MI6 is not exactly as
efficient or
glamorous as
movies always depict it as, like in
James Bond. It evolved from the
British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), which was established in 1911 under its first director, Mansfield Cumming whose initial "C" became the pseudonym for the head of the service (and later satirized by Ian Fleming in his James Bond novels.) It operates much the same way America's
CIA functions, as an organization responsible for gathering
intelligence on a worldwide basis, conduction all manner of
espionage against enemies or potential enemies.
Also like the CIA, MI6 has no jurisdiction within Great Britain, the responsibility of handling counterintelligence belongs to MI5. In reality, MI6 of SIS dates back to Elizabethan times when Sir Francis Walsingham became the first British spymaster, ferreting out plots, conspiracies, and intrigues against his sovereign, Elizabeth.
Oddly, there is a polite pretense that MI6 does not really exist, although this ultra-secret organization is supported by enormous government funds, as much as 70 million pounds sterling a year. MI6 came into its own under Cumming, a shrewd spymaster of the old school who stopped at nothing in obtaining secrets vital to British security. Cumming, who had a wooden leg, enjoyed startling his agents. On occasion, to get the attention of an agent or aide, he would suddenly drive a knife into his wooden leg to emphasize a point. Those not knowing of his disability were dumbfounded at the sight of seeing the knife protruding from Cumming's leg while he went on blithely talking.
The efficiency of MI6 is not easily evaluated because of the super-secret operations it conducts. During World War I, MI6 or SIS proved to be very effective, uncovering and exposing a vast German spy ring headed by Gustav Steinhauer and, for the most part, outwitting the military spies throughout the world that were directed by German spymaster Walther Nicolai. The organization's image was tarnished in World War II when two of its agents were abducted at Venlo in the Netherlands in 1939 through a clever Abwehr ruse conducted by SD spymaster Walter Schellenberg.
So embarrassing was the Venlo Incident, as it came to be called, that MI6's covert operations in Nazi-held European countries during World War II were turned over to the newly-created SOE (Special Operations Executive.) MI6 fared better during the Cold War but it saw many setbacks when the KGB outwitted its schemes. One of its finest Cold War coups was the way in which MI6 was able to obtain top secret documents from Oleg Penkovsky, a colonel of Russian military intelligence at the Center in Moscow.
MI6, however, bore the strain of compromise when, in 1963, one of its much-valued agents, Kim Philby, defected to Russia before he was publicly revealed to have been a double agent for the KGB, one who had, with fellow traitors Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, been stealing British secrets for decades. Because of Philby's success in turning over MI6 secrets to the Russians, the organization was thoroughly revamped.
As late as the 1980's, MI6 was under severe criticism, chiefly because it was an old boys' club of uppercrust gentlemen who were recruited from elitist colleges that had proven suspect as to their political affiliations and patriotic fidelity. Labor politician Roy Hattersley stated at that time: "The failure of the security services' present organization stems largely from inbreeding, limited field of recruitment and its traditional attitudes, and the complacency that comes from the feeling that since its entire administration is cloaked in secrecy, its organizational failures can always be swept under the carpet."
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, however, did not yield to special "outside controls" of MI6, such as the watchdog committees that oversee CIA operations. Her policy was unbending: MI6 would answer only to the Cabinet in order to preserve the services' integrity. MI6 did, however, adopt a more liberal attitude in its recruitment, selecting young applicants from a broader academic spectrum, emphasizing the need for those fluent in foreign languages.