Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, has offered an unparalleled glimpse into its operations with its first authorised history published in London Tuesday.
Currently headed by Sir John Sawers, MI6 is the world’s oldest continuously operating foreign intelligence service.
Written by Prof. Keith Jeffery of Queen’s Univer-sity Belfast, The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949 only covers its first 40 years. Sir John Scarlett, the former SIS chief who commissioned the history, said the decision was a “radical” one. The 800-page book has stories about MI6 activities in India and outside India, focusing on “Indian revolutionaries based in immigrant communities” in the US and elsewhere.
The SIS’ work in colonial India and outside India was almost contiguous with that of the India Office intelligence agency, Indian Polit-ical Intelligence, tasked with “watching of the subjects of the Indian Empire in all countries save India.”
It shows British intelligence’s ambivalence about post-Independence India, particularly after it insisted on becoming a republic but remained in the Commo-nwealth. The Attlee Doct-rine mandated that the SIS could not gather intelligence in any Commo-nwealth country without its full knowledge, something that came to the fore when the SIS decided on covert operations in India.