The use of part time spies by MI6

4 April 1991

The Guardian
Richard Norton-Taylor

OUTLINE

SECRET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE - MI6

• has used businessmen and tried to use journalists as freelance contacts, or what it calls "approved unofficial agents" 
• "successive governments have maintained the fiction that it does not exist in peacetime; thus it cannot be held to account, and can deny everything" 
• MI6 has an officer attached to most large embassies abroad 
• Embassys go to lengths to disguise their agents 
• Most host countries know exactly who they are 
• Known to have placed agents in banks abroad, and in companies which have branches in locations where there is no official government presence 
• "Persuaded the Observer newspaper to take on Kim Philby as its Beirut correspondent after his fellow Soviet agents, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, fled to Moscow in 1951." 
• Its use of outsiders is well known.

Continue Reading... Labels: MI5, MI6, Real IRA