MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949

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Since 1994, SIS headquarters have been in the SIS Building in London, on the South Bank of the River Thames. [11] History and development [ edit ] Foundation [ edit ] Neville, Leigh, Special Forces in the War on Terror (General Military), Osprey Publishing, 2015 ISBN 978-1472807908, p.296, p.314 His story has been told before, not least by himself in the autobiography he wrote in retirement in Britain, but it has found its ideal chronicler in this exceptionally rewarding book by Ben Macintyre. Over the past decade, from his breakout success with Agent Zigzag to his biography of Kim Philby, A Spy Among Friends, Macintyre has built an entirely justified reputation for his true spy thrillers. Those books were good, but this one’s better. In fact, it feels a little like he has been waiting all the time to tell us about Gordievsky, since this story is so much bigger than those he has told before. Bethell, N. (1984). The Great Betrayal: the Untold Story of Kim Philby's Biggest Coup, London, Hodder & Stoughton, ISBN 978-0-34035701-9.

a b c d e "MI6 'Diana-style' plot dismissed". BBC News. 13 February 2008. Archived from the original on 9 September 2017 . Retrieved 13 February 2013. Richard John Charles Tomlinson was born in Hamilton, New Zealand, and raised in the nearby town of Ngāruawāhia. [1] [9] He was the middle child in a family of three brothers. [10] His father came from a Lancashire farming family and he worked for the Ministry of Agriculture, and had met his wife whilst studying agriculture at Newcastle University. [11] The family moved to the village of Armathwaite [12] in Cumbria, England, in 1968. [10] The young Tomlinson won a scholarship for the independent Barnard Castle School in County Durham, where he was a contemporary of Rory Underwood and Rob Andrew, who went on to become England rugby internationals. [13] He excelled at mathematics and physics, and won a scholarship to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1981. [11] The chief of SIS, Stewart Menzies, insisted on wartime control of codebreaking, and this gave him immense power and influence, which he used judiciously. By distributing the Ultra material collected by the Government Code & Cypher School, MI6 became, for the first time, an important branch of the government. Extensive breaches of Nazi Enigma signals gave Menzies and his team enormous insight into Adolf Hitler's strategy, and this was kept a closely held secret. [30] In 2009, MI6 agreed to allow Tomlinson to return to Britain, unfreeze royalties from his book and drop the threat of charges. MI6 also apologised for his mistreatment. [7] Staff at MI6 have been allowed employment tribunals since 2000, and have been able to unionise since 2008. [8] Early life [ edit ] The plan was simple, and almost comic. At 7.30pm on Tuesdays British officers would watch a bread shop next to Kutuzovsky Prospekt, a diplomatic complex. In an emergency, Gordievsky would turn up wearing a grey cap and holding a plastic Safeway bag. The MI6 officer would walk past him munching a Mars bar or a KitKat. This signal would trigger a plan to smuggle Gordievsky into Finland in the boot of a diplomatic car. A refresher memo was concealed in an OUP edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets.His fellow student, historian Andrew Roberts, remembers Tomlinson as "a bright and charming undergraduate, popular with the boys for his drinking and sporting prowess, and with the girls for his dark good looks." [14] His friends included Gideon Rachman, who wrote him a reference after his tutor refused to do so. [15] Tomlinson completed flying training with Cambridge University Air Squadron and won a Half Blue for Modern Pentathlon. He graduated from the University of Cambridge with a starred First Class honours degree in aeronautical engineering in 1984, and was approached by MI6 shortly afterwards, whose offer he turned down. [10] Following his graduation he took examinations to join the Royal Navy as a Fleet Air Arm Officer, but he failed the medical examination due to childhood asthma. [11] Instead he applied for and was awarded a Kennedy Scholarship, which allowed him to study technology policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with full funding during 1986–7. [11] Following this, he was awarded a prize from the Rotary Foundation, allowing him to study in the country of his choice for a year. Consequently, he enrolled in a political science course at the University of Buenos Aires, where he became fluent in the Spanish language. [11] He continued to pursue his aeronautical interests and qualified as a glider pilot with the Fuerza Aérea Argentina. During 1988–9, Tomlinson worked in Mayfair, London, for management consultancy company Booz Allen Hamilton. [11] Military and MI6 service [ edit ] MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall Cross, London saw the most significant failure of the service during the war, known as the Venlo incident for the Dutch town where much of the operation took place. Agents of the German army secret service, the Abwehr, and the counter-espionage section of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), posed as high-ranking officers involved in a plot to depose Hitler. In a series of meetings between SIS agents and the 'conspirators', SS plans to abduct the SIS team were shelved due to the presence of Dutch police. On the night of 8–9 November, a meeting took place without police presence. There, the two SIS agents were duly abducted by the SS. [34]

Andrew Cook, Ace of Spies: The True Story of Sidney Reilly; 2004, Tempus Publishing, ISBN 0-7524-2959-0. Tomlinson was imprisoned under the Official Secrets Act 1989 in 1997 after he gave a synopsis of a proposed book detailing his career with MI6 to an Australian publisher. He served six months of a twelve-month sentence before being given parole, whereupon he left the country. The book, named The Big Breach, was published in Moscow in 2001 (and later in Edinburgh), and was subsequently serialised by The Sunday Times. The book detailed various aspects of MI6 operations, alleging that it employed a mole in the German Bundesbank and that it had a " licence to kill", the latter later confirmed by the head of MI6 at a public hearing. [5]How do you think he managed to get it right, given that he didn’t have access to all the information and archives that have come out recently? a b "Kim Philby – new Russian god?". International News Analysis Today. 20 December 2010 . Retrieved 1 July 2012.

a b c Iashmar, Paul (23 January 2001). "Seven of Richard Tomlinson's Big Claims". The Independent. Archived from the original on 11 April 2013 . Retrieved 22 February 2013. Deacon, Richard (1985). "C": A Biography of Sir Maurice Oldfield, Macdonald, ISBN 978-0-35610400-3. The year 2009 was the centenary of the Secret Intelligence Service. [91] An official history of the first forty years was commissioned to mark the occasion and was published in 2010. To further mark the centenary, the Secret Intelligence Service invited artist James Hart Dyke to become artist in residence. [91] A Year with MI6 [ edit ]a b "Spying scandal spreads". BBC News. 20 December 1999. Archived from the original on 19 April 2003 . Retrieved 5 December 2012. It is not complete fiction. There was a man called Biffy Dunderdale whom Fleming knew and who was the MI6 Head of Station in Paris in the 1930s. He was a man of great sangfroid and style who liked fast cars and pretty women and was quite an important figure. He travelled under the name of John Green, and was a glamorous figure a bit like Bond. On the other hand, one of the reasons he was in the Service was because he spoke Russian like a native, as well as other languages, which was definitely something you needed – and still do – and something James Bond never seemed to be able to do. SIS has been active in the Balkans, playing a vital role in hunting down people wanted by the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. British intelligence operations in the Balkans are thought to have played a vital role in the handover of the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević to The Hague; SIS was also heavily involved in the hunt for Radovan Karadžić and General Ratko Mladic, who are linked to a vast range of war crimes including the murder of Srebrenica's surrendering male population and organising the Siege of Sarajevo. [79] Sinclair died in 1939, after an illness, and was replaced as C by Lt Col. Stewart Menzies (Horse Guards), who had been with the service since the end of World War I. [25]