Qualla: MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service)

MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service): Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Laurie Nevay, CC BY-SA 2.0. Captain Sir Mansfield George Smith-Cumming was the founding head of what we now call MI6. He had lost a leg in a car crash and disliked the Smith in his name; in correspondence he tended to drop it. He signed his notes with one letter, the green-ink initial C. He died at home in 1923, shortly before he was meant to retire, having served the institution he created for fourteen years. Every chief of the Secret Intelligence Service since then has signed their internal correspondence with that same letter, C, in that same green ink. There have been eighteen of them. The current C, since October 2025, is a woman: Blaise Metreweli.

Image: Laurie Nevay | CC BY-SA 2.0

MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service): 1909 and the Foreign Section

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ernst Schäfer, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. Britain founded its Secret Service Bureau in 1909, the year of King Edward VII's last full reign, as a small office charged with countering an imagined German invasion threat. The Foreign Section, under Cumming, dealt with intelligence collected abroad; the Home Section, under Ca...

Image: Ernst Schäfer | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service): The Cambridge Five

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Heinz Junge, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. Through the 1930s a Soviet recruiter in Vienna identified clever, idealistic young Englishmen at Cambridge - men sympathetic to communism in an age of fascism, men who would later be useful inside the British establishment. The most senior of the resulting Five, the longest-servi...

Image: Peter Heinz Junge | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service): Bletchley and the Polish Gift

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Laurie Nevay, CC BY-SA 2.0. On the 26th and 27th of July 1939, weeks before Hitler invaded Poland, Polish military intelligence brought representatives of British intelligence to a forest near Warsaw and handed them a reconstructed Enigma machine, along with the cryptographic techniques the Poles had develo...

Image: Laurie Nevay | CC BY-SA 2.0

MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service): Penkovsky and the Missiles

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Laurie Nevay, CC BY-SA 2.0. The most consequential agent MI6 ever ran was a Soviet colonel named Oleg Penkovsky, recruited jointly with the American CIA in 1961 and run for the better part of two years. He passed thousands of photographed documents, including Red Army rocketry manuals that allowed US analys...

Image: Laurie Nevay | CC BY-SA 2.0

MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service): Vauxhall Cross

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dormskirk, CC BY-SA 3.0. From 1924 until 1964, SIS occupied 54 Broadway, off Victoria Street, with a great deal of its real business done in the adjoining St Ermin's Hotel. After that the service moved through various central London buildings until Margaret Thatcher's government approved, in December 198...

Image: Dormskirk | CC BY-SA 3.0

MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service): The C, and What the C Does

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Laurie Nevay, CC BY-SA 2.0. The chief of SIS, by long custom, signs internal correspondence with the single letter C, in green ink, as Mansfield Cumming did in 1909. The C is appointed by the Foreign Secretary and reports directly to her. The job is twofold: managing the intelligence officers who recruit an...

Image: Laurie Nevay | CC BY-SA 2.0