MI6 Trivia
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58 free MI6 trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This MI6 trivia quiz covers the real Secret Intelligence Service rather than the one that employs James Bond, though the films that borrowed its riverside headquarters get a look in. The easy questions cover what MI6 actually does, where it sits on the Thames, the letter its chief signs with and which sister agencies handle domestic security and signals. From there the quiz walks through the history: the 1909 Secret Service Bureau, Mansfield Cumming's green ink, the Zinoviev letter, the Venlo ambush, Bletchley's Ultra and the Cambridge spies who hollowed the service out during the Cold War. The harder end goes to the moles and defectors (Blake, Penkovsky, Gordievsky, Goleniewski), the tunnel operations, the E Squadron paramilitary unit, the RPG fired at the building in 2000, the training fort at Gosport and the succession of chiefs up to Blaise Metreweli, the first woman to hold the post. Difficulty runs from a first-timer's warm-up to questions that will test people who read intelligence histories for fun. Every answer was checked against the service's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this, our James Bond and FBI quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What do the letters MI stand for in the name MI6?
Military Intelligence
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.
Q 02What kind of work is MI6 primarily responsible for?
Foreign espionage overseas
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.
Q 03Bond's boss is M, but which letter names the real MI6 chief?
C
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.
Q 04To which cabinet minister is the chief of MI6 directly accountable?
Foreign Secretary
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.
Q 05MI6's forerunner bureau was founded in 1909 amid a public panic about what?
German spies
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.
Q 06Which country house did MI6 chief Hugh Sinclair buy for £6,000 in 1938 as a wartime base?
Bletchley Park
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.
Q 07In what colour of ink did MI6's first chief sign his letters, a habit his successors have kept?
Green
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.
Q 08Which prime minister, soon after the Cold War ended, first admitted in Parliament that MI6 existed?
John Major
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.
Q 09MI6's headquarters echoes Aztec temples and which 1930s London landmarks?
Power stations
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.
Q 10What nickname do insiders use for MI6's headquarters at Vauxhall Cross?
Legoland
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.
Q 11Which postmodern architect designed the MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall Cross?
Terry Farrell
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.
Q 12What was MI6's Lambeth headquarters called before its mid-1990s move to the riverside?
Century House
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.
Q 13In September 2000 the MI6 building was hit by what kind of weapon?
An anti-tank rocket
Q 21What was the codename for intelligence gained from breaking German Enigma messages?
Ultra
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.
Q 22Which ally, whose codebreakers first cracked Enigma, supplied nearly half the intelligence reports Britain received from wartime Europe?
Poland
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.
Q 23Graham Greene drew on his wartime MI6 service for which comic novel about a vacuum-cleaner salesman turned spy?
Our Man in Havana
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.
Q 14In which Bond film does booby-trapped cash blow a hole in the side of MI6's real London headquarters?
The World Is Not Enough
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.
Q 15In which Bond film is the MI6 building blown up via a cyber attack that ignites a gas line?
Skyfall
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.
Q 16Which forged document did the Daily Mail splash four days before the 1924 election?
The Zinoviev letter
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.
Q 17From which neutral city did MI6 coordinate its First World War spying on Germany and occupied Belgium?
Rotterdam
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.
Q 18Which adventurer, later nicknamed the 'Ace of Spies', did MI6 send into Bolshevik Russia in 1918?
Sidney Reilly
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.
Q 19What cover job did MI6 create in 1919 for its officers in British missions abroad?
Passport Control Officer
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.
Q 20In November 1939 the SS kidnapped two MI6 officers at a cafe in which Dutch border town?
Venlo
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.
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.
Q 24Which MI6 officer, who became a Soviet agent while a prisoner in the Korean War, betrayed the Berlin tunnel?
George Blake
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.
Q 25What was the codename of the Berlin tunnel project to tap Soviet communications?
Operation Gold
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.
Q 26Frogman 'Buster' Crabb vanished in 1956 on an MI6 dive beneath the cruiser that had brought which Soviet leader to Britain?
Nikita Khrushchev
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.
Q 27MI6 helped the CIA overthrow which country's prime minister, Mohammed Mossadeq, in 1953?
Iran
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.
Q 28Which GRU colonel, run jointly by MI6 and the CIA, supplied manuals that helped identify Soviet missiles in Cuba?
Oleg Penkovsky
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.
Q 29Across which country's border did MI6 exfiltrate KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky from the USSR in 1985?
Finland
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.
Q 30Which former Russian officer, once a double agent for MI6, was poisoned with Novichok in Salisbury in 2018?
Sergei Skripal
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.