MI6 is The UK's version of the CIA. Except they came first and provided the model. But there's still a lot we don't know about this notoriously tight-lipped organization. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: Who are the hosts of this podcast episode about MI6?
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Chapter 2: 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.
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Chapter 3: How did MI6 originate and who was its first chief?
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So by the time World War I rolled around, what was it, 1911, I think? I'm sure I'm wrong and we're going to get a bunch of emails, but let's just say for sake of argument, it was 1911. This is just a couple of years after the Bureau was formed and Sir Cumming was, you know, running around doing his thing. But by this time, he'd—yeah, writing letters with invisible ink all over the place.
By this time, though, he'd cultivated some sources already in Germany. He had one guy named B. He was C, and his first source was B. who would report on, you know, comings and goings on the coast and the harbor and their ship sizes and how many ships were in their fleet.
And although they totally dropped the ball on Germany invading neutral Belgium, which was a big deal, they still managed to give them a lot of like really important intel that basically proved the idea that Britain could really use a MI6 or something like it.
Yeah, I mean, it seemed to be the way I read this was like these are just sort of the baby steps. They didn't have like kind of the authority they would have later on, and they were kind of sussing out how valuable they might be. So they were just sort of getting established after World War I was when they were fully established as the SIS.
But they were, you know, they were monitoring Russia, trying to keep them in the war. They were like, what are the Americans thinking right now? What's going on in the Oval Office? Because we'd like to bring them into the war. And they were doing yeoman's work, you know, providing, you know, the kind of stuff you would see in like the Great Escape, even though that was World War Two.
Like if you're a POW, you might get a map and a compass smuggled into you, stuff like that, trying to foil bombing plots and things like that. So they were like, you know, what do you think of us now? How are we doing? And apparently good enough to be official after the war.
Yeah. So by the time the interwar period comes along, the 20s, 30s, well, there were some more legendary people. This was a time where it was just like the Wild West in Great Britain as far as spy crafts and intelligence goes. And there's this one guy who's definitely worth mentioning. He was an early agent. And we should say most people call anybody who would be working for MI6 an agent.
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Chapter 4: What are some legendary stories and spy craft associated with Sir Mansfield Cumming?
Yeah, I think circus director fit better on a card than king of the modern circus. Right. And he was an understated guy. He wasn't flamboyant.
No. There you go. Yeah, it would have been one of those things where it starts out normal, but as it gets closer to the edge of the card, they start cramping letters together. Right.
Like a poster made for elementary school?
Right, for the science fair.
Exactly.
What happens with vinegar and baking soda?
Yeah, I still do that sometimes when I have to. I'm not great at spacing like that. It has to do with your brain, I think, spatial awareness and stuff.
Yeah, I'm not that good at it either. Don't worry. All right, good. So for a long time, not a lot happened. And then World War II broke out. And World War II, by this time, remember, MI6 had proved its metal and worth in World War I. You had a whole decade or two where it just kept proving its worth. And so by the time the war broke out, you would think that they would be totally ready for this.
But I don't know if it caught them off guard or they were just allowed to... kind of be pruned in peacetime? I don't know. But it took them a minute to get their footing and regenerate intelligence, like human intelligence networks in Europe.
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Chapter 5: How did MI6 operate during World War I and the interwar period?
With like trained sharks in a moat.
That you can get a membership to.
Yeah, exactly. So speeding along up to the Cold War, we are now at a place where, like the USA, the Cold War was dominated in MI6 by the Soviets and communism, the spread of communism. agents, double agents, secret agents, triple agents. They were doing the same work we were. They partnered up with the CIA in 1948, again, which was modeled on MI6.
And they were trying to sort of, at this point, balance intelligence with covert actions because it wasn't like an act of war. So they had to approach it differently. And they said that at the time, there were a couple of different types of, I guess, what, officers working there?
Yeah.
Almost an agent. But Moscow men who are apparently very careful and, you know, gathering that intelligence and then camel drivers who were people they would send in to like on the ground in the field at a local place to ally themselves with locals to maybe. mountain insurrection or something like that.
Yeah, and I'm guessing the camel drivers came from the Special Operations Executive Heritage because that's exactly the kind of guerrilla warfare the SOE engaged in in World War II. So I'm guessing that's how that survived into the Cold War.
Yeah, and of course, because it's the Cold War, a lot of the intelligence that these Moscow men were gathering was like, hey, we're not at war, but in case something happens... We know that they've got these airfields. They've got this many tanks, this many soldiers on the ground that could move here in this amount of time. So, you know, it was sort of a readiness operation at that point.
Yeah. And not just like, OK, we they have a huge stockpile of these weapons. The opposite could be just as valuable to like, actually, they don't have that many missiles. So all this bluster about them blowing the UK into the ocean is actually full of hot air. So we don't need to be quite as scared about it.
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Chapter 6: What role did MI6 play in World War II and how did it interact with other agencies?
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Are you talking about Oleg Gordievsky?
Yes, that's exactly who I'm talking about, a KGB colonel.
That's right. Apparently this guy, and this is how you can, you know, get someone on your side from the, or at least at the time from that side, is if they really like Western culture.
Yeah, the cowabunga lifestyle.
Yeah, they're like a really like, I don't know, American sports and music and fashion, then that could be enough. And apparently he was on assignment in Copenhagen and they were like, this guy loves Western culture and he might be worth, you know, getting in touch with. And sure enough, it actually worked.
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Chapter 7: What is the origin of 'Q' and the technological innovations in MI6?
and the rest of the world got and believed bad information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Yeah. It's said that that is the lowest moment in MI6 history since Kim Philby was discovered as a traitor and longtime spy, which is really saying something if you've heard our episode on Kim Philby. But I would say that this was even much, much worse because of how many people died in the Iraq war.
Yeah.
And the reason why it was such a big deal, this bad intelligence, is because the U.S. and the U.K. essentially made a pact like we're going to invade Iraq together to topple this regime. We just want to get rid of Saddam Hussein. That's not legal. If Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, now it's legal under basically international law.
So they really went to a lot of trouble to try to find anything that suggested that. And in the end, they just relied on these sources that just were totally untrustworthy. And I don't remember where we talked about it, but one of the sources that the U.S. and the U.K. relied on to invade Iraq with said they have weapons of mass destruction.
They keep them in these glass canisters and in these like little glass balls. And the glass balls are green. And Nicolas Cage protects them with Sean Connery.
Yeah, I mean, learned people really genuinely suspect that that could have been misinformation based on The Rock.
Yeah. And that the handful of British ministers and politicians who saw this intel had not seen The Rock, apparently. It just didn't ring any bells if they had seen it.
Well, they had better taste in that.
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Chapter 8: How did MI6 function during the Cold War and what challenges did it face?
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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.
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