secret service

secret service. The British secret service traces its history back to Elizabeth I's secretary of state Sir Francis Walsingham; but, being secret, there is no way of telling if it is really older than that. Walsingham used it mainly to sniff out foreign-aided catholic plots. The playwright Christopher Marlowe is supposed to have been one of his spies; or murdered by one; or both. (Espionage is a confusing field.) Most later ministers used covert intelligence to a greater or lesser extent, though never in a formal, institutional fashion. The only British secret service agency with a continuous history from the 17th cent. onwards was the Post Office, which used to open letters, decipher them, reseal them, and send them on their way. During the Napoleonic years these activities were stepped up, as one might expect, in circles where French revolutionary contagion was thought likely to catch on. This continued through to 1820, when suspicions of agent provocateur activities by a number of government agents, including one known as ‘Oliver’, provoked such public outrage that the practice was discontinued.

For most of the Victorian years Britain had virtually no secret service, mainly because it was thought to be immoral, counter-productive, and foreign. (There was a ‘secret service fund’, but that was spent on other things.) It started up again around the turn of the 20th cent., with the formation first of the London police Special Branch in 1881–7, to look after American-Irish and continental anarchist dynamiters; and then of MI5 and MI6 in 1909, in response to the German threat. The First World War saw their activities expand enormously. Afterwards they became a permanent though invisible feature of the British political scene.

Their achievements have been mixed. They undoubtedly contributed to the allies' victory in the Second World War. Hitler admired them hugely, crediting their successes at lying and deception to the influence of the English public school. On the other hand they made some terrible errors; were almost immobilized by Russian ‘moles’ in the 1950s and 1960s; and are strongly suspected of having plotted treacherously against Labour governments in 1924 (the Zinoviev letter) and 1976.

Bernard Porter