No, no, the life of an MI5 agent is not as glamorous as the fictional one of James Bond – it’s a rather messy affair and a harrowing lifestyle.

Tom Marcus (not his real name, obviously) is a former MI5 agent. During an interview with Sky News – authorised by MI5 agency – Tom admitted that the agency is dealing with terror “all the time,” sometimes even daily.

Tom has some stories to tell, since he spent 10 years working undercover for the British intelligence agency, and Sky News got a few of them:

If we’d been briefed on a target that we needed information from, we’d go and hunt them.

We’d go and find everything we can about them, we’d watch everything they do. Essentially, as soon they come onto our grid and we need to know all information about them, our surveillance teams, myself included, would go out there and find them and make sure we control everything they do.

During one operation Tom was nearly kidnapped:

(This) was something we’d never, ever seen before on UK soil, and it came very, very close to them putting me into a van and taking me to an address that we later searched with Special Branch, where they found plastic sheeting on the ground and a video camera and the flag and the butcher’s knife. It was really down to the wire.

On another occasion, Tom was part of a team tracking a suspected Islamist terrorist and he sat outside a London mosque during evening prayers:

It was chucking it down and I was dressed as a tramp, pretending to ask for change, my own clothes soaked in my own urine to compliment that cover.

There were more woman worshippers that had left the mosque than had gone in, so I alerted the team that there was a possibility he had changed his appearance.

The suspect had changed into a burka and was pretending to be a woman. Following him, I called in a Special Forces unit to arrest the terrorist. Two Range Rovers slammed into the suspect’s car.

As the team came in incredibly quick in the Range Rovers (and) dragged him out of the car, they found weapons and pipe bombs in the boot and his planned target was the very next day because this was all at night. To be waiting for a couple of coach loads of children returning from a trip to France and he was going to kill them, the teachers and the parents.

But it’s not just Islamic extremism that threatens the UK – Chinese and Russian agents are around, too, and apparently very good at what they do.

The Russians, particularly the Russians, their intelligence agents are extremely effective. They are so well trained in counter-surveillance; the ability to stop and identify operators like me.

Tom is no longer an MI5 agent. He left the agency after 10 year’s worth of service with post-traumatic stress – I wonder what Trump would say about that?

Imagine saving the UK, one take down at a time, and not being able to talk about it?

I guess that’s what it means to be connected to the agency for life, yo – but at least he can write a book about it (with the agency’s permission, of course.)

[source:skynews]