We know Daniel Craig has had just about enough of the James Bond franchise, but what about the real operatives who work for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS)?

Better known as MI6 it isn’t often that their agents are authorised to talk to the media, although a bloke called Frank Gardner managed to secure interviews with two officers for the Telegraph. Below are excerpts from those interviews:

Kamal speaks first. “I’m what people would classify as an agent-runner,” he tells me. “Our job is to find individuals with access to secret intelligence of value to the UK government. My job [within MI6] is to build a relationship with these individuals and work with them to obtain the secrets they have access to, securely”…

Kamal’s job is at the sharp end of intelligence-gathering. Put bluntly, he has to try to recruit people to do difficult and dangerous things…

…”we have faced states and organisations that have sought to penetrate the heart of the UK government and key UK institutions and then steal their secrets. Those still exist, they haven’t gone away”…

“Alongside those threats,” continues Kamal, “we have the terrorist threat, we have states and organisations looking to proliferate weapons of mass destruction and nuclear technology. We have states with territorial ambitions and more recently we have people looking to conduct cyber espionage against the UK”…

Kamal explains something called “the intelligence cycle.” It works like this: the political leaders in Whitehall decide there is a requirement to find out something secret, for example – and these are my suggested examples here, not theirs – how many nuclear centrifuges Iran is operating below ground, or which routes ISIS is using to smuggle recruits into Syria.

The targeting officer then works with MI5 and GCHQ to identify the individual overseas who is best placed to know the answers. Next, a “reports officer” articulates these questions to the agent runner and tasks him or her to get the information. A whole team of people then works out how best to get the agent-runner in front of the potential informant…

“The mythology around espionage and around SIS in particular is extremely misleading. We are an organisation that revels in subtlety and the methods 007 employs – crash-banging across cities in both hemispheres – is entirely misleading. We seek to operate in the shadows and we don’t like to draw attention to ourselves. Having a licence to kill is the antithesis of that.”

Enough from Kamal (who wasn’t using his real name, duh), let’s hear from Kirsty (ditto):

“It would be untrue for me to say that all of our work is free of danger. However, we have a team of security advisors who ensure that both we and our agents are as secure as we can be. No operation would go ahead if we had any doubts about our security, or that of our agent”…

…some myths turn out to be true. The Chief is still known as “C” and is the only person allowed to sign papers in green ink. The gadgets and innovations department depicted in Bond as “Q” branch really does exist. “I think”, says Kirsty…“Ian Fleming would be surprised at the technology we have in the modern-day MI6. We have brilliant technologists who can come up with some amazing devices that can help enable intelligence officers to do their jobs better.”

And of course the inevitable Bond comparison…

“I think that is where the fiction ends and the fact begins,” says Kamal. “Because we are not like Bond, we don’t have officers that seek to fulfil their missions at any cost. Our officers operate within the law…The fact we need to ensure we continue operating in the shadows means we wouldn’t dream of having anybody like Bond in our organisation. He has got all manner of personal issues, which I think would be very, very unhelpful in an organisation like ours.”

Sorry to dash your hopes and dreams Bond wannabes, looks like there may be fewer thrills and spills than the life we see on screen.

[source:telegraph]