Nexus - 0706 - New Times Magazine-pages

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ON HER Majesty's SECRET SERVICE MAJESsTY'S HER SECRET SERVICE Britain's MI6 goes to extraordinary lengths to ensure the security of its intelligence operations, conducting them under the cover of official secrecy. Part 1 of 2 gent D/813317 Richard Tomlinson joined Britain's MI6 in 1991. Born in New Zealand, he read aeronautical engineering at Cambridge and was a Kennedy memorial scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. Fluent in French, German and Spanish, Tomlinson was approached at university where e gained a first. A lecturer had asked him if he wanted to do "something stimulating" in the foreign service. Despite modern recruiting methods, the trusted old-boy network is still a favoured option at Oxbridge, and a number of other key universities, such as Durham and Exeter, still have a contact group of lecturers on the lookout for "firsts" as suitable recruits. Historian Andrew Roberts has written about his own experience of being approached in 1987 to join the "FCO [Foreign and Commonwealth Office] Co-ordinating Staff", as MI6 is known: the "chat with a Cambridge contact", tea at the John Nash—designed Carlton House which overlooks St James's Park, "a discreet lunch a fortnight later and then a delightfully absurd mini-exam, in which one of the questions was, 'Put the following in order of social precedence: earl, duke, viscount, baron, marquis'". At Century House, Roberts recognised "several of the young Miss Moneypennys from the secretarial schools' arties at university". The questions continued in a farcical vein: "If I had been a com- munist, a fascist or a homosexual... Where do Britain's best long-term interests lie— Washington, Brussels or Moscow?" During the medical examination, he was told that "with Oxford, it's the drugs thing; with Cambridge, it's the boys". Attitudes have changed, and by 1997 MI6 was prepared to post a "gay couple"—"counsellor" and chief of station Christopher Hurran and his long-time Venezuelan lover—to the British Embassy in Czechoslovakia. A few years earlier, the Service had recruited a member of CND. Finally, Roberts went through the process of positive vetting (known since 1990 as "EPV"). It is generally conducted by a semi-retired officer with a false name, who interviews referees and other contacts and undertakes checks on creditworthiness. Suitable candidates are put through the fast-stream Civil Service Selection Board. Roberts, however, decided not to join, and Tomlinson did so only after spending a number of years travelling and working in the City, during which time he had also signed up for the SAS territorial regiment. Over the last decade the Service has recruited a number of personnel from the special forces, though their gung-ho philosophy seems at odds with the image that MI6 has projected of the modern spy. Tomlinson eventually joined MI6 for old-fashioned "patriotic reasons" and sat the standard Foreign Office entry examination before being accepted onto the intelligence service training course. New recruits are introduced to the traditional "tradecraft" of the world of spying and gain a broad range of knowledge from recruiting and running agents to developing agents of influence and organising and servicing "dead letter" drops. Because of the smaller numbers, MI6 officers indulge in less specialisation than their American counterparts, though the techniques are essentially little different from those used at the beginning of the century. The infamous Dreyfus affair began when a cleaning woman, Marie Bastian, working in the German Embassy but employed by the French Secret Service, handed over to her French controller the contents of the wastepaper baskets she emptied. MI6 recruiters still look out for "the life-and-soul-of-the-party types who could persuade the Turkish ambassador's secretary to go through her b wastepaper basket". These days, however, the spy is armed with a hand-held digital scanner which can hold the filched material in its memory and can also be used in emergencies to transmit the stolen secrets by burst transmissions via a satellite. Such gadgets are developed for the Directorate of Special Support responsible for by Stephen Dorril © 2000 From chapter 36 of his book MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service Edited from the Cryptome website: http://cryptome.org/mi6-sd36.htm Edited from the Cryptome website: http://cryptome.org/mi6-sd36.htm NEXUS - 19 by Stephen Dorril © 2000 OCTOBER — NOVEMBER 2000