Secret Intelligence Service

The foreign intelligence agency of the United Kingdom, popularly known as MI6

Overview

Founded in 1909 as the foreign section of the Secret Service Bureau, SIS collects intelligence abroad and is known to the public as MI6. It operates under the Foreign Secretary and received a statutory basis in the Intelligence Services Act of 1994, the same year its Vauxhall Cross headquarters became public. Its history mixes triumph, such as the wartime networks that fed the Double-Cross System, with disaster, most famously the betrayal by Kim Philby. Its first chief, Mansfield Cumming, signed correspondence with the letter C, a tradition that continues.