“This has involved exceptionally difficult and dangerous work. We have asked our agents — the people who agree to work in secret for MI6 — to do extraordinary things and run great risks.”
Speaking in December 2018, that is how Alex Younger, the chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS/MI6), described his organization’s disruption of Islamic State follow-up attacks to the 2015 Paris and 2016 Brussels atrocities. Younger spoke to a paradigm that extends across all human intelligence services wishing to be successful: The need to effectively assess risks and then embrace them is absolute.
I note this in light of the announcement on Wednesday concerning that most famous of fictional MI6 officers, James Bond.
MGM, Universal and Bond producers, Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, announced today that after careful consideration and thorough evaluation of the global theatrical marketplace, the release of NO TIME TO DIE will be postponed until November 2020. pic.twitter.com/a9h1RP5OKd
— James Bond (@007) March 4, 2020
I recognize the studio’s motivation here. Releasing the movie in April would risk doing so at a moment where the coronavirus epidemic might be at its peak. And that wouldn’t simply exacerbate public health concerns. It would jeopardize the film’s ability to make the hundreds of millions of dollars it was made to make.
But to some degree, at least, keeping James Bond on the shelf fundamentally conflicts with risk-taking that defines his real counterparts at MI6. Because MI6 does not keep its officers locked inside, even where the risk factor outside is very high, although the same, it must be said, is true of the CIA.
While MI6 does not conduct lethal-focus operations anywhere near to the degree of its closest foreign ally, the CIA, it revels in innovative operations using small teams or single officers. MI6 values quirkiness in its intelligence officers far more than does the CIA, and embraces these personalities to steal information and disrupt adversaries.
A much smaller organization than the CIA, MI6 has a lesser capacity in the numbers of intelligence officers and the logistical capacity of its stations around the world. Again, however, these limitations are ones the service accepts and builds into its operational spirit and activities. A key area is MI6’s unusual, at least by the standard of other global human intelligence services, penchant for pushing operational authority down to lower ranks. MI6 officers and small stations around the world are given wide latitude to conduct operations. This also was the case with the fictional James Bond until the coronavirus kept him at home.
This falls under what MI6 calls “production,” or sending officers out into the field to recruit agents inside foreign governments and nonstate organizations. This is another of the distinctions between MI6 and the CIA, which conversely retains a very large analytical directorate alongside its operations directorate. MI6 could be summed up by the mantra: “Get out into the field and get valuable information. Worry about the bureaucracy later.” This bureaucratic mantra certainly would not apply at the CIA, although the CIA would say it benefits policymaking by fusing collection to extensive analysis.
But the simple point is this: While James Bond might be taking a hiatus, his real-life counterparts are doing anything but.
