Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) | |
---|---|
Secret Intelligence Service | |
Abbreviation | C |
Reports to | Foreign Secretary |
Appointer | Foreign Secretary |
Constituting instrument | Intelligence Services Act 1994 |
Formation | 1909 |
First holder | Captain Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming |
Unofficial names | Chief of MI6 |
Salary | £169,999 (2010) |
Website | sis |
The Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service serves as the head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also commonly known as MI6), which is part of the United Kingdom intelligence community. The chief is appointed by the foreign secretary, to whom they report directly. Annual reports are also made to the prime minister. [1]
The chief of the Secret Intelligence Service typically signs letters with a "C" in green ink. [2] This originates from the initial used by Captain Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming, when he signed a letter "C" in green ink. Since then the chief has been known as "C".
From 1782 until 1909, British intelligence at the government level was handled directly by the Foreign Office, with the Army and Navy also maintaining their own intelligence branches. By 1909, growing tensions with Germany led the Committee of Imperial Defence to recommend the creation of the Secret Service Bureau to provide organization and leadership to the intelligence-gathering process as well as a layer of insulation from espionage activities for the Foreign Office. [3] A 10 August 1909 letter from the Director of Naval Intelligence, Alexander Bethell, to then-Commander Mansfield Smith-Cumming offered him a "new billet": the opportunity to head the Foreign Section of the new Secret Service Bureau. Cumming was to begin in this role on 1 October 1909, but bureaucratic and funding obstacles delayed the start of his work. His first full day in this capacity was not until 7 October, and even then, he "went to the office and remained all day, but saw no one, nor was there anything to do there." [3] [4]
Cumming's tenure as chief established many of the traditions and trappings of the office. Among the best known of these, he signed documents with the initial "C" in green ink, a custom upheld throughout the history of the service. [5] One tradition that was not maintained was the selection of the Chief from the ranks of the Royal Navy. Although Cumming and his successor Hugh Sinclair both had long Navy careers, [6] in 1939 Army veteran Stewart Menzies was appointed over naval officer (and Churchill's preferred candidate) Gerard Muirhead-Gould. [7] Plans to rotate the selection of Chief among the various branches of military service were considered, but most subsequent Chiefs have been career intelligence officers. [6]
Although the existence of the Secret Intelligence Service, much less its Chief, was not officially acknowledged until 1992, [8] the role's reality was an open secret for many years. In 1932, Compton MacKenzie was fined under the Official Secrets Act for elements of his book Greek Memories. Among these offences, according to Attorney General Sir Thomas Inskip was "reveal[ing] the mysterious consonant by which the Chief of the Secret Service is known." By 30 May 1968, however, The Times was willing to name Menzies as the "former Head of the Secret Intelligence Service" in his obituary. [7] A 1989 House of Commons debate listed a number of publications in which information about the Chief and his organization had been revealed. [9]
The 1994 Intelligence Services Act established a statutory basis for the Secret Intelligence Service and the position of Chief. Since then, the office has had more public visibility, including a speech by John Sawers in 2010, described by The Times as "the first of its kind". [10] [11] The Chief remains the only member of the Secret Intelligence Service whose identity is officially made public. [1]
A 2010 report revealed the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service was receiving a salary of £169,999 at that time. [12]
Chiefs have been: [13]
No. | Portrait | Name (born–died) | Term of office | Ref. | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Took office | Left office | Time in office | ||||
1 | Captain Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming (1859–1923) | 7 October 1909 | 14 June 1923 † | 13 years, 250 days | ||
2 | Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair (1873–1939) | 1923 | 4 November 1939 † | 15–16 years | ||
3 | Major-General Sir Stewart Menzies (1890–1968) | 1939 | 1952 | 13–14 years | ||
4 | Major-General Sir John Sinclair (1897–1977) | 1953 | 1956 | 2–3 years | ||
5 | Sir Richard White (1906–1993) | 1956 | 1968 | 11–12 years | ||
6 | Sir John Rennie (1914–1981) | 1968 | 1973 | 4–5 years | ||
7 | Sir Maurice Oldfield (1915–1981) | 1973 | 1978 | 4–5 years | ||
8 | Sir Arthur (Dickie) Franks (1920–2008) | 1979 | 1982 | 2–3 years | ||
9 | Sir Colin Figures (1925–2006) | 1982 | 1985 | 2–3 years | ||
10 | Sir Christopher Curwen (1929–2013) | 1985 | 1989 | 3–4 years | ||
11 | Sir Colin McColl (born 1932) | 1989 | 1994 | 4–5 years | ||
12 | Sir David Spedding (1943–2001) | 1994 | 1999 | 4–5 years | ||
13 | Sir Richard Dearlove (born 1945) | 1999 | 6 May 2004 | 4–5 years | ||
14 | Sir John Scarlett (born 1948) | 6 May 2004 | 1 November 2009 | 5 years, 179 days | [14] | |
15 | Sir John Sawers (born 1955) | 1 November 2009 | 1 November 2014 | 5 years, 0 days | [15] | |
16 | Sir Alex Younger (born 1963) | 1 November 2014 | 30 September 2020 | 5 years, 334 days | [16] | |
17 | Sir Richard Moore (born 1963) | 1 October 2020 | Incumbent | 4 years, 107 days | [17] |
Captain Sir Mansfield George Smith-Cumming was a British naval officer who served as the first chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).
Major General Sir Stewart Graham Menzies, was Chief of MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), from 1939 to 1952, during and after the Second World War.
Sir John McLeod Scarlett is a British senior intelligence officer. He was Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) from 2004 to 2009. Prior to this appointment, he had chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC).
Sir Richard Billing Dearlove is a retired British intelligence officer who was head of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), a role known informally as "C", from 1999 until 6 May 2004. He was head of MI6 during the invasion of Iraq. He was criticised by the Iraq Inquiry for providing unverified intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.
The SIS Building, also called the MI6 Building, at Vauxhall Cross houses the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as Military Intelligence, Section 6 (MI6), the United Kingdom's foreign intelligence agency. It is located at 85 Albert Embankment in Vauxhall, London, on the bank of the River Thames beside Vauxhall Bridge. The building has been the headquarters of the SIS since 1994.
Margaret Mildred "Meta" Ramsay, Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale is a Labour Party member of the House of Lords.
British Security Co-ordination (BSC) was a covert organisation set up in New York City by the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in May 1940 upon the authorisation of the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.
Colonel Valentine Patrick Terrell Vivian CMG CBE was the vice-chief of the SIS or MI6 and the first head of its counterespionage unit, Section V. Vivian, while he was attempting to introduce new blood into the service, selected Kim Philby, who later became notorious as "The Third Man" double agent and defected to the Russians, causing considerable harm to the system he had infiltrated.
Sir William George Eden Wiseman, 10th Baronet was a British intelligence agent and banker. He was a general partner at American investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co. from 1929 till 1960.
Charles Cumming is a British writer of spy fiction and a screenwriter.
Sir Robert John Sawers is a British intelligence officer, diplomat and civil servant. He was Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), a position he held from November 2009 until November 2014. He was previously the British Permanent Representative to the United Nations from August 2007 to November 2009.
Konstantin Volkov was an NKVD agent in Turkey who vanished after wanting to defect to the United Kingdom. He disappeared after telling the British Consulate General in Istanbul he would name three high-ranking double agents working in London for the Soviet intelligence service. One of these agents was Kim Philby who tipped off the Russians about what Volkov and his wife were planning. It took Philby three weeks to arrive which was enough time for Soviet security agents to find the couple and take them back to Moscow.
Gareth Wyn Williams was a Welsh mathematician and Junior Analyst for GCHQ on secondment to the Secret Intelligence Service who was found dead in suspicious circumstances in Pimlico, London, on 23 August 2010, at a flat used to house Security Service's staff. The inquest found that his death was "unnatural and likely to have been criminally mediated." A subsequent Metropolitan Police re-investigation concluded that Williams's death was "probably an accident".
Alexander Joseph Patrick "Alec" Wilson was an English writer, spy, MI6 officer, and polygamist. He wrote under the names Alexander Wilson, Geoffrey Spencer, Gregory Wilson, and Michael Chesney.
Brigadier Sir Richard Gambier-Parry, was a British military officer who served in both the army and the air force during World War I. He remained in military service post-war, but then entered into civilian life for more than a decade. In 1938, he was recruited by the head of the Secret Intelligence Service. Gambier-Parry led the Communications Section of the SIS during World War II, and assembled a clandestine wireless network that connected the United Kingdom with SIS agents in many countries, as well as helping to create the SIS resistance network in Britain. During the war, he was also recruited by the Director of British Naval Intelligence to serve as the radio consultant for Operation Tracer in Gibraltar. Post-war, he ran a network of secret listening stations.
The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6, is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of human intelligence on foreign nationals in support of its Five Eyes partners. SIS is one of the British intelligence agencies and the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service ("C") is directly accountable to the Foreign Secretary.
The Government of the United Kingdom maintains several intelligence agencies that deal with secret intelligence. These agencies are responsible for collecting, analysing and exploiting foreign and domestic intelligence, providing military intelligence, and performing espionage and counter-espionage. Their intelligence assessments contribute to the conduct of the foreign relations of the United Kingdom, maintaining the national security of the United Kingdom, military planning, public safety, and law enforcement in the United Kingdom. The four main agencies are the Secret Intelligence Service, the Security Service (MI5), the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and Defence Intelligence (DI). The agencies are organised under three government departments, the Foreign Office, the Home Office and the Ministry of Defence.
Sir Alexander William Younger is a British intelligence officer who served as the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), from 2014 to 2020. In April 2019, the government extended Younger's contract to maintain stability through the Brexit negotiations, which made him the longest-serving MI6 chief in 50 years.
Sir Richard Peter Moore is a British civil servant, currently chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and formerly Director General for Political Affairs, at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, and previously the British ambassador to Turkey.
Frederick Allan Rowley, CMG, OBE, MC was a British Army officer, Foreign Office diplomat, and Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) controller.
the speech last week by Sir John Sawers, the head of MI6, the first of its kind...