better job."

Culture of impunity

In 1978, Peter Hayman, who held a senior dole in MI6, possibly deputy chief, reportedly left a package of paedophilia-related materials on a London bus.

In 2019 an enquiry heard that an MI6 officer was sacked for child pornography, but prosecutors dropped criminal charges.

 

Events carried out

Event	Location	Description
British Airways Flight 149	Kuwait	Flight 149 landed in Kuwait City only two hours after Iraqi forces had started the 1990 invasion. The British government put the passengers in danger in order to insert military personnel engaged in a ‘black ops’ mission.
Iran/1953 coup d'état	Iran	The first of many large scale coups was carried out at the behest of big oil, by the CIA. The report of the inaugural Bilderberg next year termed this "firm Western action in Persia ... [that] had produced successful results."
Operation Crevice	London UK	A raid launched in the UK on the so-called "fertiliser bomb plotters".
Operation Embarrass		A false flag bombing campaign MI6 carried out to try to stem Jewish immigration.
Operation Mass Appeal	UK	An effort by MI6 to facilitate the UK's invasion of Iraq.
Operation Yellowbird	China Hong Kong	A UK/US operation to extract Chinese leadership of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
1989	“In one sense MI6 and MI5 have got it right, are, in fact, a brilliant success. Faced with their biggest crisis of the post-war period, the end of the Red Menace which justified the budgets, the careers and the gongs, they have emerged with budgets renewed, new agendas approved; untouched by the politicians, unsupervised by anyone, still - we are not supposed to laugh - still accountable to the Crown not Parliament ( i.e. to no-one). Both MI6 and MI5 have reacted to the new conditions post Cold War in thoroughly competent, even creative ways. Needing something something to justify the budget, MI6 picked the international drug trade. Far as I know, since MI6 joined the 'war against drugs' the price of cocaine and heroin in the UK at street level has halved: it is now cheaper to get off your face, as they say in Hull, on smack than it is on alcohol. And didn't I read a few months ago that MI6 had persuaded Clare Short to task them to provide her with early warning of coups in the developing world? An honest-to-goodness license to do anything, anywhere. Only a Labour government, timid and ignorant, would fall for a proposal as preposterous as that one. MI5 hardly paused for breath after losing the KGB 'threat' contained in the Soviet Embassy and its Trade Mission, before acquiring the domestic terrorism franchise from the Met Special Branch and beginning the process of hyping up the animal rights and green activists as a new terrorist threat. (And they are getting a new definition of terrorism run through the Houses of Parliament to support it.) Of course, only the politicians and some of the media - the handful who are paying any attention at all - take the talk of the war on drugs seriously. MI6 don't, I am sure; any more than they seriously intend to provide Clare Short with an early warning of coups in the Third World. At the higher levels of MI6, MI5 and all the rest they must be chortling in the senior dining rooms at the incredible gullibility of the British political class - and this present lot in particular.”	Robin Ramsay
Intelligence agency	“There is something very wrong indeed with the UK security services, which are most certainly not a force for freedom or justice. That MI6 can be headed by as extreme a figure as Dearlove, underlines the threat that the security services pose to any progressive movement in politics.”	Craig Murray	11 January 2019
Iran	“Two years after Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh nationalized Iran’s oil industry that had been controlled by the company now known as British Petroleum a coup happened in Iran. “If nationalisation in Iran of oil was successful, this would set a terrible example to other countries where U.S. oil interests were present,” explains Ervand Abrahamian, Iranian historian and author of Oil Crisis in Iran: From Nationalism to Coup d’Etat and The Coup: 1953, The CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations. While the CIA has historically taken credit for Mosaddegh’s overthrow, “the British have not admitted their leading role,” notes Iranian filmmaker Taghi Amirani, whose documentary film Coup 53 uncovers the influence of MI6 agents who sought to preserve their imperial-era access to Iranian oil and pulled in the Americans by promising a “slice.” Seventy years later, says Amirani, “We are still living with the ripples of this disastrous event”	Democracy Now!	2023
Craig Murray	“The naive view of the world as “goodies” and “baddies”, with our own ruling class as the good guys, is for the birds. I witnessed personally in Uzbekistan the willingness of the UK and US security services to accept and validate intelligence they knew to be false in order to pursue their policy objectives.”	Craig Murray	13 March 2018

 

Employees on Wikispooks

Employee	Job	Appointed	End	Description
Mark Allen	Director of Counter-Terrorism
Richard Barrett	Director of Global Counter-terrorism
Marion de Chastelain	Spook	November 1943	1945
Richard Dearlove	?	1966	1991
Charles Farr		1980	1980
Charles Farr	MI6/Director of Security and Public Affairs		July 2007
Barrie Gane	Deputy Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service		1991	Tipped to be director, but went for early retirement
Peter Hayman	Belgrade Station Chief	1955	1958
Peter Hayman	Baghdad Station Chief	1959	1961
Peter Hayman	Malta Station Chief	1958	1959
Nicholas Langman				Head of MI6 at the British Embassy in Athens during 2005.
John Macgregor Bruce Lockhart	Unknown	1942	1961
James Le Mesurier			11 November 2019	Untimely death
Pablo Miller				Sergei Skripal's handler
John Scarlett	MI6/Director of Security and Public Affairs	September 2001	August 2002	Took the job on a week before 9/11.
Frank Steele	Spook	1951	1975
Geoffrey Tantum		1966
Richard Tomlinson		1991	1995

 

Event Planned

Event	Start	End	Location(s)	Description
Australia/1975 coup d'état	15 October 1975	11 November 1975	Australia Canberra	A UK/US deep state-backed covert "constitutional coup" to remove Gough Whitlam whom they saw as a loose cannon.

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:CIA-MI6 Intel Ops and Sabotage	article	7 February 2012	Felicity Arbuthnot	In 1957, joint plans by the CIA and MI6 to destabilize Syria by means of staged border incidents and special forces assassinations of key political figures were approved by UK PM Harold Macmillan and US President Eisenhower.
Document:Did SA spies bomb UN boss’ plane?	Article	17 August 2015	De Wet Potgieter	Susan Williams writes that in this set of documents – headed ‘Top Secret’ and ‘Your Eyes Only’ – Allen Dulles, the then director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, had promised full cooperation with Operation Celeste, which had also been agreed with British intelligence agency MI6.
Document:Getting it Right	article	2011	Lobster Magazine	A realistic appraisal of the functioning and lack of EFFECTIVE political oversight of the UK Secret Intelligence Services
Document:How British journalists are seduced by the Ministry of Defence and spooks	Article	28 September 2021	Richard Norton-Taylor	In the world of the spooks, few in the media raised questions about the root causes of terror attacks in Britain even when Eliza Manningham-Buller, then head of MI5, warned that the invasion of Iraq would increase the terrorist threat in Britain.
Document:How To Spot A Twitter Troll	Wikispooks Page	2 July 2019	Craig Murray	Exposure is the simple way to nullify the vast state propaganda programmes on social media
Document:How to spot a Twitter troll	blog post	2 July 2019	Craig Murray	Exposure is the simple way to nullify the vast state propaganda programmes on social media
Document:MI5 and MI6 pay out £12m to Britons held in Guantánamo	webpage	11 August 2011	Christopher Hope
Document:MI6, Theresa May and the Manchester attack	Article	30 May 2017	Jonathan Cook	And so the story of MI6 and Theresa May, their sponsorship of Islamic jihadism, and the likely “blowback” the UK just experienced in Manchester is a sleeping dog no one seems willing to disturb.
Document:On Her Majesty's Secret Service - Uncensored	webpage	1 April 2001	Gordon Logan
Document:Our Secret Servants - The Shayler Affair	Article	1 January 1998	Robin Ramsay	MI5 and its schizophrenic relationship with government
Document:Rothschild TNK-BP Intriguers Drafted The Trump-Russia Report	article	14 January 2017	Yoichi Shimatsu	An in-depth analysis of a 35 page UK-sourced intelligence document purporting to discredit Donald Trump and prove Russian involvement in the so-called 'hacking' of the 2016 presidential election.
Document:Speech by Head of MI6	speech	28 October 2010	John Sawers	A speech by then Director General of MI6 to The Society of Editors about the work of the SIS's and their relationship with the media.
Document:Swedish Medical Association Says White Helmets Murdered Kids for Fake Gas Attack Videos	article	6 April 2017	Gordon Duff	President Trump is now threatening to take America into a war against Syria, Iran and even Russia, a war he says is justified by “evidence” he received from Al Qaeda's White Helmets, a “Deep State” organisation funded by the CIA and MI6
Document:The Broader View Reveals the Ugliest of Prospects	blog post	17 June 2019	Craig Murray	I find it hard to believe that I live in times where Julian Assange suffers as he does for telling the truth, where a dedicated anti-racist like Jeremy Corbyn is subjected to daily false accusations of racism and to US and security service backed efforts to thwart his democratic prospects, where the most laughable false flag is paraded to move us towards war with Iran, and where there is no semblance of a genuinely independent media.
Document:The CIA/MI6 Skripal Conspiracy Exposed?	Wikispooks Page	16 November 2024	Kit Klarenberg	A longstanding Russia hawk who cut her Agency teeth recruiting spies in the Soviet Union in the years before its collapse, Gina Haspel twice served as the CIA’s London station chief - from 2008 to 2011, and 2014 to 2017. Sergei Skripal arrived in Britain in July 2010 via a grand spy swap during her first tenure, which was negotiated by Haspel’s longtime collaborator Daniel Hoffman, then-CIA Moscow station chief.
Document:The Markov and Maxwell Murders	webpage	20 August 2011	Gordon Logan
Document:Tiny Rowland – portrait of the bastard as a rebel	Article	August 1990	Nick Davies	All big entrepreneurs have the stink of unpopularity around them. Whether it is through envy or sincere distaste, Donald Trump, James Goldsmith, Rupert Murdoch, Robert Maxwell and Richard Branson have all become popular figures of hate. The one characteristic that has marked out Tiny Rowland is his lack of respect for authority.
Document:Torture Inquiry must reveal the Truth	article	7 July 2010	Peter Oborne
Document:UK Intelligence And Security Report, 2003	report	June 2003	Richard M. Bennett Katie Bennett	A compendious summary of the UK Intelligence And Security agencies, including people, events and places.
Document:UN to Probe Whether Iconic Secretary-General Was Assassinated	Article	1 August 2016	Colum Lynch	Susan Williams, who has studied SAIMR’s activities for years, said it would be a mistake to dismiss the papers’ authenticity out of hand. “I certainly would not discount the documents, which is why I went to so much trouble to find them,” she said. “Some of them may be what they are purported to be and some of them may not be what they are purported to be.”
Document:Whitehall Farce	book review	12 October 1989	Paul Foot	James Rusbridger: "Secrecy turns otherwise rational people into fascistic nutters; secrecy allows untold billions of pounds and endless energies to be wasted in unnecessary intelligence; secrecy pollutes the political process, muzzles what is left of the independent press and makes a mockery of Parliament and elections."
File:Orwellian Ireland.pdf	book	2008	Brian Nugent	A collection of articles on the Irish Deep State as it manifests in the power of its Intelligence services, all of which are alleged to be, to a greater or lesser extent, subservient to the UK and US intelligence services
File:Osp8.pdf	report	November 2005		The selection criteria and process for deciding on the selection of Intelligence records for declassification and inclusion in the National Archive
File:Security Services Act 1989.pdf	legal document			The Security Services Act 1989
File:The Big Breach.pdf	book	2001	Richard Tomlinson	Ex-MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson tells his story - of particular interest in what he has to say about the death of Diana Pricess of Wales. The UK authorites made strenuous efforts to prevent publication of the book and Tomlinson was subjected to serious harassment and terms of imprisonment
File:Ukintell0809.pdf	report	2008		UK Intelligence and Security Committee Annual Report 2007-2008

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