58 Fun Facts About MI6

What do the letters MI stand for in the name MI6?

Military Intelligence. MI6 was adopted as a flag of convenience at the start of the Second World War and stuck in the press, though the service has called itself the Secret Intelligence Service since about 1920.

What kind of work is MI6 primarily responsible for?

Foreign espionage overseas. By law MI6 may act only against people outside the British Islands, so catching foreign spies at home falls to a sister service.

Bond's boss is M, but which letter names the real MI6 chief?

C. It began as the initial of the first chief, Mansfield Cumming, and every successor has inherited it as a title, so that today it is said to stand for Chief.

To which cabinet minister is the chief of MI6 directly accountable?

Foreign Secretary. That minister appoints the chief of MI6, though by law the chief may also report straight to the Prime Minister at any time.

MI6's forerunner bureau was founded in 1909 amid a public panic about what?

German spies. Most were figments of press and popular imagination, yet the Committee of Imperial Defence took the stories seriously enough to found the bureau from which MI6 grew.

Which country house did MI6 chief Hugh Sinclair buy for £6,000 in 1938 as a wartime base?

Bletchley Park. Sinclair is said to have paid from his own pocket when the government pleaded no budget; MI6 soon moved back to London, but the codebreakers it had brought along stayed for the war.

In what colour of ink did MI6's first chief sign his letters, a habit his successors have kept?

Green. The ink was one of several quirks of Mansfield Cumming, who also wore a gold-rimmed monocle, carried a swordstick and got around Whitehall on a child's scooter.

Which prime minister, soon after the Cold War ended, first admitted in Parliament that MI6 existed?

John Major. In May 1992 he told the Commons the time had come to acknowledge the service and named its chief, Sir Colin McColl; the law that gave it a statutory footing followed two years later.

MI6's headquarters echoes Aztec temples and which 1930s London landmarks?

Power stations. Battersea was one of the models, and the secret service's home has since become easy to recognise itself, through its appearances in several James Bond films.

What nickname do insiders use for MI6's headquarters at Vauxhall Cross?

Legoland. The prominent block stands almost within sight of MI6's first home, which could hardly have been humbler: an office in Victoria Street, rented in 1909 through a private detective.

Which postmodern architect designed the MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall Cross?

Terry Farrell. He won a competition for the site with plans for an urban village, which turned into an office scheme and ended up as the headquarters of a secret service.

What was MI6's Lambeth headquarters called before its mid-1990s move to the riverside?

Century House. The glass-walled tower with a petrol station at its base was judged a security risk, and MI6 said it had also outgrown the building it had used since the 1960s.

In September 2000 the MI6 building was hit by what kind of weapon?

An anti-tank rocket. It shattered an eighth-floor window but did no damage inside, so MI6 carried on with business as usual; police suspected dissident Irish republicans.

In which Bond film does booby-trapped cash blow a hole in the side of MI6's real London headquarters?

The World Is Not Enough. MI6 cooperated with the film-makers, who shot the boat chase outside the real building, but the blast itself was staged on a 50-foot model at Pinewood Studios.

In which Bond film is the MI6 building blown up via a cyber attack that ignites a gas line?

Skyfall. The attack forces MI6 to move into an underground bunker, and when the captured villain breaks out of it, Bond has to chase him through the London Underground.

Which forged document did the Daily Mail splash four days before the 1924 election?

The Zinoviev letter. Supposedly Moscow's orders to British communists, it was probably leaked from inside MI6, a 1999 official inquiry found; Labour lost the election, though its vote actually went up.

From which neutral city did MI6 coordinate its First World War spying on Germany and occupied Belgium?

Rotterdam. Its star network there was La Dame Blanche, Belgian train-watchers who logged German troop movements almost daily; inside Germany itself MI6 never managed to build a network.

Which adventurer, later nicknamed the 'Ace of Spies', did MI6 send into Bolshevik Russia in 1918?

Sidney Reilly. The Russian-born agent's brief was to keep Russia in the war, but he was soon plotting to topple Lenin; lured back in 1925 by a fake resistance group run by the Soviet secret police, he vanished.

What cover job did MI6 create in 1919 for its officers in British missions abroad?

Passport Control Officer. The visa desk gave MI6 station chiefs a place in British missions between the wars, and in Berlin Frank Foley used the post to help thousands of Jews escape Nazi Germany.

In November 1939 the SS kidnapped two MI6 officers at a cafe in which Dutch border town?

Venlo. The two officers thought they were meeting anti-Hitler generals; the ambush left Britain wary of German resistance contacts for the rest of the war and gave Hitler a pretext for invading the Netherlands.

What was the codename for intelligence gained from breaking German Enigma messages?

Ultra. The codebreakers answered to MI6's chief, Stewart Menzies, who kept Churchill supplied with the best decrypts every day, and that access made his service a power in Whitehall for the first time.

Which ally, whose codebreakers first cracked Enigma, supplied nearly half the intelligence reports Britain received from wartime Europe?

Poland. Its agents sent London tens of thousands of reports, and in 1944 the Home Army salvaged a crashed V-2 rocket whose key parts an RAF Dakota collected from a muddy field in occupied Poland.

Graham Greene drew on his wartime MI6 service for which comic novel about a vacuum-cleaner salesman turned spy?

Our Man in Havana. Greene joined MI6 in 1941 and worked under Kim Philby; his hero, with no secrets to send, invents a whole network of agents, and London believes every word.

Which MI6 officer, who became a Soviet agent while a prisoner in the Korean War, betrayed the Berlin tunnel?

George Blake. Given 42 years in 1961, one of the longest spying sentences in British history, he went over the wall of Wormwood Scrubs on a rope ladder five years later and reached Moscow.

What was the codename of the Berlin tunnel project to tap Soviet communications?

Operation Gold. The KGB knew about the tunnel from the start but let it run for nearly a year rather than expose its mole, and only staged a chance discovery in April 1956.

Frogman 'Buster' Crabb vanished in 1956 on an MI6 dive beneath the cruiser that had brought which Soviet leader to Britain?

Nikita Khrushchev. Prime Minister Anthony Eden had not approved the dive and would not tell MPs what had happened; the following summer a body in a diving suit, missing its head and hands, surfaced near Chichester.

MI6 helped the CIA overthrow which country's prime minister, Mohammed Mossadeq, in 1953?

Iran. Mossadeq had nationalised the oil industry that Britain's Anglo-Iranian company controlled; the coup, known to MI6 as Operation Boot, handed power back to the Shah.

Which GRU colonel, run jointly by MI6 and the CIA, supplied manuals that helped identify Soviet missiles in Cuba?

Oleg Penkovsky. His missile manuals let American analysts make sense of the U-2 photographs of Cuba; arrested that same October, he was tried for treason and executed the following May.

Across which country's border did MI6 exfiltrate KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky from the USSR in 1985?

Finland. He shook off his KGB watchers on a jog, took a train north and crossed the border in the boot of a British diplomat's car; Moscow later sentenced him to death in his absence.

Which former Russian officer, once a double agent for MI6, was poisoned with Novichok in Salisbury in 2018?

Sergei Skripal. Jailed in Russia in 2006 for spying for Britain, he reached England in a 2010 spy swap; he and his daughter Yulia both survived the nerve agent after weeks in hospital.

Which commander of the Panjshir Valley became MI6's key Afghan ally against the Soviets in the 1980s?

Ahmad Shah Massoud. Getting little from Washington or Pakistan, he asked the British for training and radios rather than guns; an MI6 team visited each year, and his fighters withstood nine Soviet offensives.

MI6 trains its new officers at Fort Monckton, built to defend which naval city's harbour?

Portsmouth. Earlier plans to guard the harbour had come to nothing, and it took the American War of Independence to get the fort built in the 1780s, on the shore at Gosport.

In which country were two MI6 officers and their special forces escort detained by rebels after a night helicopter landing in 2011?

Libya. The escort came from E Squadron, a unit drawn from the SAS, SBS and Special Reconnaissance Regiment that works for MI6; taken for mercenaries, the party was held in Benghazi rather than open fire on its hosts.

What nickname for MI6 was popularised by John le Carre's novels?

The Circus. Le Carré housed his fictional service on London's Cambridge Circus, an address the real MI6 never used, yet jargon he popularised, such as 'mole', passed into real spy talk on both sides of the Atlantic.

What was the real name of the spy novelist John le Carre, a former MI6 officer?

David Cornwell. He wrote his first novels while still a serving officer, and some old colleagues never forgave the portrait: one MI6 veteran, Daphne Park, said she would gladly hang, draw and quarter him.

Which wartime organisation, focused on sabotage, was absorbed by MI6 in 1946?

Special Operations Executive. Churchill's 'Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare' had been built in 1940 partly out of MI6's own sabotage branch, Section D, so the older service was taking back its offspring.

Who became the first woman to serve as chief of MI6, taking over in 2025?

Blaise Metreweli. After 26 years as a career intelligence officer she took the one job in MI6 whose holder is publicly named; her predecessor called her one of the service's foremost thinkers on technology.

Which MI6 chief was appointed in 2004 after chairing the committee that produced the Iraq weapons dossier?

John Scarlett. A Russian speaker, he had been expelled from Moscow in 1994 as MI6's station chief there, and he was questioned at the Hutton Inquiry about the dossier the year before he took over the service.

Which body has scrutinised MI6 and GCHQ since the 1994 Act that put them on a legal footing?

Intelligence and Security Committee. Though made up of MPs and peers, its members were at first appointed by the prime minister and reported to him; only a 2013 law had Parliament appoint them and receive their reports.

What did MI6 pilot Sidney Cotton hide in the plane he flew over Germany in 1939?

Aerial cameras. Cotton, an Australian businessman, photographed German bases for MI6 and went on to run the RAF's photo-reconnaissance unit, only to be removed in 1940 after clashing with his seniors.

In which city did William Stephenson run MI6's British Security Co-ordination from 1940?

New York. From offices in Rockefeller Center, Stephenson's team planted pro-British stories in American newspapers and radio to turn opinion towards joining the war.

Which fellow Soviet agent vetted Kim Philby when he applied to join MI6's Section D in 1940?

Guy Burgess. He was returning a favour: five years earlier Philby had recommended Burgess to Soviet intelligence, and in 1951 Burgess fled to Moscow with Donald Maclean.

Which former head of MI6's Russia desk compiled the 2016 dossier alleging links between Donald Trump's campaign and Moscow?

Christopher Steele. He left MI6 in 2009 to co-found a private intelligence firm in London, and wrote the memos for an American research company hired on behalf of Hillary Clinton's campaign.

Which future children's author passed intelligence to British Security Co-ordination, MI6's wartime network in America?

Roald Dahl. Invalided out of flying, the RAF pilot was posted to America as an air attaché, where he reported to Stephenson's network and, by his own account, told Churchill what was on Roosevelt's mind.

Which actress played M, the fictional head of MI6, in the Bond films from 1995?

Judi Dench. The first woman to play Bond's boss, she was reportedly modelled on the real spy chief who in 1992 became the first woman to run one of Britain's secret services; MI6 itself did not follow until 2025.

Which prime minister approved buying the still-unbuilt Vauxhall Cross building as MI6's new headquarters?

Margaret Thatcher. Her government bought the block off the drawing board from a private developer for about £130 million; by MI6's own account, the developer was not told who the tenant would be.

Who officially opened the MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall Cross in July 1994?

Queen Elizabeth II. Eighteen years later she acted opposite MI6's most famous fictional officer, playing herself beside Daniel Craig's James Bond in a film for the London Olympics opening ceremony.

With what is MI6's first chief said to have cut off his own leg after a 1914 car crash?

A penknife. The story goes that Mansfield Cumming freed himself to reach his dying son; in fact surgeons removed his foot in hospital, though he was later said to test recruits by stabbing his wooden leg.

Dick White, who took charge of MI6 in 1956, is the only person to have also led which other British agency?

MI5. There White had interrogated Kim Philby as the suspected 'third man' in 1951; a decade later, as chief of MI6, he sent an old friend to confront Philby, who confessed and fled to Moscow.

From which city did Kim Philby vanish in January 1963 before surfacing in Moscow?

Beirut. An old MI6 friend, Nicholas Elliott, had just drawn a partial confession from him there; Philby skipped a dinner party that evening and is thought to have left on a Soviet freighter.

What was the title of Kim Philby's memoir, published in Britain in 1968?

My Silent War. He wrote it in Moscow, and Graham Greene, who had served under him in MI6 and stayed a friend, supplied the introduction; Soviet readers had to wait until 1980 for an edition.

Which future prime minister told MPs in 1955 that he had no reason to think Kim Philby a traitor?

Harold Macmillan. He was answering Labour MP Marcus Lipton, who had named Philby under parliamentary privilege; cleared, Philby summoned the press to his mother's flat and declared he had never been a communist.

Which Balkan communist state did MI6 and the CIA try to topple with émigré fighters around 1950, a plan Kim Philby betrayed?

Albania. Philby, MI6's liaison with the Americans in Washington, passed the plan to Moscow, and most of the fighters landed by sea and air were caught by the secret police.

Richard Moore, MI6 chief from 2020 to 2025, earlier served as UK ambassador to which country?

Turkey. Moore first served there in the early 1990s as a young MI6 officer, learning Turkish, then returned two decades later in the open as Britain's ambassador.

On which social media platform did Richard Moore mark his first day as MI6 chief in 2020?

Twitter. His first-day posts came with a winking emoji and a pitch for recruits, after the admission that there were limits to what a spy chief could say there.

Kim Philby first made his name as a Times correspondent covering which 1930s war?

The Spanish Civil War. Reporting from Franco's side for The Times, the secret Soviet agent was decorated by Franco himself, and the medal served him as cover for years.

Which Soviet defector's 1961 revelations to the CIA eventually pointed the finger at Philby?

Anatoliy Golitsyn won such trust at the CIA that the next KGB defector, whose story clashed with his, was locked up for years as a suspected plant.

To which Soviet spy ring did Kim Philby belong?

The Cambridge Five. Philby warned two of the others in 1951, letting them escape to Moscow, then talked his way out of suspicion and was not unmasked himself for another twelve years.