Secrets of Her Majesty's Secret Service

It is the headquarters of the world's most famous spy organisation,

the legendary home of Agent 007... James Bond.

This is MI6, otherwise known as Her Majesty's Secret Service.

Now, with unprecedented access to the major players in British espionage...

It's exciting and the adrenaline is pumping round.

...we reveal the truth behind the covert operations,

the secret missions and the double-agents.

We expose the dangerous secret world

of real-life spies.

There are far more spies in London now

than there were during the Cold War.

London, a cosmopolitan metropolis

of 8 million inhabitants.

And home to the world-renowned British Secret Service.

For decades, cunning games of espionage

have been played out on the city's streets.

Assassinations...

treason... and betrayal.

London has always been a crossroads, a global city.

You've always had lots of exiles and dissidents here.

That means it's a real meeting place for spies...

British spies, spies from other countries trying to recruit people,

trying to run operations.

I think it's meant that London is one of the great spy cities in the world.

Entering the high-stakes world of spying,

we learn what's really going on in the shadows.

From the highest echelons of MI6...

The best form of defence against plots and attacks

is to know about it in advance.

It was all about collecting intelligence

and recruiting and running sources.

...to field operatives who risked their lives...

At my peak, I was operating under about 14 or 15 different aliases.

...unsung heroes of Britain's most secret code-breaking station...

We broke a message that said 'Today's the day minus three.'

...the KGB double agents who fought the Cold War.

The Secret Intelligence Service exists to defend

and protect the security and interests of the United Kingdom.

It's known by its World War One designation

as Military Intelligence Section 6...

or MI6.

This green and cream building behind me is the headquarters of MI6.

That's the Secret Intelligence Service,

Britain's foreign intelligence service,

the equivalent of the CIA.

Within intelligence circles, the building is known as VX,

after its location at Vauxhall Cross on the banks of the River Thames.

It became even more identifiable to millions of cinema fans around the globe

when it was famously blown up in the Bond movie, Skyfall.

It is probably the most famous secret service building in the world

thanks to the James Bond films.

The fictional world of 007

may be glamorous and entertaining

but the reality of life in MI6 is far more serious.

Someone who knows this dark world better than most is Sir John Scarlett.

For 38 years, he was one of MI6's top operatives,

rising to Chief of the Service in 2004.

MI6 is essentially an information gathering agency.

It collects intelligence.

That is its job and it is very good at it.

During his five-year tenure as Chief,

Sir John authorised many dangerous and daring intelligence operations.

There's not much I can share but I think, like many of my colleagues,

over a long period of time,

I've quite often been in situations where it's exciting,

and the best way of describing it is,

the adrenaline, you know, is pumping round.

To preserve secrecy and security,

MI6 never acknowledges its missions or spies.

But one spy has outed himself and talked...

former undercover MI6 officer and now author, Matthew Dunn.

The majority of what I did was recruiting foreign spies,

typically nationals who were placed in positions

that gave them access to secrets

and targeting senior echelons within rogue states.

That was the core of my work.

In MI6-speak, those passing on secret intelligence are called agents,

while men such as Dunn, who run the agents, are called officers.

Both are commonly referred to as spies.

Dunn typically met his agents in the bars and rooms of London's top hotels,

glossy surroundings that are far more dangerous

than they seem to the average tourist.

The biggest concern a case officer has when attending a covert meeting with an agent

is fear that he is being followed by a hostile surveillance team.

In order to address that, the officer will walk a anti-surveillance route.

Officers will establish what's called a theme,

and in this case, I'm walking down Jermyn Street

and my theme is shirt shopping.

If a team's following me,

they will think I am shirt shopping.

If an officer spots the same face more than once on his anti-surveillance route,

this is called a double-sighting.

This person may well be enemy surveillance,

in which case, the officer has to abort the meeting.

I've often felt when operating that there was a threat to me,

that I could be snatched or the person you're with could be snatched.

And that threat could include death.

Today MI6 has over 3,200 officers operating across the globe.

They run covert operations,

infiltrate terrorist organisations

and foil international plots.

They need to extract information from the most sensitive of sources.

One of the core strengths of MI6

is our agent-running skills and that is world renowned.

Other agencies... the CIA, European agencies,

do recognise that our agent-handling abilities are second to none.

MI6 will use any tool in its arsenal,

including blackmail and bribery,

to persuade foreign agents to betray their country

and hand over top secret information.

This is what happens in this sort of business.

That was a great skill.

You have to talent spot people in the first place,

you have to spot them, see their potential

and then bring them under control.

These skills have been perfected over the agency's 100-year history.

Britain's Secret Service was founded on 1st October, 1909,

to gather intelligence about the growing military threat from imperial Germany.

Tensions were rising in Europe

and people feared German spies

were infiltrating Britain.

The Daily Mail told its readers

to refuse to be served by German waiters:

'If your waiter says he's Swiss,

demand to see his passport.'

MI6's first headquarters were near the corridors of power in Whitehall.

But few in government knew the agency even existed.

Where we are now is where the earliest headquarters of MI6 is,

and that's up in that tower.

2 Whitehall Court was the foreign section

of the Secret Service Bureau.

It's where Mansfield Cumming set up his early headquarters

and throughout the First World War,

that's where what we now call MI6 was based.

Mansfield Cumming was the first Chief of the Service.

He was a naval officer who would go on spying missions

wearing rather bizarre disguises.

His office was a laboratory of strange gadgets and devices.

He was very innovative,

he was one of the first people in Britain to take his pilot's license.

He had a special license plate for his Rolls Royce

which allowed him to drive up and down London streets

at any speed he wanted to without being stopped by the police.

He was a real character.

His staffing and interview methods were uniquely gruesome.

He had a wooden leg.

And when he was recruiting new officers,

he would frequently take his pen knife

and stab it into this wooden leg.

he was just the right man to work for Britain's Secret Service.

Cumming knew that good agents

were the most important tool in the spying game.

From the very beginning, he understood it was all about

collecting intelligence and recruiting and running sources.

From the very beginning, that's what he did.

It was just in the bloodstream.

Cumming disguised his organisation's true activity

by pretending it was an import/export business called Rasen, Falcon & Co.

To this day, MI6 uses fake companies

as a cover for its clandestine operations abroad.

Cumming also created other traditions

still maintained by his MI6 successors.

He brought with him the naval tradition of the captain

writing his log in green ink.

Even now, the Chief of MI6 still writes in green ink,

because Cumming did.

His most famous legacy, however, is his signature.

Cumming was given the title of C as a cover,

it was simply the first letter of his name.

It's obviously where M in James Bond comes from

and even now, the Chief of MI6, as he's now called,

signs his letter with a C.

Signing yourself as C is a reminder that we have a continuing tradition.

Everything leads to everything else.

There's been no break. That's what's exceptional.

In 1918, Cumming recruited his most brilliant agent,

the infamous Sidney Reilly, Ace of Spies.

Reilly, who could speak seven languages fluently,

was utterly fearless,

a hardened gambler and a famous seducer of women.

In some ways he was the perfect spy because he was a bit of conman.

And he was able to persuade people to do things,

just like any conman, that they wouldn't normally do.

So he is a great collector of intelligence

and he has these daring operations.

Reilly's adventures are straight out of the pages of a novel.

In France, he poses as a priest to win Britain important oil concessions.

In the Far East, he steals Russian naval plans to sell to the highest bidder.

He was operating as a film agent

and as a Greek businessman,

changing his identity at various stages.

After his death, the Evening Standard Newspaper serialises his memoirs.

He is at once immortalised as a master of deception.

He was the Ace of Spies. He was brilliant.

In 1926, MI6 moves to new headquarters

opposite St James's Park underground station in London.

It grows quickly into a sophisticated organisation,

collecting intelligence, running agents

and mounting covert operations overseas.

Within 15 years, it has a spy network stretching across the globe.