Atestat Engleza
Atestat Engleza
Atestat Engleza
INTELLIGENCE SERVICE
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.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(c), the Special Intelligence Service
and even C's organisation. Around 1920, it began increasingly to be referred to as
the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), 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.
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".Sinclair died in 1939, after an illness, and was replaced as C by Lt Col.
Stewart Menzies (Horse Guards), who had been with the service since the end of
World War I.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 into 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 and 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.
GC&CS was the source of Ultra intelligence, which was very useful.
1939 saw the most significant failure of the service during the war, known as
the Venlo incident for the Dutch town where much of the operation took place.
Agents of the German army secret service, the Abwehr, and the counter-espionage
section of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), posed as high-ranking officers involved in a
plot to depose Hitler. In a series of meetings between SIS agents and the
'conspirators', SS plans to abduct the SIS team were shelved due to the presence of
Dutch police. On the night of 8–9 November, a meeting took place without police
presence. There, the two SIS agents were duly abducted by the SS.In 1940,
journalist and Soviet agent Kim Philby applied for a vacancy in Section D of SIS,
and was vetted by his friend and fellow Soviet agent Guy Burgess. When Section
D was absorbed by Special Operations Executive (SOE) in summer of 1940,
Philby was appointed as an instructor in black propaganda at the SOE's training
establishment in Beaulieu, Hampshire.In May 1940, MI6 set up British Security
Co-ordination (BSC), on the authorisation of Prime Minister Winston Churchill
over the objections of Stewart Menzies.This was a covert organisation based in
New York City, headed by William Stephenson intended to investigate enemy
activities, prevent sabotage against British interests in the Americas, and mobilise
pro-British opinion in the Americas.[36][37] BSC also founded Camp X in Canada
to train clandestine operators and to establish (in 1942) a telecommunications relay
station, code name Hydra, operated by engineer Benjamin deForest Bayly.
In early 1944 MI6 re-established Section IX, its prewar anti-Soviet section,
and Philby took a position there. He was able to alert the NKVD about all British
intelligence on the Soviets—including what the American OSS had shared with the
British about the Soviets.Despite these difficulties the service nevertheless
conducted substantial and successful operations in both occupied Europe and in the
Middle East and Far East where it operated under the cover name Inter-Services
Liaison Department (ISLD).
Cold War
In August 1945 Soviet intelligence officer Konstantin Volkov tried to defect
to the UK, offering the names of all Soviet agents working inside British
intelligence. Philby received the memo on Volkov's offer and alerted the Soviets,
so they could arrest him.In 1946, SIS absorbed the "rump" remnant of the Special
Operations Executive (SOE), dispersing the latter's personnel and equipment
between its operational divisions or "controllerates" and new Directorates for
Training and Development and for War Planning. The 1921 arrangement was
streamlined with the geographical, operational units redesignated "Production
Sections", sorted regionally under Controllers, all under a Director of Production.
The Circulating Sections were renamed "Requirements Sections" and placed under
a Directorate of Requirements.SIS operations against the USSR were extensively
compromised by the presence of an agent working for the Soviet Union, Harold
Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby, in the post-war Counter-Espionage Section, R5. SIS
suffered further embarrassment when it turned out that an officer involved in both
the Vienna and Berlin tunnel operations had been turned as a Soviet agent during
internment by the Chinese during the Korean War. This agent, George Blake,
returned from his internment to be treated as something of a hero by his
contemporaries in "the office". His security authorisation was restored, and in 1953
he was posted to the Vienna Station where the original Vienna tunnels had been
running for years. After compromising these to his Soviet controllers, he was
subsequently assigned to the British team involved on Operation Gold, the Berlin
tunnel, and which was, consequently, blown from the outset. In 1956, SIS Director
John Alexander Sinclair had to resign after the botched affair of the death of Lionel
Crabb.SIS activities included a range of covert political actions, including the
overthrow of Mohammed Mossadeq in Iran in the 1953 Iranian coup d'état (in
collaboration with the US Central Intelligence Agency).Despite earlier Soviet
penetration, SIS began to recover as a result of improved vetting and security, and
a series of successful penetrations. From 1958, SIS had three moles in the Polish
UB, the most successful of which was codenamed NODDY.[45] The CIA
described the information SIS received from these Poles as "some of the most
valuable intelligence ever collected", and rewarded SIS with $20 million to expand
their Polish operation.In 1961 Polish defector Michael Goleniewski exposed
George Blake as a Soviet agent. Blake was identified, arrested, tried for espionage
and sent to prison. He escaped and was exfiltrated to the USSR in 1966.
Also, in the GRU, they recruited Colonel Oleg Penkovsky. Penkovsky ran
for two years as a considerable success, providing several thousand photographed
documents, including Red Army rocketry manuals that allowed US National
Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) analysts to recognise the deployment
pattern of Soviet SS4 MRBMs and SS5 IRBMs in Cuba in October 1962.SIS
operations against the USSR continued to gain pace through the remainder of the
Cold War, arguably peaking with the recruitment in the 1970s of Oleg Gordievsky
whom SIS ran for the better part of a decade, then successfully exfiltrated from the
USSR across the Finnish border in 1985.
SIS were heavily involved in the Soviet–Afghan War – which turned out to
be most extensive covert operation since the Second World War.SIS supported the
Islamic resistance group commanded by Ahmad Shah Massoud and he became a
key ally in the fight against the Soviets. An annual mission of two SIS officers as
well as military instructors were sent to Massoud and his fighters. Through them
weapons and supplies, radios and vital intelligence on Soviet battle plans were all
sent to the Afghan resistance. SIS also helped to retrieve crashed Soviet helicopters
from Afghanistan.The real scale and impact of SIS activities during the second half
of the Cold War remains unknown, however, because the bulk of their most
successful targeting operations against Soviet officials were the result of "Third
Country" operations recruiting Soviet sources travelling abroad in Asia and Africa.
These included the defection to the SIS Tehran station in 1982 of KGB officer
Vladimir Kuzichkin, the son of a senior Politburo member and a member of the
KGB's internal Second Chief Directorate who provided SIS and the British
government with warning of the mobilisation of the KGB's Alpha Force during the
1991 August Coup which briefly toppled Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
War on Terror
During the Global War on Terror, SIS accepted information from the CIA
that was obtained through torture, including the extraordinary rendition
programme. Craig Murray, a UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, had written several
memos critical of the UK's acceptance of this information; he was then sacked
from his job.
In mid-December, MI6 officers who had been deployed to the region began
to interview prisoners held by the Northern Alliance. In January 2002, they began
interviewing prisoners held by the Americans. On 10 January 2002, an MI6 officer
conducted his first interview of a detainee held by the Americans. He reported back
to London that there were aspects of how the detainee had been handled by the US
military before the interview that did not seem consistent with the Geneva
Conventions. Two days after the interview, he was sent instructions, copied to all
MI5 and MI6 officers in Afghanistan, about how to solve concerns over
mistreatment, referring to signs of abuse: "Given that they are not within our
custody or control, the law does not require you to intervene to protect this." It
went on to say that the Americans had to understand that the UK did not condone
such mistreatment and that a complaint should be made to a senior US official if
there was any coercion by the US in conjunction with an MI6 interview.In the run-
up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, it is alleged, although not confirmed, that some SIS
members conducted Operation Mass Appeal, which was a campaign to plant
stories about Iraq's WMDs in the media. The operation was exposed in The Sunday
Times in December 2003.Claims by former weapons inspector Scott Ritter suggest
that similar propaganda campaigns against Iraq date back well into the 1990s.
Ritter says that SIS recruited him in 1997 to help with the propaganda effort,
saying "the aim was to convince the public that Iraq was a far greater threat than it
actually was." Towards the end of the invasion, SIS agents operating out of
Baghdad International Airport with Special Air Service (SAS) protection, began to
re-establish a station in Baghdad and began gathering intelligence, in particular on
WMDs. After it became clear that Iraq did not possess any WMDs, MI6 officially
withdrew pre-invasion intelligence about them. In the months after the invasion,
they also began gathering political intelligence; predicting what would happen in
post-Baathist Iraq. MI6 personnel in the country never exceeded 50; in early 2004,
apart from supporting Task Force Black in hunting down former senior Ba'athist
party members, MI6 also made an effort to target "transnational terrorism"/jihadist
networks that led to the SAS carrying out Operation Aston in February 2004: They
conducted a raid on a house in Baghdad that was part of a "jihadist pipeline" that
ran from Iran to Iraq that US and UK intelligence agencies were tracking suspects
on – the raid captured members of Pakistan based terrorist group.Shortly before the
Second Battle of Fallujah, MI6 personnel visited JSOCs TSF (Temporary
Screening Facility) at Balad Air Base to question a suspected insurgent. Afterwards
they raised concerns about the poor detention conditions there. As a result, the
British government informed JSOC in Iraq that prisoners captured by British
special forces would only be turned over to JSOC if there was an undertaking not
to send them to Balad. In Spring 2005, the SAS detachment operating in Basra and
southern Iraq, known as Operation Hathor, escorted MI6 case officers into Basra so
they could meet their sources and handlers. MI6 provided information that enabled
the detachment to carry out surveillance operations. MI6 were also involved in
resolving the Basra prison incident; the SIS played a central role in the British
withdrawal from Basra in 2007.
By 2012, MI6 had reorganised after 9/11 and reshuffled its staff, opening
new stations overseas, with Islamabad becoming the largest station. MI6's uptick in
funding was not as large as that for MI5, but it still struggled to recruit fast enough;
former members were rehired to help out. MI6 maintained intelligence coverage of
suspects as they moved from the UK overseas, particularity to Pakistan.In October
2013, SIS appealed for reinforcements and extra staff from other intelligence
agencies amid growing concern about a terrorist threat from Afghanistan and that
the country would become an "intelligence vacuum" after British troops withdraw
at the end of 2014.
In March 2016, it was reported that MI6 had been involved in the Libyan
Civil War since January of that year, having been escorted by the SAS to meet with
Libyan officials to discuss the supplying of weapons and training for the Syrian
Army and the militias fighting against ISIS.In April 2016, it was revealed that MI6
teams with members of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment seconded to them
had been deployed to Yemen to train Yemeni forces fighting AQAP, as well as
identifying targets for drone strikes.In November 2016, The Independent reported
that MI6, MI5 and GCHQ supplied the SAS and other British special forces a list
of 200 British jihadists to kill or capture before they attempt to return to the UK.
The jihadists are senior members of ISIS who pose a direct threat to the UK.
Sources said SAS soldiers have been told that the mission could be the most
important in the regiment's 75-year history.
Other Activities
On 6 May 2004 it was announced that Sir Richard Dearlove was to be
replaced as head of SIS by John Scarlett, former chairman of the Joint Intelligence
Committee. Scarlett was an unusually high-profile appointment to the job, and
gave evidence at the Hutton Inquiry.SIS has been active in the Balkans, playing a
vital role in hunting down people wanted by the International War Crimes Tribunal
in The Hague. British intelligence operations in the Balkans are thought to have
played a vital role in the handover of the former Yugoslav president Slobodan
Milošević to The Hague; SIS was also heavily involved in the hunt for Radovan
Karadžić and General Ratko Mladic, who are linked to a vast range of war crimes
including the murder of Srebrenica's surrendering male population and organising
the Siege of Sarajevo.On 27 September 2004, it was reported that British spies
across the Balkans, including a SIS was chief officer in Belgrade and another spy
in Sarajevo, were moved or forced to withdraw after they were publicly identified
in a number of media reports planted by disgruntled local intelligence services –
particularly in Croatia and Serbia. A third individual was branded a British spy in
the Balkans and left the office of the High Representative in Bosnia, whilst a
further two British intelligence officers working in Zagreb, remained in place
despite their cover being blown in the local press. The exposure of the agents
across the three capitals has markedly undermined the British intelligence
operations in the area, including SIS efforts to capture The Hague's most wanted
men, which riled many local intelligence agencies in the Balkans, some of which
are suspected of continuing ties to alleged war criminals. They were riled due to
MI6 operating "not so much a spy network as a network of influence within Balkan
security services and the media," said the director of the International Crisis Group
in Serbia and Bosnia, which caused some of them to be "upset". In Serbia, the SIS
station chief was forced to leave his post in August 2004 after a campaign against
him led by country's DB intelligence agency, where his work investigating the
2003 assassination of the reformist prime minister Zoran Djindjic won him few
friends.
Sir John Sawers became head of the SIS in November 2009, the first
outsider to head SIS in more than 40 years. Sawers came from the Diplomatic
Service, previously having been the British Permanent Representative to the
United Nations.On 7 June 2011, John Sawers received Romania's President Traian
Băsescu and George-Cristian Malor, the head of the Serviciul Roman de Informatii
(SRI) at SIS headquarters.
Five years before the Libyan Civil War, a UK Special Forces unit was
formed called E Squadron which was composed of selected members of the 22nd
SAS Regiment, the SBS and the SRR. It was tasked by the Director Special Forces
to support MI6's operations (akin to the CIA's SAC – a covert paramilitary unit for
SIS). It was not a formal squadron within the establishment of any individual UK
Special Forces unit, but at the disposal of both the Director Special Forces and the
SIS; previously, SIS relied primarily on contractor personnel. The Squadron carried
out missions that required 'maximum discretion' in places that were 'off the radar or
considered dangerous'; the Squadron's members often operated in plain clothes,
with the full range of national support, such as false identities at its disposal. In
early March 2011, during the Libyan Civil War, a covert operation in Libya
involving E Squadron went wrong: The aim of the mission was to cement SIS's
contacts with the rebels by flying in two SIS agents in a Chinook helicopter to
meet a Libyan Intermediary in a town near Benghazi, who had promised to fix
them up a meeting with the NTC. A team consisting of six E Squadron members
(all from the SAS) and two SIS officers were flown into Libya by an RAF Special
Forces Flight Chinook; the Squadron's members were carrying bags containing
arms, ammunition, explosives, computers, maps and passports from at least four
nationalities. Despite technical backup, the team landed in Libya without any prior
agreement with the rebel leadership, and the plan failed as soon as the team landed.
The locals became suspicious they were foreign mercenaries or spies and the team
was detained by rebel forces and taken to a military base in Benghazi. They were
then hauled before a senior rebel leader; the team told him that they were in the
country to determine the rebels' needs and to offer assistance, but the discovery of
British troops on the ground enraged the rebels who were fearful that Gaddafi
would use such evidence to destroy the credibility of the NTC. Negotiations
between senior rebel leaders and British officials in London finally led to their
release and they were allowed to board HMS Cumberland.On 16 November 2011
SIS warned the national transitional council in Benghazi after discovering details
of planned strikes, said foreign secretary William Hague. 'The agencies obtained
firm intelligence, were able to warn the NTC of the threat, and the attacks were
prevented,' he said. In a rare speech on the intelligence agencies, he praised the key
role played by SIS and GCHQ in bringing Gaddafi's 42-year dictatorship to an end,
describing them as 'vital assets' with a 'fundamental and indispensable role' in
keeping the nation safe. 'They worked to identify key political figures, develop
contacts with the emerging opposition and provide political and military
intelligence. 'Most importantly, they saved lives,' he said. The speech follows
criticism that SIS had been too close to the Libyan regime and was involved in the
extraordinary rendition of anti-Gaddafi activists. Mr Hague also defended
controversial proposals for secrecy in civil courts in cases involving intelligence
material.
Notable People
Cambridge Five, a Cold War Soviet spy ring
Bill Hudson, SIS agent, thought to be one of the figures on whom James Bond was
based.
Horst Kopkow, SS officer who worked for SIS after the Second World War
Aggie MacKenzie, TV presenter and journalist who spent two years working for
MI6
Buildings
SIS Headquarters
Since 1995, SIS headquarters has been at 85 Vauxhall Cross, along the
Albert Embankment in Vauxhall on the south bank of the River Thames by
Vauxhall Bridge, London. Previous headquarters have been Century House, 100
Westminster Bridge Road, Lambeth (1966–1995), 54 Broadway, off Victoria
Street, London (1924–1966) and 2 Whitehall Court (1911–1922). Although SIS
operated from Broadway, it made considerable use of the adjoining St. Ermin's
Hotel.The building was designed by Sir Terry Farrell and built by John Laing.[94]
The developer Regalian Properties approached the government in 1987 to see if
they had any interest in the proposed building. At the same time, MI5 was seeking
alternative accommodation and co-location of the two services was studied. In the
end this proposal was abandoned due to the lack of buildings of adequate size
(existing or proposed) and the security considerations of providing a single target
for attacks. In December 1987, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's government
approved the purchase of the new building for SIS.The building design was
reviewed to incorporate the necessary protection for the UK's foreign intelligence
gathering agency. This includes overall increased security, extensive computer
suites, technical areas, bomb blast protection, emergency back-up systems and
protection against electronic eavesdropping. While the details and cost of
construction have been released, about ten years after the original National Audit
Office (NAO) report was written, some of the service's special requirements
remain classified. The NAO report Thames House and Vauxhall Cross has certain
details omitted, describing in detail the cost and problems of certain modifications,
but not what these are. Rob Humphrey's London: The Rough Guide suggests one
of these omitted modifications is a tunnel beneath the Thames to Whitehall. The
NAO put the final cost at £135.05 million for site purchase and the basic building,
or £152.6 million including the service's special requirements.The setting of the
SIS offices was featured in the James Bond films GoldenEye, The World Is Not
Enough, Die Another Day, Skyfall, and Spectre. SIS allowed filming of the
building itself for the first time in The World is Not Enough for the pre-credits
sequence, where a bomb hidden in a briefcase full of money is detonated inside the
building. A Daily Telegraph article said that the British government opposed the
filming, but this was denied by a Foreign Office spokesperson. In Skyfall the
building is once again attacked by an explosion, this time by a cyber attack turning
on a gas line and igniting the fumes, after which SIS operations are moved to a
secret underground facility.[96] In Spectre, the evil head of crime organisation
SPECTRE, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, traps Agent 007 James Bond alongside the film's
Bond girl Madeleine Swann inside the remains of the building. Blofeld then
detonated bombs planted in the building, demolishing what was left of the building
fully, though Bond managed to save Swann and escape before the building
exploded.On the evening of 20 September 2000, the building was attacked using a
Russian-built RPG-22 anti-tank rocket launcher. Striking the eighth floor, the
missile caused only superficial damage. The Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorist
Branch attributed responsibility to the Real IRA.
Other Buildings
Most other buildings are held or nominally occupied by the Foreign &
Commonwealth Office. They include:
- Fort Monckton: a former fort dating from the 1780s, rebuilt in the 1880s, is now
the field operations training centre for SIS.
The Circus
MI6 is nicknamed The Circus. Some say this was coined by John le Carré
(former SIS officer David Cornwell) in his espionage novels and named after a
fictional building on Cambridge Circus. Leo Marks explains in his World War II
memoir Between Silk and Cyanide that the name arose because a section of the
Special Operations Executive was housed in a building at 1 Dorset Square,
London, which had formerly belonged to the directors of Bertram Mills circus.
Chiefs
1909–1923: Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming, KCMG CB
The End!
Thank you,
Balasoiu Vlad
12B