MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations (Fourth Estate, 2000)

Brief Description of MI6:

To the person in the street, the British secret service conjures up images of the shaken, but never stirred suavity of James Bond. The reality of life inside MI6--the Security Service responsible for British operations outside of the United Kingdom--is a more dark narrative of intrigue and ineptitude, alleges Stephen Dorril, author of this comprehensive and weighty tome. Don't plan to put this on your light reading list, for MI6 is a huge and dense book: 800 pages of text, plus a list of acronyms that runs to six pages and over 60 pages of notes. Dorril begins by observing that "Researching secret agencies--and there are a few more secret than MI6--is obviously a difficult task"; in the light of this he's done an admirable job. From his position as an outsider (Dorril has never been a member of the Security Services but has been researching their activities for nearly 20 years), his access to information and scholarship has little parallel in the murky history of whistle-blowers and legal actions. MI6 is crammed with information for the security service buff and the lay-person alike (although the latter may find the denseness of the text a little hard-going at times), which is by turn extraordinary, darkly comical and alarming, but never less than a remarkable insight into a service that operates in our name. --Carina Trimingham

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