How MI6 works

From 2020 until last September, Richard Moore was Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) also known as “C”. Prior to that he’d been a Director-General at the Foreign Office and our ambassador to Turkey, having spent his earlier career in MI6.

Our interview with Richard was so interesting we’ve split it into two posts to cover as much ground as possible. In this first post we discuss how MI6, and the wider security apparatus, operates. How does “C” work with the prime minister? How do intelligence agencies try to avoid group think? Does he agree with the idea that there’s a “deep state”?

In part two - which we’ll post at the weekend - we cover the wider world. What’s Richard take on Putin, Xi, Iran and working with the US under Trump?

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Lawrence: You joined MI6 in the late 1980s. How did it happen?

Richard: The way we recruit people is very different today, but I received the stereotypical tap on the shoulder. I won’t reveal the identity of the particular academic who sidled up to me, but someone did in my second year at Oxford. I always remember because he said he knew I was interested in potentially joining the Foreign Office. Would I be interested in a career in an alternative field of foreign affairs? And I must have been such a naive 20 year old because I really didn’t get initially what he meant. And then a letter appeared, and I was summoned to a rather grand building, which we no longer have, just off the Mall. It was part of that wonderful set of buildings around Carlton Terrace. And then, of course, once I was recruited I worked in the decidedly more down at heel Century House near Lambeth North tube station. So that’s how I came to join MI6. And I suspect I did so because of curiosity, a sense that this just might be more fun and worthwhile. I never regretted the decision. I had no buyer’s remorse.

Lawrence: How does the MI6 you left compare with the MI6 you joined?

Richard: At its core, of course, it’s still doing the same thing. It is identifying people who would be prepared to help us, who are sitting within the apparatus of a hostile state or on the margins of a terrorist group, and finding a way to get close to them, get alongside them, to use the terminology, and find a way of persuading them to come and work with us. That has not changed at all, but getting to the point where you identify them is infused now with technology, of which AI is the latest version, and that enables you to perhaps kiss fewer frogs as you search for your prince or princess. You can now refine your search so much more effectively than you could when you noted everything down, person by person, on paper cards.