Spycraft

THE SPIES WHO CAME IN FROM THE CONTINENT

From John le Carré’s novels to the insatiable popular interest in James Bond, Britain has long enjoyed, and cultivated, an image of producing superior spies. This reputation is based on more than myth. For decades during and following World War II, the painstaking real-world work of British intelligence officers was one of the United Kingdom’s primary sources of power.

That power, and its underlying foundations, is now in jeopardy thanks to Brexit, which will have a cascading series of repercussions for British intelligence: It will shut Britain out of European Union institutions that have benefited British national security, and it may also jeopardize the special intelligence relationship with the United States, which may look to deepen relations with Brussels instead. But while Brexit may now be inevitable, there are still ways for the U.K. to avoid this outcome.

Britain’s intelligence services—MI5, which handles domestic security intelligence; MI6, which does foreign intelligence; and GCHQ, which focuses on signals intelligence (SIGINT)—have been touted at home and abroad as the Rolls-Royces of intelligence services. But they weren’t always. Declassified records show that, prior to World War II, British spy agencies were often more like rickety cars than luxury vehicles. MI5 and MI6 were established in 1909, and at the outbreak of World War I in 1914, both services had scant resources: MI5’s staff totaled 17, which included its office caretaker. The situation had scarcely improved by the start of World War II in 1939. A declassified in-house MI5 history shows that on the eve of the war, the agency’s counterespionage section had just two officers—with responsibilities for the entire British Empire and Commonwealth. MI5 and MI6 did not even know the name of the German military intelligence service, the Abwehr.