LONDON (dpa) – On the screen James Bond regularly defends Britain and the world against international terrorism, but in real life MI6, the British espionage agency, was caught off-guard by the attacks of September 11.
The only warning of a possible al-Qaeda attack to come out of London was from Jane’s, the renowned magazine that deals with military issues. It predicted in 1999 that Osama bin Laden’s terror network could be planning to hit “financial targets in New York”.When that attack came in September last year, MI6 had just 30 members of 1,600-strong staff detailed to defence against terror attacks, according to intelligence sources cited in the Observer Sunday newspaper.Now considerable changes are afoot, and there is talk of merging MI6 with its domestic counterintelligence counterpart, MI5.Operatives in the two organizations have long engaged in rivalry, and contact between the two has been bedevilled by competition, the agents eying each other with suspicion from their respective headquarters on opposite sides of the Thames.“While this did not matter so much during the Cold War when coping with other countries’ monolithic military and intelligence structures, it has left them appearing slow and bureaucratic compared with fast-moving, well organized international terrorists,” the Independent newspaper said.MI6 is roughly in the position it began in some 55 years ago, many believe. At that time there was a lack of agents who could speak Russian, who had contacts within Soviet military circles or who understood how a totalitarian system worked.Now the agency is looking for agents who can speak Arabic, as well as Asian language little studied in the West.But language abilities are not the only ones required.“In the Cold War, if you wanted to recruit an East German or a Pole, the vehicle for that contact was the diplomatic cocktail circuit or the tennis court,” former CIA director Robert Gates says“None of the guys you are interested in now are on that circuit,” he notes.James Bond can, as a result, hang up his black tie and tennis racket for good.The working environment has changed completely, a security source told the Observer. Things would never be the way they were in Geneva or Vienna during the Cold War, which many people have come to know through the best-selling spy novels of John le Carre. Agents are now required to operate under dangerous and uncomfortable conditions.Other things have changed too. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has told Russian President Vladimir Putin that the British services will in future work closely with their former foes.This is less of a problem for the agents than cooperating with agents from countries like Libya, who have been held responsible for a string of operations on British soil.The head of the Libyan foreign secret service, Musa Kusa, is reported to have met MI6 agents in London recently with the aim of exchanging information on Islamic terrorist suspects.Kusa was thrown out of the country in 1980 as persona non grata after he openly approved the murder of two Libyan dissidents in exile in Britain.The British government is well aware that it will take a lot of time and money to infiltrate its agents into terrorist networks like al-Qaeda.The end of the Cold War saw cuts across the secret services. This is now seen as a big mistake, and according to the Observer, MI6 plans to double the number of its frontline officers – the agents in the field.Commander Bond is in demand once again, but his job is harder and more distasteful than ever.
