MI6 claims the mantle of the Special Operations Executive
Welcome! I’m Tom Griffin and this is my intelligence history newsletter. Feel free to share this article with the button below.
On this weekend’s events in Venezuela, one of the most timely pieces is
Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt, C.I.A. Source Inside Venezuelan Government Helped Track Maduro, New York Times, 3 January 2026.
On the intelligence history background, see the following pieces here:
SOE officers and resistance members in Southern France in 1944 (Imperial War Museum, CC4.0).
In Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger the title character tells James Bond ‘they have a saying in Chicago: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”’1
Only two MI6 chiefs have invoked the legacy of the wartime Special Operations Executive (SOE) in recent years, but it seems to have been more than coincidence.
On a visit to Paris in December 2024, Richard Moore recalled the flame of the French resistance ‘was kindled by the men and women of the Special Operations Executive, asked by Churchill to ‘set Europe ablaze.’
After the war, the SOE was merged into SIS [Secret Intelligence Service, popularly known as MI6], and we cherish our heritage of covert action which we keep alive today in helping Ukraine resist the Russian invasion.2
A year later, his successor Blaise Metreweli, invoked the same legacy.
At an operational level, we will sharpen our edge and impact with audacity, tapping into – if you like – our historical SOE instincts. We’re at our best when we’re hustling to make things happen, because our intelligence is most valuable when it changes reality on the ground.3
Both statements suggest a new attitude to issues which have long been central to MI6’s role. The choice was perhaps defined most succinctly by journalist Gordon Corera when he noted the competing tendencies reflected in the service’s most famous fictional representatives, Fleming’s Bond and John Le Carré’s George Smiley.
The story of British intelligence since the Second World War can be understood, in part, as the evolving tension between these two poles, between the doers and the thinkers - those who sought to change the world and those who sought to understand it, or, to put it another way, between covert action and intelligence gathering.4
The divide between these two intelligence disciplines was never starker than during the Second World War. After 1940, when the new SOE took over MI6’s sabotage and subversion organisation, Section D, they were the responsibility of separate agencies.
Among the officers who SOE inherited was a Soviet mole, Kim Philby, who recalled that ‘starting from the valid premise that sabotage and subversion are inherently insecure (the authors of bangs are liable to detection) the intelligence people rushed happily to the invalid conclusion that bangs were a waste of time and money, diverting resources from the silent spy.’5
Another Section D officer, Bickham Sweet-Escott, made a similar observation, saying that an officer ‘who is interested in obtaining intelligence must have peace and quiet and the agents he employs must never… be found out’’, while ‘the man who has to carry out operations will produce loud noises if he is successful, and it is only too likely that some of the men he uses will not escape.’6
Perhaps the most extreme example of inter-agency conflict was in Greece, where SOE officer Spike Moran shot dead his MI6 counterpart Costa Lawrence in the belief that he was a traitor. Lawrence’s successor, Nigel Clive, managed to establish a decent working relationship with SOE.7 Along with David Balfour, he was nevertheless part of a group of MI6 officers who saw the rival agency as having made a ‘mess of it in Greece.’8
This reflected one of the tensions identified by Philby: ‘By and large, the British Government had accustomed itself to supporting the monarchs and oligarchs of Europe. Such men where strongly averse to any form of subversion. The only people likely to oppose any sort of resistance to Hitler were the Left-wing movements.’9
In Greece, MI6 was staunchly monarchist, while SOE warned that the return of the king could provoke civil war.10 It was MI6 which was in line with broader policy and the wartime exigencies which drove SOE were rapidly losing weight.
An October 1944 Foreign Office study of the future of MI6, the Bland Report, concluded that ‘it was impossible to conduct any enquiry into the future of S.I.S. without coming across numerous examples of the harmful impact upon it of the present existence of a second, independent secret organisation functioning in the same field.’11
Despite some military opposition, SOE was absorbed into MI6 after the war, leaving the Foreign Office in overall control of covert action, in stark contrast to the situation that was to emerge in the United States.12
MI6 chief Stewart Menzies initially envisaged reducing the legacy SOE to a small cadre organisation except for ‘certain activities in the Middle East and India which have been specifically authorised.’13 This vision was embodied in MI6’s Directorate of War Planning (D/WP).14
The Cold War revival of interest in covert action happened first in propaganda, with the creation of the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department to play the role of wartime Political Warfare Executive.
Paramilitary covert action took longer to overcome what intelligence historian Richard Aldrich described as ‘skilful Foreign Office heel-dragging’ but by 1949 ‘the British military, and more importantly the Americans had secured the green light to conduct operations in Albania, Poland and even within the Soviet Union itself in the volatile Ukraine.’15
Of these, only the Ukrainian operation was not thoroughly penetrated by Soviet intelligence, in part because one of its key leaders was a turned MGB officer. All had petered out by the mid-1950s. Aldrich suggests that they may only have been intended to keep the Soviets under ‘general pressure’, but that ‘it would not have taken much clandestine activity of this sort to ring alarm bells for Stalin, whose paranoia had assumed fantastic proportions.’16
Almost from the outset, British enthusiasm had been tempered by the advent of the Soviet nuclear bomb. D/WP’s successor, MI6’s Special Political Action Section, would focus on Africa and Asia.17
The national life or death business of Cold War Europe increasingly became the domain of clandestine intelligence collection. A new generation of agent-runners emerged in the 1960s under the tutelage of MI6’s Soviet Bloc Division chief, Harold Shergold.18 Agents such as Oleg Penkovsky and Oleg Gordievsky informed British policy at key points from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the emergence of Perestroika.
After his 1985 defection, Gordievsky co-authored a book on the KGB with intelligence historian Christopher Andrew. While they acknowledge that almost all western attempts to penetrate the Soviet Union in the Cold War were infiltrated, they go on to emphasize that ‘one of the distinguishing characteristics of Soviet intelligence operations was the extent to which they were targeted on imaginary enemies as well as real opponents.’19
Richard Moore’s willingness to highlight Anglo-Ukrainian covert action suggests that MI6 is not unwilling to play on Russian paranoia, and indeed on Moscow’s own narrative. In June, the Russian Ambassador in London blamed Britain for a Ukrainian drone operation which destroyed 40 Russian warplanes. This had the advantage of absolving the Americans while denying the Ukrainians themselves too much of the credit.20
While the risks of being singled out in this way are obvious, there may also have been advantages for MI6. Anne McElvoy reports this weekend that Moore’s ‘punchy public profile’ is regarded within the service as having succeeded ‘in actively encouraging Russians worried about being implicated in Putin’s war crimes to get in touch.’21
McElvoy suggests Metreweli’s approach will be more reserved. The new chief’s invocation of SOE is a clear note of continuity and her suggestion that ‘intelligence must drive action’ could be read as a ongoing emphasis on covert operations.
However, other parts of her speech suggest a stronger focus on clandestine collection.
Our fast-paced, tech and threat-infused world now generates more heat than light. As nations retrench and rearm, we are losing opportunities to listen to what’s really going on.
I’ve seen time and again throughout my career, that this is where MI6 matters most: we listen and we hear. We understand, because we take time to learn languages and cultures, complex technical and historical detail, immerse ourselves in what’s really driving the situation.
Perhaps Smiley is still in the game against James Bond, even if Bond’s big bangs make for better advertising.
Ian Fleming, Goldfinger, Penguin Classics 2004, p.166.
Speech by Sir Richard Moore, Chief of SIS, 29 November 2024, gov.uk.
Speech by Blaise Metreweli, Chief of SIS, 15 December 2025, gov.uk.
Gordon Corera, MI6: Life and Death in the British Secret Service, Phoenix, 2012. p.4.
Kim Philby, My Silent War, Panther, 1968, p.27.
Bickham Sweet-Escott, Baker Street Irregular, Methuen 1965, p.24, cited in Philip H.J. Davies, MI6 and the Machinery of Spying, Frank Cass, 2004, p.115.
Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949, Bloomsbury, 2010, p.503.
Stephen Dorril, MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service, Touchstone, 2000, p.306.
Kim Philby, My Silent War, Panther, 1968, p.28.
Stephen Dorril, MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service, Touchstone, 2000, p.306.
Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949, Bloomsbury, 2010, p.606.
Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949, Bloomsbury, 2010, p.629.
Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949, Bloomsbury, 2010, p.628.
Philip H.J. Davies, MI6 and the Machinery of Spying, Frank Cass, 2004, p.203.
Richard J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence, John Murray Publishers, London, 2001, p.159.
Richard J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence, John Murray Publishers, London, 2001, p.174
Philip H.J. Davies, MI6 and the Machinery of Spying, Frank Cass, 2004, p.227.
Gordon Corera, MI6: Life and Death in the British Secret Service, Phoenix, 2012. p.4.
Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story, Harper Perennial, 1991, p.406.
Russian ambassador partly blames UK for Ukrainian drone attack, Sky News, 4 January 2025.
Anne McElvoy, Inside the first days of the new MI6 chief, New Statesman, 3 January 2006.
Let's be honest mi6 contribution in ww2 aside from Bletchley wasn't that fantastic. SOE actually killed nazis and organised resistance.
Observing the conflict in Ukraine I've been ever mindful that they have been receiving much more help than what is mentioned in the news.
Tom, you have a typo in one of your quotes, along with what may be a translation issue:
"Such men where strongly opposed to any form of subversion. The only people likely to oppose any sort of resistance to Hitler were the Left-wing movements."
It should be "strongly averse" and, more importantly, "likely to support"!