Secret service becomes a little less so with publication of authorised history

MI6 has lifted the veil of secrecy which has surrounded its operations for the past century with the publication of the first authorised history of the service.

Professor Keith Jeffery, of Queen's University, Belfast, was given unrestricted access to the surviving historic files of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), as it is more properly known.

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At a launch at the Foreign Office yesterday, Sir John Scarlett, the former SIS chief who commissioned the book to mark its centenary last year, said it was a "radical step" for an agency whose watchword is secrecy.

"Mansfield Cumming (the first service's first chief) believed passionately in secrecy. I am sure he would be surprised to see me here today presenting a history of his service," Sir John said.

"For MI6, this is an exceptional event. There has been nothing like this before and there are no plans for anything similar in the future.

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"Although for much of its history it was astonishingly underfunded and very much smaller than imagination would have it, the overall impression one is left with is the remarkable level of achievement against a very wide range of extremely difficult and stressful intelligence targets on five continents."

Unlike the recent authorised history of MI5, which runs to the present day, it only covers the first 40 years of the service from 1909 to 1949.

Prof Jeffery also had to agree to a number of restrictions – including a proviso that he could not name or allude to any agent whose identity was not already clearly in the public domain.

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While he said that his "Faustian pact" had in some cases "overridden the imperatives of historical scholarship", it had not "materially undermined" his ability to tell many important stories from the period.

The include the exploits of such legendary characters as Sidney Reilly, the self-styled "Ace of Spies", and Wilfred "Biffy" Dunderdale, who knew author Ian Fleming and is one possible model for James Bond.

Prof Jeffery said he was able to lay to rest the myth that MI6 had a "licence to kill", although "fatalities" did occur in the course of its work.

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He said he found no evidence to support recent claims that MI6 was involved in the assassination in 1916 of Rasputin, the notorious "mad monk" who had insinuated himself into the Russian royal family circle.

"If MI6 had a part in the killing of Rasputin, I would have expected to have found some trace of that," he said.

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