What we know about MI6

Summary

Podcast Summary: Stuff You Should Know – What We Know About MI6

Release Date: May 1, 2025
Hosts: Josh Clark, Chuck Bryant, Jerry
Produced by: iHeartPodcasts

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1. Introduction to MI6

The episode kicks off with a light-hearted exchange among the hosts, Josh, Chuck, and Jerry, before delving into the subject of MI6, the United Kingdom's Secret Intelligence Service.

• Josh Clark [01:23]: "MI6 is the United Kingdom's Secret Intelligence Service, akin to America's CIA."

2. Understanding MI6: Roles and Responsibilities

The hosts draw parallels between MI6 and other intelligence agencies, clarifying the distinct roles within the UK's intelligence community.

• Jerry [03:07]: "MI6 gathers intelligence internationally, similar to how the CIA operates in the US, whereas MI5 handles domestic matters like the FBI."

• Josh Clark [04:18]: "MI6 focuses primarily on human intelligence, utilizing spies to gather secrets, while GCHQ handles signal intelligence like intercepting communications."

3. Early History and Formation

Exploring MI6's origins, the discussion highlights the agency's roots in early 20th-century espionage fears and its evolution into a formal intelligence body.

• Jerry [06:19]: "MI6 originated from a German spy scare spearheaded by a fictional adventurer, William Le Queue, whose fabricated threats spurred the creation of MI5 and MI6."

• Josh Clark [07:32]: "Originally part of the Secret Service Bureau, MI6 was structured to provide plausible deniability for government officials engaged in espionage."

4. Structure and Operations of MI6

The conversation delves into the organizational structure of MI6, emphasizing its autonomy and the use of code names and designations reminiscent of popular culture.

• Josh Clark [09:58]: "The heads of MI6 are designated as 'C,' a tradition started by the first chief, Sir Mansfield Cumming, who signed off as 'C'."

• Jerry [10:43]: "MI6 agents boast gadgets even more advanced than those featured in James Bond films, reflecting the agency’s real-world technological prowess."

5. Notable Figures and Agents

Highlighting key personalities, the hosts discuss influential figures within MI6 and their contributions to espionage.

• Josh Clark [09:35]: "Sir Mansfield Cumming was not just the first chief but also an adventurer, embodying the quintessential spy archetype."

• Jerry [17:37]: "Cyril Bertram Mills, a circus director turned MI6 agent, played a crucial role in intelligence gathering before and during World War II."

6. MI6 During World War II

The episode covers MI6's critical role in World War II, including code-breaking efforts and unconventional operations that aided the Allies.

• Jerry [21:28]: "MI6 worked alongside Bletchley Park in code-breaking, with figures like Alan Turing contributing to significant victories against Axis powers."

• Josh Clark [22:11]: "Kathleen Pettigrew, overseer of communications, was a pioneering female figure in MI6, likely inspiring characters like Miss Moneypenny in James Bond."

7. The Cold War Era

Focusing on MI6's activities during the Cold War, the hosts explore espionage tactics, double agents, and pivotal intelligence operations.

• Jerry [34:20]: "Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer who defected to MI6, provided invaluable insights into Soviet strategies, influencing Western diplomatic approaches."

• Josh Clark [30:10]: "During the Cold War, MI6 focused intensely on Soviet capabilities, employing agents like 'Moscow men' and covert operatives to gather critical intelligence."

8. Intelligence Failures: Iraq WMDs

A candid discussion addresses one of MI6's most controversial moments—the flawed intelligence leading to the Iraq War, highlighting the consequences of misinformation.

• Jerry [43:46]: "The MI6's dissemination of unverified WMD intel significantly impacted global geopolitics, marking a low point in the agency's history."

9. MI6 in Modern Times

Transitioning to contemporary operations, the hosts examine how MI6 has adapted to technological advancements and evolving global threats.

• Josh Clark [45:52]: "Modern MI6 leverages AI to predict agent behavior and enhance intelligence operations, recognizing the challenges posed by advanced surveillance technologies."

• Jerry [46:18]: "Recruitment has shifted from clandestine sourcing to formal applications, reflecting MI6's integration into the modern era while maintaining secrecy."

10. Legal and Ethical Considerations

The podcast touches on the legal framework governing MI6, including immunity from prosecution for agents and ongoing debates about operational transparency.

• Jerry [39:43]: "The 1994 Intelligence Services Act officially acknowledged MI6, outlining legal protections for agents abroad, fueling discussions about a 'license to kill.'"

• Josh Clark [41:12]: "While MI6 agents are legally protected, the notion of a 'license to kill' remains symbolic, as actual actions are subject to international law enforcement."

11. Notable Incidents and Operations

Highlighting specific events, the hosts recount daring missions and the agency's resilience in the face of threats.

• Jerry [37:31]: "Oleg Gordievsky's escape from Moscow was a masterclass in espionage, involving deceptive tactics like altering car odors to evade KGB surveillance."

• Josh Clark [47:09]: "The mysterious death of MI6 codebreaker Gareth Williams underscores the inherent risks and enduring shadows surrounding intelligence work."

12. Conclusion

Wrapping up, the hosts reflect on MI6's storied past, its present challenges, and the perpetual need for adaptation in the realm of international espionage.

Notable Quotes

• Josh Clark [03:05]: "MI6 is the oldest continuously operating foreign intelligence service in the world."

• Jerry [10:57]: "MI6 agents have access to gadgets even more advanced than those in James Bond movies."

• Josh Clark [38:20]: "Oleg Gordievsky helped temper Western rhetoric that could have inadvertently provoked Soviet aggression."

• Jerry [43:46]: "The flawed intelligence on Iraqi WMDs was a significant misstep, costing lives and credibility."

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Final Note: This episode offers an in-depth exploration of MI6, blending historical accounts with modern-day insights. Whether you're a history buff or new to the world of espionage, the discussion provides a comprehensive understanding of the UK's premier intelligence agency.

Transcript

[Josh Clark]

You're listening to an iHeart podcast.

[Chuck Bryant]

With T Mobile. No, Trendspotter has to deal with Trendspotty service because T Mobile helps keep you connected from the heart of Portland to right where you are on America's largest 5G network. Switch. Now keep your phone and T Mobile will pay it off at the $800 per line via prepaid card. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com KeepAndSwitch up to four lines via virtual prepaid card. Last 15 days qualifying unlock device, credit service port in 90 plus days device and eligible carrier and timely redemption required card is no cash access. It expires in six.

[Josh Clark]

Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

[Jerry]

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry. And this is stuff you should know. And I have to say, we didn't have the most auspicious start just now. Chuck, I stepped on you at the countdown for us to sink. That's not a good sign. Don't you think this sounded good sign?

[Josh Clark]

I think if you look at it another way, we were in sync because we were both kind of trying to say the same thing.

[Jerry]

Wow, that was a silver lining.

[Josh Clark]

How's that?

[Jerry]

There's not been any better in sync since Lance Bass and Justin Timberlake were running around together.

[Josh Clark]

We should preface this, by the way. We're doing an episode today on MI6, the United Kingdom's Secret Intelligence Service.

[Jerry]

Is that how you pronounce it?

[Josh Clark]

M I 6. What do you say?

[Jerry]

Mix. That's what I've been saying. In my head at least.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Jerry]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Jerry]

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.

[Josh Clark]

That is. They were the, 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.

[Jerry]

Yeah, we used them as a kind of a model.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, there you go. That's a very clean way to say that.

[Jerry]

So there's two things that MI6 does and that really does kind of get it across. They're like that 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 US to the FBI. They do domestic stuff, but MI6 is concerned about everything else in the world. And by gathering intelligence they usually use two methods or they gather. Yeah, two methods. One's human intelligence, which is good old fashioned spying, using people who are secretly spying on their own governments or whatever. And then the other signal intelligence, which is intercepting communications. And I saw that another intelligence firm, I guess in the uk, the government communications headquarters, gchq, they seem to do most of the signals intelligence, while MI6 still does most of the human intelligence. Yeah, but I think like if they, they capture an email or something, they don't just delete it because they don't do signals intelligence, they're still going to use it.

[Josh Clark]

Right? Not my office. Delete.

[Jerry]

Not my job.

[Josh Clark]

We call them MI6. The official name, like I said at the beginning, is the Secret Intelligence Service or the SIS. That's what they became in 1920, but we call it MI6 because that was the call sign that they adopted in World War II. And you know, let's be honest, people hear MI6 and they identify it with intelligence a lot because of Ian Fleming and James Bond and Le Car and Smiley. A couple of, you know, in James Bond's case, maybe thinly veiled literary figures. I'm not sure about Smiley. I don't know much about lecar. Is Smiley based on someone that you know of?

[Jerry]

I don't know. My dad was big time into John Le Carre, but I never have been.

[Josh Clark]

Is it Le Carre? I don't know.

[Jerry]

I've heard it. I think it's probably both ways. I mean, unless you're his mom. I'm sure there's just one way to say if you're his mom, but, you know, he's dead. He doesn't care.

[Josh Clark]

How about Lee Carey?

[Jerry]

No, perfect.

[Josh Clark]

But like you said earlier, you know, it's kind of challenging to gather intelligence on MI6 as a podcaster, because for the longest time, they would just destroy any documents they had that weren't still useful to them. They weren't like, hey, let's keep this on file, because one day somebody might ask for this and maybe want to see it. They'll be like, no, we don't need that anymore, and we're a secret organization, so let's just throw it in the old burner. And in the 1960s, they started officially keeping historical records. And then eventually in the 2000s, for their 100th anniversary, they hired a guy named Keith Jeffrey to write its history up to 1949.

[Jerry]

Yeah. And apparently even still today, that's where their Official history ends, 1949. Anything after that, don't ask Jack, or else they'll take you somewhere and render you.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Politely.

[Jerry]

They will. So we should probably say that MI6 started, and I think when we did our Kim Philby episode, yeah, I said that MI6 stood for the Ministry of Intelligence, but it actually is military intelligence, which is, I think, like you said, what it grew out of originally. But the whole thing started there was a scare, a German spy scare in Great Britain in the turn of the last century. Germany was this imperial power that was rising, so there was reason to be scared of them. But really the whole reason came down to this guy who named William Le Queue. He was a totally made up adventurer, soldier of fortune, who was just as patriotic as you could get. He made up this huge backstory for himself to give himself legitimacy, but really he was just weaving these yarns saying essentially that Britain is sleeping right now and it's loaded with German spies, and if we don't wake up, we were gonna get taken over by Germany. And it just hit this perfect nerve in the British public, so much so that it directly led to the formation of what would become MI6 and MI5.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. All in unison. They heard this and went, well, we can't have that. So they got going. The Secret Service Bureau is who originally housed both, including MI5, and they were pretty important, you know, aka the Bureau, known as the Bureau, because they had complete autonomy and they also had plausible deniability. So they would sort of act as a go between. If there was a government official doing some, you know, spy business, the bureau could step in and kind of provide cover as a screen for them.

[Jerry]

Yeah, and apparently, even though they, they are now publicly acknowledged by the government as existing, that hasn't changed very much. Still today, like, they do not. You can't, as a government official, go to MI6 and be like, I demand these records of your torture program in the Iraq war.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Jerry]

They'll just say, we don't know what you're talking about. Yeah. We're not even having this conversation. And that's, that's what. They don't have the kind of political and legal hamstringing that the CIA has. It's much less of a bureaucracy. And so they can do things that say, like the CIA legally couldn't do. They have a lot of legal cover in Great Britain.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. I wonder what their version of FOIA is, like a Freedom of Information act request or if they even have that. Or if they're just like, sorry, don't ask.

[Jerry]

Yeah. They just call it fo, Right?

[Josh Clark]

Oh, boy, I wish that was a man. If we had written that out as a comedy duo, it couldn't have been more perfect.

[Jerry]

Thanks. I think we did really good too.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about their first chief, Sir Mansfield Cumming. It was pretty much a one person show at the beginning of the operation. And Cumming was that guy staffed fully, you know, with gentlemen, as they called him. If you were a woman at the time, you might get work as a typist or a secretary, but. Although that would change in not too long after.

[Jerry]

Like 50 years.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, exactly. I guess so. But he was sort of a. The kind of guy you would make a movie about. He was a race car driver, he was a pilot, he could drive a boat with a plum. He loved spycraft, he got into it. He signed off as C for his last name. Apparently he wrote in green ink, which his successors have continued doing today. Writing in that green ink.

[Jerry]

And they're all called C too. It's the title for the chief of MI6.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, exactly. And they. It was like, like M and Q, like all those things from James Bond. Like most of those things are real. They use numbers and letters and it's not just made up for fictional purposes.

[Jerry]

No, in Q, that was the scientist who would come up with all these amazing, amazing devices and gadgets and everything. And as we'll see, MI6 has gotten way more talkative publicly. They're trying to like, kind of recruit more and more people. So they're giving, you know, interviews even though their names are anonymous. And one of them said, like, we have those gadgets, but they're even better than what James Bond has.

[Josh Clark]

Like, really?

[Jerry]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So this guy coming, he had an incident in 1914 where he earned this. Probably sounds like lore to me, but he had a car crash in France in 1914. Very sadly, his son was killed, and this is how he lost his left foot. And the reason the lore was so important was because the legend was the only way he escaped was by amputating that foot himself. Sort of like, who was the guy in real life that they made the Danny Boyle made the movie about that was stuck in the rock?

[Jerry]

I don't remember his name, but. Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. But supposedly he. You know, as the story goes, he cut off his own foot with a penknife just to escape.

[Jerry]

I think just the fact that people that became a legend around him says a lot about who he is.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, totally.

[Jerry]

If I were in a car wreck and I lost my foot, no one would create a legend that said, I cut my own foot off with a pen knife to escape. Like, it just. You just wouldn't make that up. No one would believe it. This guy, at least it was believable.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Legend has it Josh wailed and cried for hours until the ambulance finally arrived. And they said, you know, you could probably just have backed out of this thing on your own, right?

[Jerry]

They're like, it's really just gonna bruise is all. So there's one other thing. There's a lot to talk about. Like you said, the guy could definitely deserve his own movie if it hasn't been made multiple times already. But one of the other legendary things associated with him is, like, he was really into spycraft. Like, he came up with disguises. He would, like, disguise himself and go walk around London and see if any of his people would recognize him. And he was. I don't want to say obsessed, but he was really into the idea of invisible ink, and he searched high and low to find a good invisible ink that couldn't be detected through standard methods. I don't know who came up with this idea, but somehow it came around that semen can be used very effectively as an invisible ink. And I saw that somebody put it. The supply is renewable.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So he must have just searched high but not low, right? Yeah. Renewable. There's some. I mean, it gets a little grosser. Should we even cover this in more detail?

[Jerry]

Yes.

[Josh Clark]

Okay. Apparently, he had a colleague that reported about the man, and one of our men in Copenhagen stocked it in a bottle for his letters, and it stank so bad that they had to tell him that a fresh Operation was necessary for each letter. Wow.

[Jerry]

Yeah, we had to say that.

[Josh Clark]

And he said, no problem.

[Jerry]

Yeah, exactly. Wow. Thank you.

[Josh Clark]

Exactly.

[Jerry]

So you want to take a break or you want to dive into World War I era?

[Josh Clark]

Let's take a break. That's a good little table setting. So we'll come back and talk about, talk about World War I right after this.

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[Jerry]

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[Josh Clark]

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[Jerry]

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[Jerry]

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 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 of invisible ink all over the place. By this time, though, he cultivated some sources already in Germany. He had one guy named B. He was C in this. This 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 are in their fleet. And although they totally dropped the ball on Germany invading neutral Belgium, which was a big deal.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Jerry]

They still managed to give them a lot of, like, really important intel that basically proved the idea that. That Britain could really use a MI6 or something like it.

[Josh Clark]

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 II, 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.

[Jerry]

Yeah. So by the time the interwar period comes along, the 20s, 30s, they. Well, there were some more legendary people. This is a time where it was just like the Wild west in Great Britain as far as spycraft 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 with the CIA. You'd be correct. With MI6, you'd be wrong. An agent, as far as MI6 is concerned, is one of those sources who has turned turn code on their country and is supplying MI6 with secrets. Right, that's an agent.

[Josh Clark]

Double agent, yeah.

[Jerry]

Or just a plain old agent. A double agent would be somebody who is actually spying for their country, but posing as a spy for MI6. This is just a plain old agent. Officers are the people who are employees of MI6 that run and handle agents in the field.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So that would make Cyril Bertram Mills an agent, correct?

[Jerry]

Yes, that's what I was getting to.

[Josh Clark]

All right, so before World War II, this guy was a circus director. And he ended up working for MI6 for about four decades, known only to his family for doing this work, because as a circus director, he could get in a little bi wing plane and he could fly all over the place under cover of doing circus business. I don't think he was like standing on the plane and eating a banana, like on the wings of the plane or any, like, doing tricks. But he had to get around as a, as a circus guy. And this was pretty good cover. And he had some pretty dangerous missions with these flights as well, right?

[Jerry]

Yeah, there's a couple where he was giving, like, MI6, like really valuable intelligence from flying over, like, aircraft factories in Germany. Apparently there was a. One particular piece of information, or I guess a bunch of information that really formed a good picture of the size of Germany's Luftwaffe, their air force. And Winston Churchill apparently used that to decide whether he was on the side of appeasing Hitler or. Or fighting Hitler. And I guess because of the buildup of this air force, he was like, we can't let this guy keep continuing. So he was against appeasement, thanks largely to Bertram Mills intel that he was directly giving him.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And this was, you know, this is dangerous work. He wasn't just flying around. I think in 1936, which was the year he started the Nazi courts executed by decapitation, usually with an axe, six spies that were caught. So he had a lot on the line as a circus director, but he was doing it for, I guess, love of country.

[Jerry]

Yeah. And a circus director is understating it. He was known as King of the Modern Circus. Like, he was a really big deal outside of his spying activities. It would have astounded anybody who had ever heard of him that he was a spy.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. I think circus director fit better on a card than King of the Modern Circus.

[Jerry]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

And he was an understated guy. You know, he wasn't flamboyant.

[Jerry]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Like a poster made for elementary school.

[Jerry]

Right. For the science fair. Exactly what happens with vinegar and baking soda.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I still do that sometimes when I have to. I don't. I'm not great at spacing like that. It has to do with your brain, I think, spatial awareness and stuff.

[Jerry]

Yeah. I'm not that good at it either. Don't worry.

[Josh Clark]

All right, good.

[Jerry]

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 mettle 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. The war broke out, you would think that. 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. But they apparently got their footing fairly quickly and were very successful. In basically generating a lot of intelligence coming out of different countries, including occupied countries in Europe during World War II.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it seems like that was the slower part where we know they did a lot better was at Bletchley park with their signals intelligence. You know, we talked about the code breaking and Alan Turing and the. What was it? Enigma machine. Yes, that's right. Some great episodes from our distant past, but they were kind of crushing it over there. They did finally, during this period, start to have some women working there that were not just secretaries. There was one overseen by a woman named Kathleen Pettigrew, Communications, at least between home and field agents. She was very proud of her work and said, I was basically Ms. Moneypenny, but with more power.

[Jerry]

Yeah, she was the chief at the time secretary, and he imbued her with enough power to run a program. So a lot of people say she was probably the inspiration for Ian Fleming's Miss Moneypenny, who James Bond used to like to flirt with.

[Josh Clark]

I think a lot of people from this age were like, I'm basically M or I'm q or I'm Ms. Money. Vin.

[Jerry]

Right. My dad used to go around telling people he was Q.

[Josh Clark]

Are you serious?

[Jerry]

No. I would have been so embarrassed.

[Josh Clark]

Well, see, that was a tough one. I'm giving myself a break there because I believe in almost anything you tell me about your dad.

[Jerry]

Yeah, it's true. The herbal Elvis.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Jerry]

Yeah. And speaking of Q, it turns out that. So they. They were. They did kind of develop devices like you said, figuring out ways to hide compasses and maps to get to POWs in World War I. But the idea of their research and development and technology branch that produced someone like Q that we all who know the James Bond movies are familiar with, that actually came from them absorbing a rival agency that was developed in World War II that the MI6 did not like one bit at first. The Special Operations Executive or the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it seemed like. And I may just be like, teenage boying this thing, but it seemed like they got under MI6's skin because they got to do more fun stuff.

[Jerry]

Yeah, for sure.

[Josh Clark]

Like, kind of more dangerous. Ops went to them, and MI6 were like, you know, we've been around a while, and these are. I think they thought of them the way Kyle put it, as dangerous amateurs. But then they started saying, but you got to take us along at least.

[Jerry]

Well, yeah, I mean, they definitely did have their fun stuff curtailed because MI6 had a department called D section, and D stood for destruction. Like they were supposedly perfectly capable of doing sabotage. I don't know enough about World War II British military history to understand why they felt a Special Operations Executive was needed or if somebody just managed to have enough power that they developed their own thing and it just became the SOE. I don't know. But eventually MI6 prevailed. Especially after World War II, and they absorbed the Special Operations Executive. Including a lot of their really interesting, useful stuff like their research and development group that produced people like Q. Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

I got the feeling. And maybe we'll get a real, you know, British history buff that can let us know. But it sounded to me like a Churchill directive. Kind of like, I know we've got our section D in MI6, but we need a really super secret special saboteur team. And like let's create one.

[Jerry]

Right. Everybody was waiting for that last part.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. That's kind of what it sounded like. But back to Q, that was based again on a real person. And I think we said. But Q stands for quartermaster. And this guy was Charles Fraser Smith. And he was the one that made like literal miniature cameras inside cigarette lighters and steel shoelaces to choke someone out with.

[Jerry]

Yeah. Garotte.

[Josh Clark]

A cigarette holder, telescope. Kyle said that these weren't as were a little more humdrum. But I think a bullet shaped device to stick up your butt that holds vital information. Maybe humdrum, but it's pretty useful.

[Jerry]

I'll bet it doesn't feel humdrum going in.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. It depends on what kind of bullet too.

[Jerry]

For sure. Yeah. So I mean there's a lot of what we understand about MI6 and like the movies and all that. It does apparently bear some resemblance because I don't know if we said it or not. Ian Fleming worked for MI6 during World War II. So he had first hand knowledge about all this stuff. Which is why there are real life people who these characters were based on. So our understanding of what MI6 does and has at its disposal in the way it runs is not that far off. But one of the big differences I saw was the idea of a lone loose cannon running his own operations out there is totally incorrect. It's just backwards. I've seen current employees say like that guy wouldn't even make it through the door. Like he would get vetted out so quickly that he wouldn't even have a chance. You need somebody who's not a loose cannon.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Jerry]

You. Rather than solo missions. Apparently. It's all teamwork.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Jerry]

And it's not one person coming up with one giant piece of information. Like there's a super villain who's created a. A layer at the bottom of the sea that you can shoot nuclear missiles from that usually doesn't come up in one big package. It takes thousands of people to work together to piece little pieces of information and then go back and double check and triple check with other sources whether those pieces of information are correct. And then eventually you create a whole picture and you hope that it's true and accurate.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, and you hope there's a secret layer. Right, with like, trained sharks in a.

[Jerry]

Moat that you can get a membership to.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, exactly. So speeding along up to the Cold War, we are now at a place where, like the USA, the Cold War was. Was dominated in MI6 by. 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 COVID 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 said 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 mount an insurrection or something like that.

[Jerry]

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.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Jerry]

Yeah, and not just like, okay, we, we. They have a huge stockpile of these weapons. The. The opposite could be just as valuable too. 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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, good point.

[Jerry]

Yeah. And that's, I mean, that's really important too. But like you said also, I mean they got caught maybe a little off guard with World War II. I get the impression that they didn't let that happen during the Cold War. They were still keeping up with the Soviets like capabilities. I think what else made it easy too is you had one nation really to spy on the Soviet Union as a whole. It was massive and it's, it was made up of what are now a bunch of independent nations. But at the time you had one big enemy. Rather than today where you have like terrorism, non state bad actors, like it's just much more dilute. Whereas before it was like those guys, those are our enemy. That's who we need to spy on.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Train all ears toward Moscow basically.

[Jerry]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So they were also still recruiting intelligence officers, you know, to, to use on their side. And this is. Did I read this right? The kgb, their acronym MICE stood for money, ideology, coercion and ego. Were they identifying people within their own ranks that might be susceptible to being turned?

[Jerry]

I'm sure you could apply it to that. But the impression I had is that was just how they decided if somebody was worth approaching to recruit as a spy for them.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, okay. But it could cut both ways.

[Jerry]

It would apply. Yeah, for sure. So if you're recruiting people, that's one way to do it. You can flatter them, make them just be like, this person clearly wants to feel like they're important or helping their country or something like that. You can have stuff to blackmail them with. Apparently MI6 is more than willing to blackmail agents into working for them. Bribery is another one too. So a lot of very famous and prolific spies have been brought on to being a spy is just getting paid. Although in the end when you, when they're being executed, you're like, you did all this for $300,000 really? Yeah, you know, it just never quite adds up. And it's like, and also it's like $300,000 over like 12 years or something like that. It just, I never quite get it. So maybe there's like they're really in it for the thrill. The money was just the extra bonus. I don't know.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, they'd be like, why don't you just try scratch off tickets?

[Jerry]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

If you want to make 40 grand a year for the next 15 years.

[Jerry]

Right. And then another gambit is called the dangle. It's not dirty, it's just this way of getting somebody to spy for you.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, okay.

[Jerry]

Or actually it's a way of creating a double agent like you were talking about.

[Josh Clark]

So that's when you recruit somebody, but for the purposes of exposing them.

[Jerry]

Right, So a dangle is where you say, like, you have somebody in Moscow that you've turned into an agent for you. You try to make them attractive to, say, the kgb, to recruit them as a spy. So now you have a double agent working inside.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, and is that who. Is that how they got Oleg Penkovsky?

[Jerry]

I don't know. He came to them. No, he came to them. He became disillusioned with the Soviet Union and he's like, I think I'm going to start helping the UK.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, okay. Because he worked with both MI6 and CIA, and again, this is during the Cold War. So he was one of the key players in sort of getting or I guess getting and giving information on Soviet missiles in Cuba during the Cuban Missile crisis.

[Jerry]

Yeah, which is pretty useful as a matter of fact. Yeah, he was hugely helpful. Just over like 18 months, and then he was caught and executed. But I think at that time he gave up 5,000 photos of Soviet documents to MI6.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And you know, you mentioned the CIA earlier having sort of more legal hands being tied than they do apparently, in the Cold War. And who knows, maybe this still happens today. But if there was a CIA officer that couldn't get something done on the down low that was maybe untoward or violent or illegal, they could call MI6 and say, hey, we can't get this done. Could you?

[Jerry]

And they say, yes, yes. Wait, can you say I can't do a very good British accent?

[Josh Clark]

Yes, that was Murray from New Zealand again.

[Jerry]

Yeah, almost always is. Oh, well. So I say we take a break and we come back and talk about one of the most thrilling moments in MI6 history.

[Josh Clark]

Are you talking about Oleg Gordievsky?

[Jerry]

Yes, that's exactly who I'm talking about. A KGB kernel.

[Josh Clark]

That's right. Apparently this guy. And this is how you can, you know, get someone on your side from the. At least at the time, from that side is if they really like Western culture.

[Jerry]

Yeah, the cowabunga lifestyle.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. They're like, I 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. 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.

[Jerry]

I don't know where they'd fall in the mice. Acronym. Money. Ideology. Coercion. Ego. Taste, maybe.

[Josh Clark]

Ideology and ego.

[Jerry]

I don't know, I'm not sure. But yes, he definitely turned but he was caught. He was found out. So he became the station chief, or working out of the embassy as a KGB agent in London. So he was able to actually kind of easily pass secrets to the Brits because he was there already. He was found out by Aldrich Ames, who was a famous American trader who spied for the Soviets in, I think, the 80s or maybe even into the 90s. And he told them about Gordievsky spying for the Brits. Gordievsky was not immediately jailed, which is weird. He was definitely taken back to Moscow and held, like, basically under surveillance. But he was going to be jailed. He was going to be executed. Yeah. So he started what had been planned seven years before and named Operation Pimlico. And by. By standing in a Moscow bakery or outside of a Moscow bakery, holding a plastic Safeway bag, he was signaling MI6, like, get me out of here right now.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And he said, how am I going to know if you've gotten the message? And they says, well, how about this? A man's going to walk by you carrying a Harrods bag. And he said, that could be anybody. And he said, all right, how about this? Carrying a Harrods bag and eating a Mars candy bar. And he said, I guess that narrows it down enough.

[Jerry]

Yeah. Which is really showing off, because I think you could trade a Mars bar for a car in Moscow in 1985.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, well, yeah, that's a good point, actually.

[Jerry]

At least that's what they told us in school.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, exactly. They don't have toilet paper either. So he evaded surveillance, was making a run for the Finnish border, and MI6 grabbed him and put him in a car trunk. But they have, like, you know, sniffing dogs, inspecting cars and things. So they had the brilliant idea to change a poopy diaper on the trunk of the car that he was stuffed inside. And apparently it worked.

[Jerry]

Yeah, Those dogs were like, oh, God. And just went back to their post.

[Josh Clark]

No, thank you.

[Jerry]

Yeah, isn't that amazing? So then they. They got him across the Finnish border. Finland is neutral, and he was safe. But I mean, like, that is real deal spy stuff, you know?

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah, for sure.

[Jerry]

Like holding a Safeway bag. That's awesome. The Mars bar. I love every part of that. So he actually. He was actually tried in absentia and sentenced to death by the Soviet Union, but he had defected to the UK and they protected him and he died an old man, I think, age 86, last March at his home in Great Britain.

[Josh Clark]

Incredible.

[Jerry]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

They never got a hold of him.

[Jerry]

No. But one thing that we really should say, and I was kind of touching on it earlier, one of the really valuable things he provided was he could understand the state of mind of the Soviet government and Soviet military. And he fed this information to the UK, to MI6, who turned around and said, margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, you guys need to tone down this evil empire rhetoric.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Jerry]

Because you are scaring the Soviets so.

[Josh Clark]

Bad, fanning your flames.

[Jerry]

They're plotting a first strike because they think you're going to strike out of nowhere. So you actually might trigger a first strike from the Soviets if you keep talking like this. And as a result, they really dialed it back quite a bit.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. He said, have you seen War Games? Yeah, he's like, that could happen.

[Jerry]

In that sense, he kind of saved the world. Yeah, I think that's great.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I think saving the world is totally great.

[Jerry]

I'm all for it.

[Josh Clark]

If we're talking about modern times, and you mentioned the 90s is when things sort of went official. And that was 1994. They officially went public due to the 1994 Intelligence Services Act. And basically this had happened to MI5 in 1989. And it kind of seemed like they had to kind of bring in some bureaucracy for legal reasons. Among others, the staff of MI5. And I guess later MI6 wanted better legal basis for things like tapping phones. They had to be a little. Little more on the up and up. I think the. It was the European Court of Human Rights said that if you're an intelligence service, you have to have legal footing and a complaints system. So, like, you have to become official for all this stuff to be official.

[Jerry]

Right. There's so that law that essentially acknowledged that there was such a thing as MI6 back in 1994, it had a section called Section 7 and it basically said if one of our agents is off running around committing crimes in another country that they could be tried for back in the uk, they cannot be held liable for that. They'll never be tried for this.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Jerry]

And some people have taken that as admission that there's such a thing as a license to kill. And that makes sense. I mean, apparently there is a new law that's being talked about right now and is making its way through the Supreme Court there that basically says, yes, and pretty much murder too. We're not going to try them for murder. And it actually extends to agents, too. So if somebody murders somebody for MI6 and then they defect to the UK, the UK is never going to try them for that murder. So it's a lot. So people Are like, that's a license to kill. And I saw an agent say on, I think a PBS or BBC documentary, a license to kill. Doesn't make any sense. Like if you're in another country and you kill somebody there, like when the cops come, you're not going to show them your license to kill and they'll let you go. Like, this is not. You're breaking that country's law, You've murdered someone in that country, you're toast if you get caught.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Jerry]

So there is no license to kill.

[Josh Clark]

But symbolic.

[Jerry]

These laws essentially kind of potentially give something like a license to kill.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, but you just don't whip out your double O card.

[Jerry]

No, no.

[Josh Clark]

The other things that happened in 1994, as far as the organization goes, is they were. The chief was, well, I was about to say exposed. Technically, that's right. But they voluntarily said, all right, we have to be official. Now. Here's who our chief is. They moved offices to some fancy headquarters on the Thames designed by Terry Farrell. It's a very secure sort of secretive building. And you know, it's. While they did go public, you know, technically it's still MI6 and they still have a culture of secrecy because of what they do. It's not like, you know, they just sort of made some things a little more public to make things official, I guess.

[Jerry]

Right. That building too, it is secure, but it was blown up not once, but twice. Well, not blown up the first time. It was attacked by the ira. They shot an anti tank rocket launcher at the building on September 20, 2000, and that building just like shook it off immediately. It did almost no damage to it whatsoever. And really kind of showed just how crazy reinforced that building is. But it suffered a much different fate in James Bond's Skyfall, where it blew up.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, was that with that building? Mm, Skyfall was good.

[Jerry]

Yeah, it was, as a matter of.

[Josh Clark]

Fact, quite liked it. I'm curious what's gonna happen next with that franchise.

[Jerry]

Yeah, they haven't named any James Bond yet.

[Josh Clark]

I don't think so. And they sold, you know, the Broccoli family, I think. Sold. Sold everything.

[Jerry]

Oh, really?

[Josh Clark]

To God. It may have been Amazon even, I don't know.

[Jerry]

Wow.

[Josh Clark]

Not sure, but we'll see.

[Jerry]

Well, if it's not Idris Elba, I'm gonna be really surprised.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, they've been talking about him for years. That would be too good to be true. No one's smart enough to do that in movie making. Yeah, I don't have great faith. We should talk a little bit about the more modern day stuff because, you know, starting in the early 2000s, leading up to the Iraq war in 2003, obviously they were going to be working with hunting down terrorists and maybe weapons of mass destruction. And that was one of their big black eyes actually was bogus information that got through apparently, you know, it wasn't vetted like it should have been. And that was one of the reasons that the US and the rest of the world got and believed bad information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

[Jerry]

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. And the reason why it was such a big deal, this bad intelligence, is because the US and the UK 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 US and the UK 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 Nicholas Cage protects them with Sean Connery.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. I mean, learned people really genuinely suspect that that could have been misinformation based on the rock.

[Jerry]

Yeah. And that the handful of British ministers and politicians who saw this intel had not seen the rock, apparently. And it just didn't ring any bells if they had seen it.

[Josh Clark]

Well, they have better taste than that, I guess.

[Jerry]

It wasn't that good. But you know, if you want just like a, you know, shoot them up bang kind of thing, action movie, I guess. Yeah, it's all right.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Jerry]

So today MI6, they're realizing openly in interviews and stuff that they really need to start keeping up with technology because. Because of like facial recognition and surveillance states like that China has and the uk, it's basically impossible to create an agent somewhere. Like human intelligence is really hard to.

[Josh Clark]

Do now, especially in China.

[Jerry]

Yes. And apparently they're starting to use AI to run scenarios and situations to Predict how somebody will behave in different situations. That's a new one they're starting to do too. So I don't know how ahead of the curve they are, and it sounds to me a little bit like they're behind the curve, but at least they're realizing they need to. They need to wake up and smell the hard drives.

[Josh Clark]

Sorry, thought you're going to say English.

[Jerry]

Breakfast tea, but, oh, that's even better. Can we just edit that in? But you say it.

[Josh Clark]

Paging Mr. Herman. So the other obvious thing, as far as modern day recruitment goes, it's not like the old days where they would just sort of source someone out and very quietly have someone walk by and drop a note on their dinner table that says, are you interested in a job? You know, come by this office tomorrow alone. That kind of thing. It's a modern organization now with, you know, job listings and things like that. Again, still very secretive in a lot of ways, I'm sure, in what they do. But they, you know, starting in 1994 is when they really were brought into the sort of modern era. It's a little less James Bond y and just a little more, you know, fill out this application and we'll do our background checks.

[Jerry]

Right. It is still risky, though. I can't remember what year it was in the 2000 and tens. I believe there was a code breaker for MI6 named Gareth Williams who was found dead in his bathroom inside a tote bag that was locked from the outside.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that's hard to do on your own, but wouldn't that be excuses? Like he did this himself?

[Jerry]

Either that or that it was like a sex game gone wrong and the partner took off, freaked out and took off. I think that's the official explanation. But there was a former KGB agent who came forward in 2015 and said no. That guy would they. The Russians tried to recruit him and he said no and so they killed him.

[Josh Clark]

I wonder if it was a sex game gone wrong and they just were extracting invisible ink.

[Jerry]

Oh my God. I think that's a pretty good way to wrap up this episode, if not have wrapped it up 30 seconds before you said that.

[Josh Clark]

Agreed.

[Jerry]

Well, since we both agreed that this episode is wrapped up, then that means it's time for listener mail.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, this is a. I've got a couple of two parters on these next ones about disaster films because, boy, we heard from a lot of people that really enjoyed that one. And these two are from Maria and Kirk. Hey, guys. Love the disaster movie, but I'm surprised you didn't mention the movie Testament. I haven't not heard of this Maria, but I'm gonna check it out. It's from 1983 by Lynn Littman, starring Jane Alexander. One of the few with a female lead. Closest thing to a hero in this post apocalyptic movie and one of the few directed by a woman. You were focusing more escapist, action disaster type things, but you did mention a few that were a little off the radar. So I thought I would mention this one. And another one that you could have mentioned that was a little off the radar was Melancholia, a pre apocalyptic film. So have we not mentioned that?

[Jerry]

I swear to God we did.

[Josh Clark]

I don't think we did in that episode, but we did talk about it recently, because we've talked about it a few times.

[Jerry]

For some reason, I think that qualifies.

[Josh Clark]

And then also from Kirk. Hey, from beautiful Astoria, Oregon. Longtime listener and I love disaster films and you guys did a great job. I'm surprised though, that you didn't mention Jurassic park, because I believe that fits all the criteria and predates Twister by three years. And it also fits your conversation on the early use of CGI with some of the greatest special effects of the time. I have a feeling I won't be the only person mentioning this.

[Jerry]

You totally were.

[Josh Clark]

Love the podcast, guys. And that is from Kirk Klinger. Now, we had a few people write in about Jurassic park, but I don't know about disaster movie. To me, that's maybe a subgenre of monster movie. I don't know.

[Jerry]

What do you think? It did have a Hoffman in the form of Wayne Knight, who played Newman.

[Josh Clark]

True.

[Jerry]

He was even wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Like he couldn't get more obviously Hoffman.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that's a good point.

[Jerry]

I don't think it is a disaster movie, though. But that's just my opinion.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, and we're not the. I mean, what do we know? If you think it's a disaster movie, then go with it.

[Jerry]

I did say some people agreed with me though, that Godzilla minus one is definitely disaster.

[Josh Clark]

No.

[Jerry]

So I was right.

[Josh Clark]

Well, the scale of destruction in Jurassic park one was limited to Isla Nubar, so I don't know. Other things were localized too. So maybe I'm just wrong about everything in life.

[Jerry]

Yeah, like that tunnel collapse with Stallone. That was localized.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that's true. That's true.

[Jerry]

Yeah. Well, Kurt, thank you for starting this conversation. It's a great one. Like I said, we love that kind of thing. Send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcastheartradio.com.

[Josh Clark]

Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartradio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit.

[Chuck Bryant]

The iHeartradio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever.

[Josh Clark]

You listen to your favorite show.