What we know about MI6
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Who are the hosts of this podcast episode about MI6?
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Hi, I'm Sam Mullins, and I've got a new podcast coming out called Go Boy, the gritty true story of how one man fought his way out of some of the darkest places imaginable. Roger Caron was 16 when first convicted. That's spent 24 of those years in jail. But when Roger Caron picked up a pen and paper, he went from an ex-con to a literary darling. From Campside Media and iHeart Podcasts, listen to Go Boy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and there's Jerry. And this is Stuff You Should Know. And I have to say, we didn't have the most auspicious start just now, Chuck. I stepped on you at the countdown for us to sync. That's not a good sign. Don't you think that's not a good sign?
I think if you look at it another way, we were in sync because we were both kind of trying to say the same thing.
Wow, that was a silver lining. How's that? There's not been any better NSYNC since Lance Bass and Justin Timberlake were running around together.
We should preface this, by the way, we're doing an episode today on MI6, the United Kingdom's secret intelligence service. Is that how you pronounce it? MI6, what do you say?
What is MI6 and how does it compare to the CIA and MI5?
MI6.
That's what I've been saying in my head, at least. Oh, no. Yeah. That is an inauspicious beginning then, for sure. But, you know, this is a little, it risks being a little disjointed because if you kind of went down every rabbit hole that we speak about here, we'd be here for days.
Oh, yeah. One of the things that lets us off the hook, though, that I found, and I'm sure Kyle, who helped us with this, we had our man in Britain to make him an agent and us officers. That's right. Because he was giving us intel on MI6. If you go and just start researching it, especially if you just type in MI6, they've done a pretty good job of... keeping search results pretty sanitized.
Yeah.
Like I would say out of the top 20 results, two are not official MI6 pages. So it's kind of hard to research them, especially considering they've only been publicly recognized as actually existing since the mid 90s.
Yeah, 1990s, that is. They are the oldest operating, continuously, that is, operating foreign intelligence gathering organization anywhere in the world. And like I said, if you're American, you can think of MI6 as sort of their CIA. And in fact, our own CIA was born out of, not out of MI6, but they had a lot to do with how we did things.
Yeah, we use them as a kind of a model.
Yeah, there you go. That's a very clean way to say that.
So there's two things that MI6 does, and that really does kind of get it across. They're like Britain's equivalent of the CIA, or better yet, the CIA is America's equivalent of MI6. So they gather intelligence, and they gather internationally, abroad. There's also MI5, which you could say is roughly equivalent in the U.S. to the FBI. They do domestic stuff. But MI6 is concerned about everything else in the world. And by gathering intelligence, they usually use two methods or they gather – yeah, two methods. One is human intelligence, which is good old-fashioned spying, using people who are secretly spying on their own governments or whatever. And then the other is signal intelligence, which is intercepting communications. And I saw that –
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who are the hosts of this podcast episode about MI6?
0:05–2:10
2
What is MI6 and how does it compare to the CIA and MI5?
2:10–17:03
3
How did MI6 originate and who was its first chief?
17:03–22:41
4
What are some legendary stories and spy craft associated with Sir Mansfield Cumming?
22:41–30:04
5
How did MI6 operate during World War I and the interwar period?
30:04–38:56
6
What role did MI6 play in World War II and how did it interact with other agencies?
38:56–49:28
7
What is the origin of 'Q' and the technological innovations in MI6?
49:28–57:09
8
How did MI6 function during the Cold War and what challenges did it face?
57:09–58:30
Speakers
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