>From the New York Times -- http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/14/international/europe/14secret.html
London Journal Britain's Secret Service Indeed! Spy on It on Its Web site By ALAN COWELL LONDON, Oct. 13 - If there is an institution that the fictional James Bond made famous with all his derring-do it was, to quote from the thriller and movie of the same name, Her Majesty's Secret Service. As of Thursday, the service was not quite as secret as it had been. At midnight, Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6 - the equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency - introduced its first publicly accessible Web site, raising the hem of its cloak (if not its dagger) to just a modicum of scrutiny. So intense was the interest in this move by an intelligence service - once so secret that it denied its own existence - that the site recorded 3.5 million hits in its first few hours, slowing access to a crawl, said Nev Johnson, a British Foreign Office press officer who speaks on behalf of the Secret Intelligence Service. "It's been pretty astronomical," he said. Girding for the fight against global terrorism, the agency developed the site primarily to recruit agents, operatives and analysts from a much broader academic and social background than in the past and to let would-be spies know how to join. So wide is the net that the site has versions in Spanish, French, Arabic, Chinese and Russian - hardly the kind of overture that would have been expected in the cold war heyday of writers like John le Carr, or double-agents like Kim Philby and Guy Burgess, when the point was to keep foes at bay by the most devious of means. But times have changed. In literary espionage, le Carr's George Smiley hunted for "Gerald the mole" in the British intelligence services, Bond reported to an anonymous spymaster called M and heroes crossed cold war frontiers in dire peril and great discomfort. Now, the head of the S.I.S., once known only as C (the final initial in the name of the first S.I.S. chief, Capt. Sir Mansfield Smith Cumming), is identified by name on the Web site. The incumbent is John Scarlett. These days, too, S.I.S. headquarters, called the Circus in le Carr's world and never identified to the outside world as a nest of spies, is a huge and prominent building on the River Thames where, the Web site says, there is a "family atmosphere" and "facilities include squash and basketball courts, a gym, coffee lounge and bar." In the mythology of British espionage, moreover, an agent might once have been recruited by a sharp-eyed Oxford or Cambridge don, harvesting likely operatives from undergraduate sherry parties. Recruitment, so it was said, came with a discreet tap on the shoulder and a whispered introduction to a diffident spymaster in some anonymous office. The new Web site, by contrast, cites what it calls three case studies of graduates from universities in Bristol, Durham and Edinburgh who joined the service in their 20's, doing other jobs before turning to espionage as a career change. "I've already been in some pretty testing situations abroad," says one supposed 28-year-old spy, identified only as Andrew. Another, identified as Peter, 24, is just as bullish about his newly adopted tradecraft. "Yes, there are mundane parts to it, especially the paperwork," the agent is quoted as saying. "But the feeling of achievement when you persuade a contact to trust you is what does it for me." There is, too, a woman from what seems an ethnic minority background. "It is a much more diverse and down-to-earth place than anyone might think," said Naheed, a 27-year-old lawyer whose family moved to Britain from Kenya in the 1970's - according to her Web site "legend," as spies in novels call cover stories. "And my background has been a professional bonus." The targets, too, have changed. "After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, S.I.S. developed its already emerging response to the challenges which are now so dominant: regional instability, terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and serious international crime," reads a section of the Web site chronicling the organization's history since its founding in 1909. In some ways, the Secret Intelligence Service is playing catch-up to MI5, Britain's domestic intelligence agency, whose Web site draws in the bulk of its recruits. MI5 has already said it wants to increase its officers by 50 percent to 3,000 by 2008, while the S.I.S. has not made known its targets. "It would be counterproductive to talk about target numbers of staff or anything like that," said Mr. Johnson, the spokesman. Indeed, while its advertising is Web-based (www.mi6.gov.uk or www.sis.gov.uk), anyone wishing to either join or offer a snippet of intelligence is urged to do so by regular mail. That, in itself, might seem an advance on the thriller writer's world of microfilm and "dead-letter drops" marked by chalk marks on crumbling walls in the dingier parts of Berlin or Moscow. But the S.I.S. is not prepared to go so far as to make its Web site interactive. Indeed, the host of the site is a server outside London that has no links to the S.I.S.'s own computer systems, Mr. Johnson said. Of course, the leap into cyberspace has already inspired a number of metaphors. The service has "come in from the cold" and the Web site is "for millions of eyes only," The Daily Mail reported. "Licensed to surf," was the headline of an editorial in The Times of London, linking 007's license to kill with would-be operatives surfing the Web. But the crucial question remained: might a modern spy expect the Aston-Martin-and-martini adventures of Ian Fleming's James Bond? The answer lay somewhere between coy and inscrutable. "By the time the filmmakers focused on Bond, the gap between truth and fiction had already widened," the Web site observed. "Nevertheless, staff who join S.I.S. can look forward to a career that will have moments when the gap narrows just a little and the certainty of a stimulating and rewarding career which, like Bond's, will be in the service of their country." Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 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