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− | MI6 | + | '''MI6''', also known as the '''Secret Intelligence Service''' is a UK [[intelligence agency]] charged with foreign intelligence and operations. Its full name is '''HM Secret Intelligence Service'''{{cn}}. Its headquarters (right) are at 85 Vauxhall Cross, [[London]], on the South Bank of the river Thames {{Maplink|51.487269,-0.124648}}. It is not to be confused with [[MI5]], which focuses on the [[UK]]. Some rivalry exists between the two groups. |
==Official Narrative== | ==Official Narrative== |
Revision as of 05:47, 27 September 2015
MI6 | |
---|---|
MI6 HQ Building London, viewed from the North bank of the River Thames | |
Motto | Semper Occultus (Always Secret) |
Predecessor | Secret Service Bureau |
Formation | 1909 |
Parent organization | UK |
Headquarters | SIS Building, London, UK51°29′16″N 0°07′29″W, 51.48778°N 0.12472°W, 51.48778, -0.12472 |
Type | Intelligence agency |
Subgroups | Irish Joint Section |
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 |
MI6, also known as the Secret Intelligence Service is a UK intelligence agency charged with foreign intelligence and operations. Its full name is HM Secret Intelligence Service[citation needed]. Its headquarters (right) are at 85 Vauxhall Cross, London, on the South Bank of the river Thames Map. It is not to be confused with MI5, which focuses on the UK. Some rivalry exists between the two groups.
Contents
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 breeching the Official Secrets Act.[1] 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.[2] 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."[3] Impressed by documents relating to Operation Embarrass, he appears not to have considered that this revelation might be a limited hangout.
Problems
Before it was even officially admitted to exist, on 9 December 1993, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay of Clashfern has noted 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".[4] The extreme secrecy of MI6's operations, and the statements by various whistleblowers does not inspire confidence in their purportedly high ethical standards.
State sponsored murder
On 19th February 2008 when speaking to an inquest about the premature death of Princess Diana, 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[3]). 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".[5] 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".[6]
Demand for public disclosure
On 13 May 2014, former diplomat Patrick Haseldine emailed David Cameron to request he "open all MI6 files on state sponsored murders".[7][8][9][10]
Leaks
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.[11] 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. [12] 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."
Leadership
- Full article: Chief of the SIS
- Full article: Chief of the SIS
The Chief of the SIS is the only publicly acknowledged position of MI6. Since Sir David Spedding held the position (1994-1999) it has been held for 5 years at a time. The Chief tends to appoint the deputy.
See Also
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 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 |
References
- ↑ http://spartacus-educational.com/FWWm6.htm
- ↑ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/8011165/Former-MI6-chief-Sir-John-Scarlett-fears-losing-friends-over-memoirs.html
- ↑ a b http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/sep/21/spy-secrets-history-mi6
- ↑ HL Deb 528, 1–12, 9 December 1993, col.1029.
- ↑ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-516712/Ex-MI6-chief-admits-agents-licence-kill-denies-executing-Diana.html
- ↑ http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmhansrd/cm090428/text/90428w0012.htm
- ↑ http://www.thepetitionsite.com/859/022/615/open-all-mi6-files-on-state-sponsored-murders/
- ↑ http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/prime-minister-david-cameron-open-all-mi6-files-on-state-sponsored-murders/
- ↑ https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/open-all-mi6-files-on-state-sponsored-murders/
- ↑ https://secure.avaaz.org/en/petition/Prime_Minister_David_Cameron_Open_all_MI6_files_on_state_sponsored_murders/
- ↑ Executive Intelligence Review archive site
- ↑ Cryptome page about the MI6 list(s)