6 ms·
There is no doubt that MI5 was effectively rubbish in the spy vs spy games during the Cold War. But it's also possible to go a bit far in judging them purely on
by secfirstmd 6y ago
There is no doubt that MI5 was effectively rubbish in the spy vs spy games during the Cold War. But it's also possible to go a bit far in judging them purely on that basis.
If you (allow me to remove the civil liberties issues for a second) look more towards Northern Ireland and assess its success (from a UK gov point of view), along with RUC SB (the most important UK org in the conflict), SIS and the FRU, then it's a slightly different assessment you'd have to take. Of course interpretation depends on your viewpoint and how you patch the pieces of the story together. Considering the amount of Islamic radicialisation in the UK, it and CTC/SB have arguably been fairly successful. A similar sort of assessment could probably be made about the Communist Party in the UK - it was effectively going no where and well infiltrated. Though there were blips around miners and bits of the Labour Party, MI5 and Special Branch had such a tight hold of them post 1950 to the point where they were actually chasing their tail and seeing conspiracies where none existed.
I think reading the various bits of information to come out since the Cold War about the CIA in Russia can also probably show how little they really achieved there in the spy game. There is a whole genre of similar sorts of stories waffling away about disguises and technology but recently there was are challenges to the orthodoxy around that. Essentially successes were pretty minimal, dangles were swallowed all the time etc.
Worth reading this on that topic "Fictitious Spies and Fake History"
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08850607.2019.1668247?journalCode=ujic20 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08850607.2019.16...
- ciarannolan 6y ago>There is no doubt that MI5 was effectively rubbish in the spy vs spy games during the Cold War. This is not even remotely true. At one point they knew of every single KGB spy in the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Gordievsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Gordievsky
- TallGuyShort 6y agoYou're confusing MI5 with MI6. One is domestically focused, the other is internationally focused.
- ciarannolan 6y agoI don't think I am. Once they had Gordievsky, MI5 could use his knowledge of all KGB activities in the UK to root out spies, and they did.
- secfirstmd 6y agoThey most certainly did not. They didn't know about Norwood amongst others until after Mitrokhin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melita_Norwood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melita_Norwood Plus their successes were towards the end of the Cold War. They were effectively neutered by their own arrogance, ego and class blinding foolishness in the Russia sense until the 80s.
- mhh__ 6y agoNorwood retired when Gordievsky was still in Denmark if I have my dates correct, which is probably why he never heard about her (he never made it quite to the top of the tree). "I did what I did, not to make money, but to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, a good education and a health service" (As with most Soviet spies she lived the lie until she died)
- CrazyStat 6y agoThe quote from the article was > The terrible truth that began to dawn in the 1980s was that MI5 - whose job it was to catch spies that threatened Britain - had never by its own devices caught a spy in its entire history. Which is correct. MI5 only had that information thanks to the work of MI6, not by its own devices.
- pjc50 6y ago> look more towards Northern Ireland and assess its success (from a UK gov point of view) They spent approximately 40 years failing to defeat the IRA while covering for various "loyalist" terror groups and murdering a band they were trying to frame, defense solicitors for those arrested, and several actual children? > Though there were blips around miners and bits of the Labour Party, MI5 and Special Branch had such a tight hold of them post 1950 The democratically elected opposition did manage to take power on a couple of occasions, at which point the security services considered doing an Allende on Harold Wilson? Never mind "defund the police", we need (and of course are never going to get) prosecution of the security services for their partisan political interference and domestic crimes. Even the "soldier F" stuff rumbles on.
- secfirstmd 6y agoI don't disagree with a lot of what you are saying about collision etc, with the exception of the PIRA part. PIRA was so heavily penetrated with informers by early 80s that the Security Service (amongst others) managed to help push a strategy towards peace. Again I'm looking at it from UK Gov perspective, they managed to pretty much defeat the IRA by opening the door to Sinn Fein.
- vkou 6y agoI always thought the IRA was defeated by the Good Friday Agreement. Which is to say, that it won.
- secfirstmd 6y agoVery much an interpretation issue of course.