It's not because of a lack of caring for an agent. It's just the nature of the job. When a job goes bad. The 'diplomatic staff' get expelled. The agents get thrown in prison for life. As he said. Espionage is a high stakes game. But it's essential for any government.
He was being deliberately glib for the sake of refuting the bond image, but if you read real stories, for example Oleg Gordievsky (The Spy and the Traitor is an exception book about this particular agent), its wholesome and almost unbelievable the lengths spy agencies will go to protect their assets even when there is no more incremental intelligence value to be gained. Oleg was extracted from the Moscow through plan that was immensely complex logistically and posed massive diplomatic risk to multiple countries involved if it was discovered, even though his entire value was being a mole in the KGB. Why? Partly its sentimental for the reasons Harry mentioned - after you've spent years watching someone risk his/her life to help your country, often with very little material reward expected in return, it's difficult not to want to do everything in your power to save that person, but there is also the pragmatic consideration that if you just said 'whelp, cya' to your agent at the first sign of trouble and they got strung up in public for the whole country to see, it becomes a lot harder to recruit spies in the future
I don't think you were listening. Just before that he'd said how you couldn't just walk into the target, you have to work via agents. That's because you obviously have no power in that country. When a job goes wrong that's if eg the authorities find out. You are probably going to find out a bit later. With no power, and playing catch-up to the latest bad developments, how could you possibly help at that point? It's too late and you have no leverage. If there is any, your country will have it at the government level, but to use that is to admit what was going on. They trust you to do everything you can so it doesn't get to that stage.
Former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt once was asked the same question: was it all worth it. And he said „when the rooster crows on the dung heap, the weather will change or stay as it is“
The special feature of Ian Fleming was his ability to write a story that people would want to read, he was fortunate that being DDNI in WW2 the ideas for stories would flow over his desk every day for all his service time. His stories have credibility, and the excitement that his reader's required.
SOE very for real. They were doing suicide missions - 6 week lifespan for agents was a strong innings. It was a very scary place to live, and the gestapo were killing journalists, historians, and whomsoever they believed to be an enemy combatant. We are talking premier league genocidal government, which is racking up the death toll like they legalised murder. The unconventional warfare offices of the UK were where the stuntmen and bank robbers went to work, and Ian Fleming's lot were considered "more trouble than their worth" by many in the XX counterintelligence office. Fleming's bond shows the ultra casino corruption crew who worked alongside the British and OSS taking down the Nazis, and as such is an exceptional portrayal of the early post war era. It's a good insight, and Fleming is absolutely convincing in his insights of how SOE senior agents were able to operate - autonomous incommunicado infiltration and sabotage operations are by nature improvised and high risk. It's illegal in a warfare context to use operatives of this type, and James Bond's behaviour was considered scandalous in its era - for the nazis these people would have looked like satan himself incarnate, wearing a bow tie, listening to big banf jazz, and drinking martini.
The entire notion of all Bond narratives is ludicrous. The primary purpose of the Bond nonsense is to entertain and distract the domestic populations with spectacle. They play no role whatsoever in the big game with agencies of other countries. It’s ludicrous to assume that for instance the Russians or Chinese would believe that British agents operate in any particular way, or are somehow less capable or easily detectable.
Noel Coward wouldn't agree. After a late night he called in at Fleming's Jamaican home, Goldeneye, to hear Fleming reading one of his stories aloud. He stood outside a window, barely able to suppress his laughter.
At a guess Bond has been dramatically important to MI6 simply because Bond stands out, his car(s) women and drinking, plus he must have a hotel room packed full of incriminating gadgets. Assume that a British spy is like Bond, then simply don't notice the grey man or woman who simply does the job, doesn't, get noticed, then vanishes silently. BUT a grey man as Bond wouldn't sell books/films.
@johnflanagan9382 if you go back to the older Bonds you have this element a lot where Bond makes the distraction and his partner gets access to something because of it. Especially Felix Leiter.
I get the impression that real espionage is usually as exciting as working in a tax office. But when it's not, a spies best weapon or gadget is plausible deniability.
UA-cam Physical Penetration Testing. These are modern day guys that get paid to sneak into companies (sometimes in plain sight) to see where their security is weak, both in name, but also in physical and staff sense.
Interestingly cold: "When the job goes belly up, I'm on the first plane back to London....But the agents get left behind to do the job....So" Looks like it's key to be able to turn off your humanity in order to be able to retire in this profession. Too inhuman for me, I could not do it. But I do know that this job has to be done.
@@sivecruze1247what he calls an agent is more usually termed an "asset". That is people who are not actually members of am I 6 - not case officers in the CIA sense - but people that are employed, or bribed, or threatened, or cooperating for personal reasons with the intelligence agencies. these are usually people in foreign countries, but they could be domestic as well. If you wanted to be tried you can think of them as the "freelance contractors" of the intelligence world.
15:00 I know someone who went to Moscow on holiday in the late 70s or early 80s. He was an odd bloke, very left wing, he'd always wanted to visit the USSR because he saw it as an ideal place, he fully believed their propaganda and so on, he went through the process of getting a tourist visa to the USSR which wasn't easy in those days and he brought with him his brand new camera to take some photos and document the experience. That was fine, he said at the airport they checked his papers and his camera and he was assigned to a tour bus which would take him to Red Square and he was allowed to wander around and photograph things, because it is always kept nice for people to photograph in these tours. But you see Peter was an odd bloke, as you may well expect of someone whose dream holiday was a guided tour of Soviet Russia and he wanted to see a bit more, he wanted "the real Communist utopia" so he wandered off from the back end of his tour and went down a street, continuing to take pictures of houses and saying hello to people in his bad Russian 😂 Apparently after about 5 or 10 minutes of this a black GAZ 24 pulled up and two men in long overcoats got out and walked over to him, snatched the camera out of his hand, opened the film up and exposed it all, then dropped the camera on the ground and stamped on it. One wagged his finger and the other pointed back down the street towards Red Square.
As an old story goes, KGB agents used to hang around in threes. One could read, one could write and the third used to keep an eye on the other two dangerous intellectuals.
yet according to a KGB defector, Gareth Williams was poisoned by the SVR with a gas that leaves no trace. If they have such a gas, why use a frikin weapon of mass destruction which novichok is to target a very specific person. So somebody's gotta be lying here. Polonium thing is more believable but it has to be placed somewhere where the target spends a lot of time. In the 90s in Russia a lot of radiation sources were left unguarded after the breakup of the USSR and radiation was a thing to remove rival bussinessmen. They once found a source of radiation sewn into the car seat.
Fascinating stuff 👍 He's had an interesting career and to do it with having a family is scary stuff for them. Much respect! I've always loved watching spy movies, James Bond and series like "Homeland" and "Slow Horses". 😄
Specifically he said an officer had never been lost _on assignment._ whether you consider that to be a meaningful distinction or not is a separate question, but I think a case could be made that it is legit. i.e. It's kind of like saying that an army has never lost a soldier in combat, even if maybe one was killed by his neighbor when he was at home, one died in a drunk driving accident, etc
@Laotzu.Goldbug 3:23 He says "in operations," but I did miss that. I suppose, depending on how he defines that (in his own mind), he could say almost anything.
@@anthonykent00 yes, on assignment, in operations basically all mean the same thing: "in the practical activity of the espionage", you're right it is tricky to define, but I think we can pretty definitively say that by any reasonable definition it doesn't include sitting in your own parlor in your home being assassinated by a foreign government.
Interesting story, I like how he is let to talk. They are very good at blending in, you don't notice them. I hope they are well supported after they stop working, but knowing the government I doubt it.
I hope you don't mind me plugging "Spies in the Family". Written by an old family friend, it's about her Dad and his work with a Russian during the Cold War. Just saying, this guy seems to know whereof he speaks. "Was it worth it?". The subject of the book sacrificed much. At his funeral, his pall bearers were there because he was worth it.
I will relate the following. There was a British spy in Germany immediately pre-WW2. He rode the rails! Yep. He simply rode the rails around Germany, doing reports. Was it dangerous? Absolutely! If caught and detected, he would have been executed forthwith. The spy eventually retired, moved to downtown Los Angeles and died in obscurity. When the former Soviet achieves were opened after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was learned that the predecessor of the FSB had more accurate and up-to-date maps of San Francisco than the US Army. In Europe, in the '70's, Russian Spetnaz people would be truck drivers running routes from Turkey to Great Britain and taking notes. In late October 1987, around October 23rd Spetnaz troops, driving a truck marked "Polish Mineral Expedition" tested the Soviet built concrete highway outside of Khandahar, Afghanistan to learn if it were solid enough to handle aircraft landings. Not glamorous, but necessary.
James Bond did use a 'crisp' to detect if somebody entered his room; he placed a tiny hair in his room in one of the novels by Fleming that was disturbed, indicating his room was entered into.
The part of his interview where he stated spies don't hurt spies (pace Mad Magazine's running cartoon, 'Spy vs Spy") rings true. Also the part at the end whether it was worth it, knowing so many people got hurt, also rings true. The British war historian John Keegan, writing about WWII partisans, stated that probably all the resistance did was slow down the Nazis a bit, at great cost, and it was not a big factor in winning the war. Even WWII's Bletchley Park's code-cracking Enigma project arguably was not a big factor in winning WWII (the Germans also cracked the Allied codes at times, and in the battle for Crete, despite perfect knowledge of German plans due to Enigma, the Germans still won despite being slowed down quite a lot).
They used the hair in that BBC series The Capture as well. But the problem is that a hair can be easily replaced, as he said in the interview, if you know what your crisp looks like then it's unlikely they will find one the same to replace it with, so even if they clean up their mess and put a fresh crisp down, you'll still know they've been in. Granted a hair is harder to spot but if they happen to see you checking for it, there's a risk they can replace it and you may not notice. Of course if you use a hair and a crisp then you've got both bases covered!
@@Jamie-js3qw Yes but I said if they were watching you and saw you checking/replacing the hair then they could easily keep it themselves and put it back after. But unless you're thinking of Pringles where they're all the same, it's exceedingly unlikely they are going to be able to get hold of a crisp exactly the same shape as your original one, which they don't even know what it looks like because they only found it after they crushed it.
You can tell he's unscripted and free from moral restraints. I'm not learning anything new about methods but i am learning a lot about reading a person. Thanks to posters who said beware of factual accuracy!
Fleming was basically M. He was the one sending people behind enemy lines during WWII to commit acts of espionage. I'd love for James Bond to go back to the 40s or 50s. Make it a period piece about his origins. I've had an idea for it for years, whereby the pre-credits sequence is Bond on a mission at the tail end of WWII. By the time he returns for a debrief, Germany has surrendered and the war is over. Post-title sequence, Bond returns to his native Scotland and in the post-war peace, he doesn't know what to do with himself until one day, his old commander comes to visit him, talking about tensions rising with the Russians and a new initiative being spearheaded by British Intelligence called the Double O Programme.
Yes, I see you understand that Bond was a WWII level spy, not afterwards. The SOE was tasked with actively/physically bringing down the Germans. Today, it is more about info.
I would love a modern Bond, where saving the world is not the issue, but protecting someone or something. They kind of went that route with the last 3, but it always drifted into too much action and your typical superhero/avengers movie.
James Bond is real. James Bond is not an analyst or a recruiter or officer. James Bond is an agent. James Bond is a disposable asset and his job is to infiltrate elite enemies of Britain. That's why he is allocated a big budget through the treasury which allows him to have what a mission would require. He is also given a license to kill so that he will not be trialled in a UK court. There is a misnomer that James Bond works for MI6. He doesn't. He actually receives a stipend through his company Universal Exports LTD and checks in with his handler which is M. M as James should never know an officers real identity. Many of the elite movers and shakers are actually their respective countries' versions of James Bond. The curious case of Jeffrey Epstein (Bond Villain) who went from school teacher to Billionaire, only he was never really a billionaire, he just had a massive budget to entrap other agents.
Use two detection mechanisms. One "obvious" one, one hidden one. If both are tripped, you know someone came in. If the obvious one was replaced, you know it wasn't just anyone.
Very fascinating and by all counts might as well be perfectly accurate, albeit I might add that you have just seen a description of a profession that deals with assessing and producing deception. This fine chap has maybe "retired" from a profession from which by his own words no person retires and maintains it's secrets. So given his fine health and sound mental state how can I really know that anything he says is actually real and if I choose to accept it as factual , is that the effect he planned and to what end? In any case cool video bro.
No, they didn't "lose" him. He travelled to Russia without his boss's knowledge or permission to carry out what he saw as a piece of unfinished business. Unfortunately he was arrested by the precursor of the KGB. On Stalin's orders he was shot.
@@davidlauder-qi5zv Whoops! There's a screwup and a half for your ass, not much point in pulling crap like that if you aren't getting paid :) In all fairness, at least they shot him to death instead of torturing him and keeping him alive for years and years which is probably the typical result when a spy is caught in somebody else's country!
it's the local agent. The SAS fight wars or stage interventions. Agents are the local guys who work in a nuclear research unit or government or whatever it is
Dunno if it was edited somehow, but the whole "you might think you'd slow down and let the other people get in the wày of the bullets, but NO WAY would you, anyone, me for instance, ever do that" bit, because it appears unprompted read all a little bit like the postman youve never met before ringing your doorbell one day and teling you "you might suspect your wife's affair, but theres no way I'm hooking up with her. Not on Tuesdays, not Thursdays, definitely not last Thursday, I would NEVER do that..."
I dont understand the statement 17:51 "you have a agent" what agent are we talking about if you are a mi6 agent you don't do the dirty work you ask others to do it for you who are these "others"?
Last time I asked a question like that (about someone else who mysteriously died) one of these types told me it was suicide and he'd always been depressed. I didn't believe him and kept pressing him, over months. So he introduced me to another guy. The other guy confirmed the story and added, the deceased had been haunted by a genie (I kid you not) and that's why he killed himself. No joke.
Majority of spies are “ordinary” people, you get travel bloggers, foreign investors, university lecturers etc… in my time in the services Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya and across the Middle East came across many of these people, sometimes you have people who work for NGOs who will then be asked to also provide information for the intelligence services, a lot of times the info is trivial and leads to other leads etc, from my experience the whole thing is pretty boring personally never came across anyone who was anything like James Bond or Bourne, most were like Mr Worger from English lit or Jack Corrigan travel vlogger and author.
I've come across many of them too, although I wasn't in the services. I wouldn't say they were all that ordinary. One dude, as far as I know, is still a foreign spy working as a translator for the Home Office.
Thats only because they don't really deal with dangerous people think about it in certain places you can get killed for fucked up look. And most places the locals know everyone in their hood so if a couple of pasties show up out of nowhere and speak your language something ain't right
That's very true. However, their goal is to influence or murder or bribe the hierarchy of an organisation. The hierarchy is detached from the hood and doesn't have the same nose for the weirdo pasties. The hierarchy understands things like elite schools and elite hobbies. They don't understand roast fish and cornbread.
Very interesting interview. What must be kind of disappointing is that you spend your entire life lying and being lied to, and in the end you're not sure if it was all worth it..
With FB and Social Media, Everyone Carrying a Device and it listing now with AI across platforms. Autos Now data sweeping. Your house, Camera's. Etc. The time for a field Agent is almost at an END.
"Will they trust their lives and their family's lives with them"
"If they get caught I'm on the first plane home"
It's not because of a lack of caring for an agent. It's just the nature of the job.
When a job goes bad. The 'diplomatic staff' get expelled. The agents get thrown in prison for life.
As he said. Espionage is a high stakes game. But it's essential for any government.
He was being deliberately glib for the sake of refuting the bond image, but if you read real stories, for example Oleg Gordievsky (The Spy and the Traitor is an exception book about this particular agent), its wholesome and almost unbelievable the lengths spy agencies will go to protect their assets even when there is no more incremental intelligence value to be gained. Oleg was extracted from the Moscow through plan that was immensely complex logistically and posed massive diplomatic risk to multiple countries involved if it was discovered, even though his entire value was being a mole in the KGB.
Why? Partly its sentimental for the reasons Harry mentioned - after you've spent years watching someone risk his/her life to help your country, often with very little material reward expected in return, it's difficult not to want to do everything in your power to save that person, but there is also the pragmatic consideration that if you just said 'whelp, cya' to your agent at the first sign of trouble and they got strung up in public for the whole country to see, it becomes a lot harder to recruit spies in the future
No different than any other nation, but at least he is brutally honest about it.
I don't think you were listening. Just before that he'd said how you couldn't just walk into the target, you have to work via agents. That's because you obviously have no power in that country. When a job goes wrong that's if eg the authorities find out. You are probably going to find out a bit later. With no power, and playing catch-up to the latest bad developments, how could you possibly help at that point? It's too late and you have no leverage. If there is any, your country will have it at the government level, but to use that is to admit what was going on.
They trust you to do everything you can so it doesn't get to that stage.
@@Hebdomad7 Those officers with official cover could get expelled while those with non-official cover stay hidden if they are good at their job...
“You want all your spies to be different”
Recruits exclusively from Cambridge 😂
He said Oxford. Pay attention James.
Haha
Not a details man are you. In truth they recruit from many places.
@@chrismac2234 I am, and they don’t
@Jules-hn6un ur not, and they do.
This channel is going to blow up. More content on intelligence like this please
Thank you so much for the comment
This guy is good. Deserves a full hour interview
We've got a longer cut coming soon - watch this space!
Definitely!
Play it twice
Cool guy... he'd be a wonderful teacher, he knows hot to word his stories. I believe he could make an agency for agents if he wanted.
@@PEOPLEAREDEEP you better upload it😡, pweassssee🥺🥺
Former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt once was asked the same question: was it all worth it. And he said „when the rooster crows on the dung heap, the weather will change or stay as it is“
I just learned, never trust a spy. also learned being a spy, you have a career where your employer wants to see you succeed.
The special feature of Ian Fleming was his ability to write a story that people would want to read, he was fortunate that being DDNI in WW2 the ideas for stories would flow over his desk every day for all his service time. His stories have credibility, and the excitement that his reader's required.
Dare I ask..favourite Bond?
SOE very for real. They were doing suicide missions - 6 week lifespan for agents was a strong innings. It was a very scary place to live, and the gestapo were killing journalists, historians, and whomsoever they believed to be an enemy combatant. We are talking premier league genocidal government, which is racking up the death toll like they legalised murder. The unconventional warfare offices of the UK were where the stuntmen and bank robbers went to work, and Ian Fleming's lot were considered "more trouble than their worth" by many in the XX counterintelligence office. Fleming's bond shows the ultra casino corruption crew who worked alongside the British and OSS taking down the Nazis, and as such is an exceptional portrayal of the early post war era. It's a good insight, and Fleming is absolutely convincing in his insights of how SOE senior agents were able to operate - autonomous incommunicado infiltration and sabotage operations are by nature improvised and high risk. It's illegal in a warfare context to use operatives of this type, and James Bond's behaviour was considered scandalous in its era - for the nazis these people would have looked like satan himself incarnate, wearing a bow tie, listening to big banf jazz, and drinking martini.
@PEOPLEAREDEEP My heart says Connery, but my brain says Craig. Connery set an I credibly high standard which Daniel Craig broke.
The entire notion of all Bond narratives is ludicrous.
The primary purpose of the Bond nonsense is to entertain and distract the domestic populations with spectacle.
They play no role whatsoever in the big game with agencies of other countries. It’s ludicrous to assume that for instance the Russians or Chinese would believe that British agents operate in any particular way, or are somehow less capable or easily detectable.
Noel Coward wouldn't agree. After a late night he called in at Fleming's Jamaican home, Goldeneye, to hear Fleming reading one of his stories aloud. He stood outside a window, barely able to suppress his laughter.
At a guess Bond has been dramatically important to MI6 simply because Bond stands out, his car(s) women and drinking, plus he must have a hotel room packed full of incriminating gadgets. Assume that a British spy is like Bond, then simply don't notice the grey man or woman who simply does the job, doesn't, get noticed, then vanishes silently. BUT a grey man as Bond wouldn't sell books/films.
There is a theory that Bond is a cover for the Grey Man to get the job done properly...!
Kincora boys... That's the moral capacity of intelligence agencies
@johnflanagan9382 if you go back to the older Bonds you have this element a lot where Bond makes the distraction and his partner gets access to something because of it. Especially Felix Leiter.
Yea few know about Stock (Agent -007), who sneaks into objectives and accomplishes the mission while Bond 007 is distracting the bad guys.
@@johnflanagan9382.
"Spies hate electronic gadgets.."
* Gasp! * My mum's a spy !
Took a second to catch on, but that was a good joke!
Fantastic interview. Thank you to the guest for sharing part of his life story.
Thanks for watching!
I like this man, clearly very switched on and has had an amazing career!
Wired! He's really wired!
crisping my entire house
😂💯
Crisping Lover
Crisps are too noisy.
I thought i’m just a slob. Turns out I was a top spy all along!
Like it
I get the impression that real espionage is usually as exciting as working in a tax office. But when it's not, a spies best weapon or gadget is plausible deniability.
UA-cam Physical Penetration Testing. These are modern day guys that get paid to sneak into companies (sometimes in plain sight) to see where their security is weak, both in name, but also in physical and staff sense.
Intelligence work is usually pretty boring but important.
Interestingly cold: "When the job goes belly up, I'm on the first plane back to London....But the agents get left behind to do the job....So" Looks like it's key to be able to turn off your humanity in order to be able to retire in this profession. Too inhuman for me, I could not do it. But I do know that this job has to be done.
Wait man. Is the ‘agent’ also in the MI program?
@@sivecruze1247 nay the agent is an asset
@@sivecruze1247what he calls an agent is more usually termed an "asset". That is people who are not actually members of am I 6 - not case officers in the CIA sense - but people that are employed, or bribed, or threatened, or cooperating for personal reasons with the intelligence agencies. these are usually people in foreign countries, but they could be domestic as well. If you wanted to be tried you can think of them as the "freelance contractors" of the intelligence world.
@@sivecruze1247 nah that's the foreigner he's leveraged / lied to in order to get them to do his dirty work
Guess you have to be on the psychopathic spectrum for this work.
Great video. Good luck with the new channel.
This is excellent and no lies detected. The end is on point. Was it worth it. Did the world change? My answer was no
Impossible to know.
90% office work. 10% observing.
Depends on your job within MI6.
Depends on your job in MI6
If all you do is "observe" you won't learn much.
Really interesting interview. Thank you for doing this.
"thye're looking to take your strengths and support them"that sounds worth working for
underrated strengths
Really interesting. What a great interview ❤
came from TikTok, love this, dont stop
Appreciate you making the journey!
You mean tictac?
This was fascinating. I've subscribed.❤
Thank you!
Another DEEP interview on Wednesday!
Would love to see you do an updated interview with Edward Snowden.
We’d love to as well!
Russian citizen Ed Snowden, father to two Russian citizen children ...
not another one, please
Thank you for such an engaging and informative chat.
Thank you for watching!
@@PEOPLEAREDEEP you did good kid
15:00 I know someone who went to Moscow on holiday in the late 70s or early 80s.
He was an odd bloke, very left wing, he'd always wanted to visit the USSR because he saw it as an ideal place, he fully believed their propaganda and so on, he went through the process of getting a tourist visa to the USSR which wasn't easy in those days and he brought with him his brand new camera to take some photos and document the experience.
That was fine, he said at the airport they checked his papers and his camera and he was assigned to a tour bus which would take him to Red Square and he was allowed to wander around and photograph things, because it is always kept nice for people to photograph in these tours.
But you see Peter was an odd bloke, as you may well expect of someone whose dream holiday was a guided tour of Soviet Russia and he wanted to see a bit more, he wanted "the real Communist utopia" so he wandered off from the back end of his tour and went down a street, continuing to take pictures of houses and saying hello to people in his bad Russian 😂
Apparently after about 5 or 10 minutes of this a black GAZ 24 pulled up and two men in long overcoats got out and walked over to him, snatched the camera out of his hand, opened the film up and exposed it all, then dropped the camera on the ground and stamped on it. One wagged his finger and the other pointed back down the street towards Red Square.
As an old story goes, KGB agents used to hang around in threes. One could read, one could write and the third used to keep an eye on the other two dangerous intellectuals.
Subbed. This was a really interesting interview. Looking forward to watching more!
Thank you! Another every Wednesday!
They're the crepe sole, rumpled clothes people, innocuous with a lethal skill of observation and a peculiar intelligence for thinking outside the box.
Skripal was poisoned with Novichok not polonium. Litvinenko was polonium
And, mirroring the history of the real event, it took em a guy on the internet to point out what's up.
And so they said …….. they also said Russia was not provoked in Ukraine 🤷♂️
yet according to a KGB defector, Gareth Williams was poisoned by the SVR with a gas that leaves no trace. If they have such a gas, why use a frikin weapon of mass destruction which novichok is to target a very specific person. So somebody's gotta be lying here.
Polonium thing is more believable but it has to be placed somewhere where the target spends a lot of time. In the 90s in Russia a lot of radiation sources were left unguarded after the breakup of the USSR and radiation was a thing to remove rival bussinessmen. They once found a source of radiation sewn into the car seat.
Do FSB has James Bond level spies?
@@jacobjorgenson9285 they weren't
great piece of PR that lulls people into thinking this dude is not a karate master
LOL that would be hilarious - him doing his kiddy karate katas. Would be so much fun to watch.
Another top upload there deep
Thanks for watching - appreciate it!
Fascinating stuff 👍 He's had an interesting career and to do it with having a family is scary stuff for them. Much respect!
I've always loved watching spy movies, James Bond and series like "Homeland" and "Slow Horses". 😄
In the 115 years that MI6 had existed, there has never been an officer lost... because we say so. Especially, not Gareth Williams. 👍
Still blows my mind that case
Specifically he said an officer had never been lost _on assignment._
whether you consider that to be a meaningful distinction or not is a separate question, but I think a case could be made that it is legit. i.e. It's kind of like saying that an army has never lost a soldier in combat, even if maybe one was killed by his neighbor when he was at home, one died in a drunk driving accident, etc
@Laotzu.Goldbug 3:23 He says "in operations," but I did miss that. I suppose, depending on how he defines that (in his own mind), he could say almost anything.
@@anthonykent00 yes, on assignment, in operations basically all mean the same thing: "in the practical activity of the espionage",
you're right it is tricky to define, but I think we can pretty definitively say that by any reasonable definition it doesn't include sitting in your own parlor in your home being assassinated by a foreign government.
That is a bold faced lie. MI6 lost a huge number of agents in WW2 due to poor tradecraft.
Could listen to this guy for hours.
Glad you enjoyed it - check out our other episodes!
Interesting story, I like how he is let to talk. They are very good at blending in, you don't notice them. I hope they are well supported after they stop working, but knowing the government I doubt it.
I hope you don't mind me plugging "Spies in the Family". Written by an old family friend, it's about her Dad and his work with a Russian during the Cold War. Just saying, this guy seems to know whereof he speaks. "Was it worth it?". The subject of the book sacrificed much. At his funeral, his pall bearers were there because he was worth it.
I will relate the following. There was a British spy in Germany immediately pre-WW2. He rode the rails! Yep. He simply rode the rails around Germany, doing reports. Was it dangerous? Absolutely! If caught and detected, he would have been executed forthwith. The spy eventually retired, moved to downtown Los Angeles and died in obscurity.
When the former Soviet achieves were opened after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was learned that the predecessor of the FSB had more accurate and up-to-date maps of San Francisco than the US Army. In Europe, in the '70's, Russian Spetnaz people would be truck drivers running routes from Turkey to Great Britain and taking notes.
In late October 1987, around October 23rd Spetnaz troops, driving a truck marked "Polish Mineral Expedition" tested the Soviet built concrete highway outside of Khandahar, Afghanistan to learn if it were solid enough to handle aircraft landings. Not glamorous, but necessary.
if a brit spy was doing something openly then it was likely that he was a turncoat. MI6 has a lot of those.
James Bond did use a 'crisp' to detect if somebody entered his room; he placed a tiny hair in his room in one of the novels by Fleming that was disturbed, indicating his room was entered into.
The part of his interview where he stated spies don't hurt spies (pace Mad Magazine's running cartoon, 'Spy vs Spy") rings true. Also the part at the end whether it was worth it, knowing so many people got hurt, also rings true. The British war historian John Keegan, writing about WWII partisans, stated that probably all the resistance did was slow down the Nazis a bit, at great cost, and it was not a big factor in winning the war. Even WWII's Bletchley Park's code-cracking Enigma project arguably was not a big factor in winning WWII (the Germans also cracked the Allied codes at times, and in the battle for Crete, despite perfect knowledge of German plans due to Enigma, the Germans still won despite being slowed down quite a lot).
They used the hair in that BBC series The Capture as well. But the problem is that a hair can be easily replaced, as he said in the interview, if you know what your crisp looks like then it's unlikely they will find one the same to replace it with, so even if they clean up their mess and put a fresh crisp down, you'll still know they've been in. Granted a hair is harder to spot but if they happen to see you checking for it, there's a risk they can replace it and you may not notice. Of course if you use a hair and a crisp then you've got both bases covered!
@@vink6163 a hair cannot be, it would not be seen. If crisp was perfectly replaced, no, you wouldn't know they'd been in.
@@Jamie-js3qw Yes but I said if they were watching you and saw you checking/replacing the hair then they could easily keep it themselves and put it back after. But unless you're thinking of Pringles where they're all the same, it's exceedingly unlikely they are going to be able to get hold of a crisp exactly the same shape as your original one, which they don't even know what it looks like because they only found it after they crushed it.
@@vink6163 He missed out the bit where you eat the crisp.
if it's ready salted you've had visitors. British spies would use Salt & Vinegar crisps.
Super interesting vid!
Really pleased you think so!
The Sinn Fein chap Stephen Lambert recording MI5 officer trying to recruit him is mad and is a great listen.
4:25 So his words "no one in Mi6 died on assignment" essentially meant "we don't die, but the people we recruit certainly do" ?
I like the idea of this channel. This was a great video. The dissonance of the music… not sure about.
He is a empath and a medium, in order for him to see others ❤
You can tell he's unscripted and free from moral restraints. I'm not learning anything new about methods but i am learning a lot about reading a person. Thanks to posters who said beware of factual accuracy!
Free from moral restraints?😮 is that what he's doing with his hand
Good Watch 👍
Thanks 👍
Very interesting. Would have loved to hear him comment on Argo and the real events that inspired the film.
Great suggestion! Next time…
Of course he was recruited through Oxford! Love haha
This was fantastic. Thoroughly engaging and interesting
Thank you so much! Please check out our other videos!
Fascinating!
Video timed well with mi6 recruiting
Very interesting, thanks.
James Bond never found 006 padlocked in bits in a sportsbag
Bond put him there after it turned out he was a clone of Blofeld.
That's because 006 was a Lyensk Cossack working for the KGB.
Mind you, when he did find 006, he pushed him off the gantry of a huge radio telescope.
@@BrianRPaterson For England, James?
Okay, how doesn't this channel have 1 million subscribers?
If April is a spring Month in London, how is the weather in St. Petersburg?
Sounds interesting hope this channel catches on😊
Thank you - us too!
Fleming was basically M. He was the one sending people behind enemy lines during WWII to commit acts of espionage. I'd love for James Bond to go back to the 40s or 50s. Make it a period piece about his origins.
I've had an idea for it for years, whereby the pre-credits sequence is Bond on a mission at the tail end of WWII. By the time he returns for a debrief, Germany has surrendered and the war is over. Post-title sequence, Bond returns to his native Scotland and in the post-war peace, he doesn't know what to do with himself until one day, his old commander comes to visit him, talking about tensions rising with the Russians and a new initiative being spearheaded by British Intelligence called the Double O Programme.
Yes, I see you understand that Bond was a WWII level spy, not afterwards. The SOE was tasked with actively/physically bringing down the Germans. Today, it is more about info.
I would love a modern Bond, where saving the world is not the issue, but protecting someone or something.
They kind of went that route with the last 3, but it always drifted into too much action and your typical superhero/avengers movie.
Good idea...somebody in Hollywood has probably now nicked it
James Bond is real. James Bond is not an analyst or a recruiter or officer. James Bond is an agent. James Bond is a disposable asset and his job is to infiltrate elite enemies of Britain. That's why he is allocated a big budget through the treasury which allows him to have what a mission would require. He is also given a license to kill so that he will not be trialled in a UK court.
There is a misnomer that James Bond works for MI6. He doesn't. He actually receives a stipend through his company Universal Exports LTD and checks in with his handler which is M. M as James should never know an officers real identity. Many of the elite movers and shakers are actually their respective countries' versions of James Bond.
The curious case of Jeffrey Epstein (Bond Villain) who went from school teacher to Billionaire, only he was never really a billionaire, he just had a massive budget to entrap other agents.
more than agents apparently
How can Bond fool anyone being a pasty white Scotsman ? You think the Chinese, Africans, and Saudis be fooled.
When he says agent in America we call asset. An agent is same as officer here
Please do one with an expert in micro expressions and profiling or predicting people's actions
Great suggestion!
What are MI-1 through 4 up to?
Still learning to count through to 5 and 6
It used to go 1-19, with 13 and 18 not used.
All the former MI departments were disbanded, apart from 5 and 6.
very, very interesting!
inspired from real events.
Ah hence the song, about agents. Not officers ....
"Secret ageeent sacrificial mug!"
“I joined in a very unusual way…”
Goes on to explain how every spy seems to get recruited 🤔
What is the NIS that he mentioned a few times? anyone know?
I believe about 50% of what he says - OSA still in effect and he probably still has links
Use two detection mechanisms. One "obvious" one, one hidden one. If both are tripped, you know someone came in. If the obvious one was replaced, you know it wasn't just anyone.
The structural maze is already there for you guys to have fun 😂
Excellent.
That is the saddest part. Having the Secrets and Integrity to bring them to your grave.
You should have asked him about short wave Numbers stations.
Very fascinating and by all counts might as well be perfectly accurate, albeit I might add that you have just seen a description of a profession that deals with assessing and producing deception. This fine chap has maybe "retired" from a profession from which by his own words no person retires and maintains it's secrets. So given his fine health and sound mental state how can I really know that anything he says is actually real and if I choose to accept it as factual , is that the effect he planned and to what end? In any case cool video bro.
Thanks for watching - appreciate your thoughts!
@@PEOPLEAREDEEP Oh you are very welcome.
He's on a mission to hide the fact they have secret bases and super gadgets.
Didn't MI6 lose Sydney Reilly?
No, they didn't "lose" him. He travelled to Russia without his boss's knowledge or permission to carry out what he saw as a piece of unfinished business. Unfortunately he was arrested by the precursor of the KGB. On Stalin's orders he was shot.
@@davidlauder-qi5zv Whoops! There's a screwup and a half for your ass, not much point in pulling crap like that if you aren't getting paid :)
In all fairness, at least they shot him to death instead of torturing him and keeping him alive for years and years which is probably the typical result when a spy is caught in somebody else's country!
Not bond. These people are information gatherers. Researchers, intelligence etc. Its the SAS or SBS seconded that do the action. If at all.
it's the local agent. The SAS fight wars or stage interventions. Agents are the local guys who work in a nuclear research unit or government or whatever it is
Can you write the next Bond film please?
Great video
Thanks so much for watching!
Moonraker was especially realistic, its all lasers, and magic cars in the intelligence service
Dunno if it was edited somehow, but the whole "you might think you'd slow down and let the other people get in the wày of the bullets, but NO WAY would you, anyone, me for instance, ever do that" bit, because it appears unprompted read all a little bit like the postman youve never met before ringing your doorbell one day and teling you "you might suspect your wife's affair, but theres no way I'm hooking up with her. Not on Tuesdays, not Thursdays, definitely not last Thursday, I would NEVER do that..."
He starts off saying its not like the movies then proceeds to tell how he wrestled a potentially armed man down whilst being unarmed😂
Subbed 👍🏼
Thank you!
I dont understand the statement 17:51 "you have a agent" what agent are we talking about if you are a mi6 agent you don't do the dirty work you ask others to do it for you who are these "others"?
What happened to Gareth Williams?
Last time I asked a question like that (about someone else who mysteriously died) one of these types told me it was suicide and he'd always been depressed. I didn't believe him and kept pressing him, over months. So he introduced me to another guy. The other guy confirmed the story and added, the deceased had been haunted by a genie (I kid you not) and that's why he killed himself. No joke.
It seems more like Gene Hackman in The Conversation than James Bond or Mission Impossible
Majority of spies are “ordinary” people, you get travel bloggers, foreign investors, university lecturers etc… in my time in the services Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya and across the Middle East came across many of these people, sometimes you have people who work for NGOs who will then be asked to also provide information for the intelligence services, a lot of times the info is trivial and leads to other leads etc, from my experience the whole thing is pretty boring personally never came across anyone who was anything like James Bond or Bourne, most were like Mr Worger from English lit or Jack Corrigan travel vlogger and author.
I've come across many of them too, although I wasn't in the services. I wouldn't say they were all that ordinary. One dude, as far as I know, is still a foreign spy working as a translator for the Home Office.
Thats only because they don't really deal with dangerous people think about it in certain places you can get killed for fucked up look. And most places the locals know everyone in their hood so if a couple of pasties show up out of nowhere and speak your language something ain't right
That's very true. However, their goal is to influence or murder or bribe the hierarchy of an organisation. The hierarchy is detached from the hood and doesn't have the same nose for the weirdo pasties. The hierarchy understands things like elite schools and elite hobbies. They don't understand roast fish and cornbread.
Sounds like being an undercover cop is more exciting. You probably get more “action”. And still gather intel. You also more hands on interacting.
My girlfriends grandfather was MI6 killed by the Nazis in WW2, so when he says none have been killed, he must mean excluding WW2.
@15:00 - photographing a military site as a tourist: how many Chinese tourists are currently doing that in the US in recent times?
Shame he got the Skripal poisoning incorrect.
You are now entering the most secure location in England ! :))))))))))))
I always wondered what Chris Tarrant had been up to since Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.
How many agents have been killed in the 115 in assignment? And is Bond an agent or an officer?
So, how are we to believe anything a professional liar says?
15:30 - Q: "Pay attention Mr. Ferguson..."
I need to confess: i never run as fast as i can.
The Skripsks were poisoned with Novichok, not Polonium.
4:01 I guess the real question… is how many agents have died 😅
17:34 the answer 😅
Very interesting interview. What must be kind of disappointing is that you spend your entire life lying and being lied to, and in the end you're not sure if it was all worth it..
The fact that he can talk about this means he's a non-official PR person for MI6, right?
I love the story about the massive cameras. Hilarious!
Hilarious? It was mildly amusing at best.
With FB and Social Media, Everyone Carrying a Device and it listing now with AI across platforms. Autos Now data sweeping. Your house, Camera's. Etc. The time for a field Agent is almost at an END.