by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights before I’d
watched another PBS show right after the second Presidential debate: a British
retread from the year before called Secrets of Her Majesty’s Secret Service, an episode dealing with the British Secret
Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as Military Intelligence Unit 6 (MI6),
the outfit the fictional James Bond works for — and of course the main business
of the director and writers was to highlight the differences between the
Bondian fiction and the agency’s reality, which is mostly concerned with
recruiting foreign nationals in the U.K. and getting them to spy on their home
countries. Its founding director from 1909 to 1923 was Captain Sir George
Mansfield Smith-Cumming, who usually dropped the first part of his hyphenated
last name and was just addressed as “Cumming.” When he signed official
documents it got abbreviated still further, to a simple “C” in green ink, and
ever since tradition has decreed that whoever is running MI6 is identified only
as “C” (in the Bond books it is, of course, “M”) and signs all official
documents the same way Cumming did — just the letter “C” in green ink. The show
discusses some of MI6’s biggest embarrassments, including the length of time
Soviet “mole” Kim Philby was part of the upper echelon and the sheer number of
people the Soviets were able to recruit when they were young idealistic
students in Cambridge (MI6 tended to recruit its agents from the upper classes
and in the 1920’s and 1930’s a lot of upper-class young men had flirtations
with Communism, and in some cases it was far more of a lifetime commitment),
also the agency’s recovery later in the Cold War when it grabbed Soviet
defector Oleg Gordievsky (who’s still alive and was interviewed for the show)
out of Russia just as he was about to be exposed and executed as an MI6
informant. (For those who are still entranced by the romantic world of James
Bond, most of the daily business of an MI6 officer consists of recruiting
“agents” — i.e., informants — from other countries’ diplomatic services or
wherever they can find them, though it was amusing to hear that when Gamal Abdel
Nasser was setting up his secret service in Egypt he bought large quantities of
the Bond novels by Ian Fleming and had his own secret service people read them
to see which parts reflected actual espionage activities and which were totally
fictional.) There have been other shows with far more to say about real-life
espionage, both our own and our enemies’, but this was at least an interesting
time-filler and it was good after the last disastrous Presidential debate to
watch a film about genuinely intelligent people on both sides serving their
countries without thought (much thought, anyway) of their own egos!
