MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949

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SIS is one of the British intelligence agencies and the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service ("C") is directly accountable to the Foreign Secretary.

The Zinoviev letter played a key role in the defeat of the minority Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald and the victory of the Conservatives under Stanley Baldwin in the general election of 29 October 1924. It is the sort of book I would have loved to have written myself and I perhaps tried to do it a bit with my recent book.

Mansfield Cumming, far left, pictured in 1907, became the first head of MI6 upon its founding in 1909. He revealed that the head of the Secret Service used a single initial C and that he wrote in green ink! This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. What could be taken from this book and added to is by going into more depth about some of the operations that would make for interesting reads.

M16's postwar activities were mired in prewar attitudes and practices, at home in the exclusive clubs of Pall Mall but poorly suited to a retreating post-imperial power.This specialisation was because the Admiralty wanted to know the maritime strength of the Imperial German Navy. Sir Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador to Germany from 1937 to 1939, was actively hostile towards MI6 running agents out of the British embassy in Berlin as he made it clear his belief that espionage against Germany would hamper the "general settlement" he was seeking with the Reich.