Best Intelligence Organization During the Cold War

[lingo]

Many intelligence services become compromised to some extent. MI6 in the post war years was penetrated at the highest levels. Kim Philby was MI6 liason to the CIA (as first secretary in the Washington embassy) from IIRC 1949.He was working for the Soviet Union for God's sake! Angleton (you look him up) was so suspicious of him that Bedell Smith (look him up too) threatened to suspend the intelligence relationship between the US and UK until he was removed. Hardly conducive to the security of the NATO alliance.All this is in the public domain and it is all fact,not opinion.
MI6 then spent twenty years chasing its own tail and by all accounts (public again) became a very paranoid organisation to work in and not particularly efficient or effective.I am not denying it its achievments,notably some well known and senior KGB officers that it managed to "turn".
I am a keen amateur historian I can only access material in the public domain,you may be surprised how much there is. Freedom of information means just that.
Steve

Philby and his homosexual communst friends were a disgrace and the whole story was widely reported at the time. MI 6 is not the only British intellegence agency however so not all was lost, which is more than can be said for the agents reported to the Soviets by the toxic three. The US has been compromised from within on several occasions, as have the Soviets. Ever hear about Oleg Gordievsky? He was the highest ranking KGB agent when he defected in 1985, and he had been working for the British( MI 6 actually) since the invasion of Czechoslovakia.

 

[syscom3]

The Israeli's are always tight lipped about the activities of the Mossad, but they seem to have penetrated all of their enemies political and military establishments.

 

[timshatz]

Philby and his homosexual communst friends were a disgrace and the whole story was widely reported at the time. MI 6 is not the only British intellegence agency however so not all was lost, which is more than can be said for the agents reported to the Soviets by the toxic three. The US has been compromised from within on several occasions, as have the Soviets. Ever hear about Oleg Gordievsky? He was the highest ranking KGB agent when he defected in 1985, and he had been working for the British( MI 6 actually) since the invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Didn't Philby end up drinking himself to death in Moscow (or somewhere over there). Guess the guilt and associated joys of living in the worker's paradise were too much for him.

Got what was coming to him.

 

[pbfoot]

The Israeli's are always tight lipped about the activities of the Mossad, but they seem to have penetrated all of their enemies political and military establishments.

and their friends

 

[BombTaxi]

The Stasi has been brought up. The HVA was the foreign intel service of the Stasi.

My bad, I hadn't made the connection

 

[Amsel]

The Israeli's are always tight lipped about the activities of the Mossad, but they seem to have penetrated all of their enemies political and military establishments.

As well as the KGB. They were probably the largest most powerful of the services. They probably were able to penetrate Isreal as well. There are supposedly photos of a high ranking KGB officer socializing with Golda Mier. I believe there was more then 400,000 officers in the KGB, which the majority of those were stationed behind the iron curtain. That would make any espionage in the USSR a challenging task to say the least.

 

[stona]

Didn't Philby end up drinking himself to death in Moscow (or somewhere over there). Guess the guilt and associated joys of living in the worker's paradise were too much for him.

Philby did end up a drinker in Moscow but lived to 76.He never professed any guilt or remorse.He had Sinatra's version of "My Way" played at his funeral.You may be thinking of Donald MacLean who was already drinking himself to death while he was still at Cambridge. He was cosidered one of the sharpest minds at the Foreign Office in his younger days! I think the slightly homophobic comment from someone else may refer to him as well as he was as openly homosexual as was possible in those days.
I'm not sure what was coming to them. The last executions in Britain were in 1964. I'm no lawyer but I think that since they started spying for the Soviet Union when it was an ally they could not have been hanged for treason. I'm sure a long prison sentence would have been handed down.George Blake got 45 years,although he escaped and made his way to Moscow.There were quite a few of them there Philby,Burgess,MacLean and Blake! Others like Cairncross and Blunt eventually confessed but were never prosecuted.
The long list of names,many senior, gives an idea of the damage these idealogically driven traitors did to the British intelligence effort during the early part of the "cold war"
Steve

 

[yulzari]

There is the hypothesis that the SIS actually identified their moles, unlike certain other agencies, and they have a history of using them to disseminate misinformation and disinformation which relies upon the discovered moles staying in place and their plausibility to provide information maintained, even in the long term. It is, as I say, a hypothesis.

 

[Zipper730]

What about the GRU

 

[stona]

There is the hypothesis that the SIS actually identified their moles, unlike certain other agencies, and they have a history of using them to disseminate misinformation and disinformation which relies upon the discovered moles staying in place and their plausibility to provide information maintained, even in the long term. It is, as I say, a hypothesis.

Putting one in charge of counter espionage against the Soviet Union and then sacrificing many, many lives to maintain him there would raise some serious moral questions....if that was true
Cheers
Steve