MI۶ has the swagger of James Bond; its French equivalent, DGSE, the complexities of the television drama Le Bureau. The film and TV shows may be fictional, but a survey run by a French magazine that placed the British spy agency above the French as No ۱ across all of Europe this week is not.
L’Express, a news weekly, conducted a Eurovision-style poll of ۶۰ current and former spies from across the continent, plus the CIA and Israel’s Mossad. Each was asked to rank their top five foreign intelligence agencies, in secret, naturally enough. MI۶ was first with ۲۵۱ points ahead of DGSE on ۱۶۹, with other agencies trailing behind.
The result did not surprise Alexandra Saviana, a deputy editor at the publication, specialising in defence and intelligence, but the margin of victory did. “It is a huge point gap,” she said, reflecting the opinions of insiders and allies, ۱۷ of whom are or were agency chiefs in a interconnected, covert ecosystem.
At MI۶’s headquarters in Vauxhall, London, there has been no sign of a public reaction from its chief, Blaise Metreweli. But there is a quiet satisfaction at the unexpected verdict, not least because the agency values how it is perceived by both allies and adversaries. “Reputation matters a lot in the espionage game,” said a former Whitehall insider.
“British spies fascinate Europe, and beyond,” L’Express explained in its cover story. Saviana added that MI۶’s success in the poll was principally down to its record in recruiting and running high-level human sources over generations: a focus on human intelligence in an era dominated by technology, intercepts and satellite monitoring.
“The British have the ability to play the long game, to bet on sources over ۱۰ years, a bit like the Russians,” a former French DGSE spy told the magazine, adding “and they have a penchant for underhand tactics” without revealing what they meant.
One ex-spy voiced scepticism about the survey and added that a human intelligence service such as MI۶ was only as good as the high-value agents on its books. Under Richard Moore, MI۶’s previous chief, there were worries that it no longer had enough. Others, including Saviana, accept that greater credit might have been given to MI۶’s sister agency, the signals intelligence experts at GCHQ, but it was not in the poll.
MI۶’s reputation among its peers, the French publication said, was built on “long standing tradition”, including recruiting cold war assets, most notably the KGB’s Oleg Gordievsky, a double agent through late ۱۹۷۰s and early ۸۰s, who helped convince Margaret Thatcher to take Mikhail Gorbachev seriously before he had to be dramatically smuggled into Finland in ۱۹۸۵, his cover finally blown.
Not every mole evaded capture. Alireza Akbari, a former Iranian deputy defence minister who had become a British citizen, was arrested on a return to Iran in ۲۰۱۹ and executed in ۲۰۲۳. Prior to his death, he confessed to being an MI۶ agent. Though the confessions appeared coerced, spies from a number of countries indicated he was the person who had passed on the existence of the Fordow nuclear enrichment site in ۲۰۰۸.
In the run-up to the ۲۰۰۳ Iraq war, MI۶ was accused of simplistically supporting the case for war, promoting what turned out to be false sources, claiming that Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, could attack UK targets within “۴۵ minutes”, and relied on one source who described supposed chemical weapons devices that were remarkably similar to one in the Hollywood movie The Rock. It was a low point.
L’Express argued that MI۶ had rehabilitated itself in the run-up to the Ukraine war in February ۲۰۲۲, correctly warning in conjunction with the CIA that Russia was about to invade, while French and German counterparts were sceptical up until the last minute, having misjudged the situation. The chief of the German BND agency even flew into Kyiv the day before the invasion, seemingly unprepared.
It reflects MI۶’s close and longstanding relationship with the CIA, part of the wider Five Eyes arrangements for intelligence sharing, between the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, that are the envy of continental Europe, even allowing for the complexities posed by Donald Trump’s chaotic presidency. “Every other country wants to say they are the sixth eye,” Saviana said.
Fiction also has its advantages. Gordon Corera, a co-presenter of The Rest is Classified podcast, recalled that a former MI۶ chief once told him a story of a young officer going somewhere far flung, not knowing whether the person he was trying to cultivate spoke English. “As he walked into the room the contact extended his hand and said: ‘Hello, Mr Bond.’ The former chief remarked: ‘I doubt if he would have received such a warm welcome if he’d been from the Belgian secret service.’”
