The biggest laughing stock in British intelligence history: intelligence personnel are Soviet spies.

Many people believe that after World War II, British MI 6 quickly re-focused on the Soviet Union. In fact, the first problem that MI6 encountered was how to keep itself alive. British historian Gith Jeffery tells the secret story of MI6 in his new book The Secret History of MI6.

Clashes with MI5.

1in the summer of 945, the British Conservative Party was defeated in the general election and the regime returned to the hands of the Labour Party. Attlee, the new prime minister, has a bad impression on MI6, thinking that such a department will only be a "chicken rib" after the end of World War II. At that time, the British ruling and opposition parties kept proposing to merge MI6 and MI5.

Later, Steve Walter, Chairman of the Security Committee of the British Parliament, wrote in the draft on the division of responsibilities: "The work related to overseas espionage should still belong to MI 6. In the end, Attlee agreed with this view. However, in the following year, all parties have been haggling over the issue of power and responsibility, and finally reached an agreement: MI 6 is responsible for intelligence collection in Western Europe, Iberian Peninsula, Northern Europe, South Africa, Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and the Balkans.

However, this division of powers and responsibilities annoyed MI5. Percy Hillstone, who has just been appointed as the head of MI5 by Attlee, wrote to the Prime Minister that the Middle East Security Agency under his management should not be abolished because of the scope of MI6' s responsibilities, because many domestic security affairs are inextricably linked with the Middle East.

In order to solve this dispute, MI5 was assigned to "continue to be responsible for the intelligence in the Palestinian area" and the rest was handed over to MI6. However, the director of MI6 thought it was Hillstone's personal ambition, so he wrote to Stewart to express his dissatisfaction. Contradictions between the two intelligence agencies continued, and the wave of mutual dismantling intensified, until Menzexi and Hillstone cleared up their differences and reached an information sharing agreement at 1948.

Encounter the biggest laughing stock in the history of intelligence.

In the history of MI6 in the early cold war, it is worth mentioning a spy war called "Kobe Incident". It was named "Kobe" because the MI6 personnel who participated in the investigation at that time loved to drink a whisky "Kobe" produced in Canada. It was1September 9, 945. MI6 discovered that Inge Kortenko, who works in the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa now, turned out to be a code breaker. Intelligence personnel later discovered that behind Kaulzenko was Zaboting, the head of the Soviet military intelligence agency in Canada.

Zabotin holds a list of European elites who are willing to play for the Soviet Union. Alan Kamei, a British nuclear expert working in Canada, was on the list, and he had handed in an important sample of uranium -235 earlier. They were even more surprised by the information that MI6 subsequently dug up, because they found that Kim philby, who had worked for MI6 for many years, had already passed the information on to the Soviet Union.

Philby graduated from Cambridge University and is now a household name in Britain. He secretly met Boris Kurenchard, the director of Soviet intelligence in London, under the pseudonym "Stanley". According to Kurentchard, the information that the Canadian intelligence network was cracked was learned from philby.

Philby's status as a "Soviet spy" made MI6 very nervous, because philby was not only undercover in MI6 for a long time, but also a senior liaison officer of Britain in the CIA, responsible for coordinating the anti-Soviet espionage actions of Britain and the United States. MI6 reported this situation to Attlee, who took advantage of his visit to the United States in June of that year (1 1) and suggested that US President Truman launch a joint investigation.

But to the surprise of the British, Truman refused to discuss the cooperation plan. Therefore, although this incident was exposed in 1946, philby successfully defected to the Soviet Union after 10 years. His memoir My Silent War was published in 1968, and quickly became a bestseller list in the world. The philby incident has also become the biggest laughing stock of British intelligence agencies in history.

Tracking communism in Eurasia

As mentioned earlier, MI6, which got rid of the "small wall rebellion", quickly found its position in the cold war era. In the late 1940s, Churchill's "Iron Curtain Speech" set off a new confrontation between the East and the West. 1947, then British Foreign Secretary Bevan bluntly said that the diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union were tepid, and the British security department must see clearly that it was facing an anti-Western, gradually expanding communist camp.

1947, according to the report of MI6 at that time, the intelligence personnel knew all the information of the * * * resolution started at the German regional level. A female undercover, code-named "Chef", was employed by MI6, and had been lurking in Hamburg for many years, providing information. MI6' s "reward" for this undercover now seems pitiful, but it only guarantees to provide her with 1500 calories of canned beef and 500 grams of buttered bread every day.

In addition to Germany, MI6 has sent more intelligence personnel to France, Spain, the Balkans and Northern Europe. Even in Jerusalem in the Middle East, I never forget to trace the local communist organizations. In Britain's view at that time, preventing Jewish immigrants from entering Palestine was the key to successfully preventing communism from entering the Middle East. According to the archives of MI6, the British believe that the Soviet Union wanted to make the local people feel that it was the power of the Soviet Union that enabled the Jews to establish a state in Palestine, not to help the West.

In order to make the Soviet Union feel that Britain "saw the opportunity", MI6 took pains to create a fake file at 1948, which read "British intelligence agencies have cracked illegal Jewish immigration channels in Bulgaria, Romania and the Middle East, and learned that Soviet forces are behind it". In order to make this document look more authentic, MI6 agents specially took it to the famous "* * *" nightclub in Vienna, where Soviet agents often found it. However, this painstaking intelligence intimidation war finally proved to have little effect.