Real-life James Bonds: Actual spooks reveal what a job in MI6 is really like

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/jamesbond/11874457/Real-life-James-Bonds-Actual-spooks-reveal-what-a-job-in-MI6-is-really-like.html

By Frank Gardner
telegraph.co.uk
25 Oct 2015

It’s slick, it’s fast-paced and it’s sexy. But that’s the cinema. SPECTRE, 
the latest James Bond thriller starring Daniel Craig opens in cinemas on 
Monday to critical acclaim. Pure fantasy? Or are there any similarities 
with the work of a real-life operative in Britain’s Secret Intelligence 
Service (SIS), better known as MI6? I’ve gone to meet two serving SIS 
officers to find out.

I don’t notice them at first, there are so many people in the room. Are 
they part of the camera crew? A couple of people sent up from hotel 
reception perhaps, to check we have everything we need? But then we are 
introduced. “Kamal” – and I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess 
that is probably not his real name – is 30-something, unshaven, quietly 
confident. “Kirsty” is only slightly older. Neatly dressed, she looks like 
she could be running a medium-sized IT company. In fact, she is in 
recruiting, having already done the hard yards in the field overseas.

Kamal speaks first. “I’m what people would classify as an agent-runner,” 
he tells me. “Our job is to find individuals with access to secret 
intelligence of value to the UK government. My job [within MI6] is to 
build a relationship with these individuals and work with them to obtain 
the secrets they have access to, securely.”

And bang, up in smoke goes one of the biggest misnomers about espionage 
and spies. James Bond, and all the true-life men and women who work inside 
those sandstone and emerald-coloured headquarters at Vauxhall Cross on the 
banks of the Thames are not “secret agents”. They are intelligence 
officers. The people overseas who they persuade to spy for them are the 
actual agents.

[...]

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