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Loading ...Britain recruiting gay spies
08.18.2008 1:04pm EDT
(London) M15, Britain’s domestic spy agency, has begun looking for gays and lesbians to help it keep tabs on threats to the country.
The agency has contracted with LGBT rights group Stonewall to help it recruit members of the community and to encouraged gays already in the service to come out.The move, said Stonewall spokesperson Ben Summerskill, “is in recognition that the establishment is changing and slowly becoming more reflective of wider society.”
The British military long ago abandoned its ban on gays serving openly and also recently asked Stonewall for help in recruitment. M16, the country’s foreign intelligence service, ended its ban on gay spies a year ago.
Homosexuality was decriminalized in the UK in 1967 but gays and lesbians were barred from working in sensitive jobs in the diplomatic or security services until the early 1990s, over concerns that gay spies could be vulnerable to blackmail.
Activist Peter Tatchell said the change was long overdue.
“Until a decade ago, gay people were seen as a security threat, and as recently as two decades ago, they were being witch hunted and sacked from the security services,” he told The Associated Press.
The change is a marked turn from the height of the Cold War, when Britain’s spy agencies conducted a purge of suspected gays following the Burgess affair.
Guy Burgess was arguably the most dangerous gay man who ever lived. As a spy for the Soviet Union, the Englishman helped organize a ring of gay men who came from the highest echelons of British society.
According to documents that have been declassified from both British Intelligence and the CIA, Burgess and his fellow spies helped prolong the Cold War for years, and possibly led to the deaths of nearly a dozen western agents.
The ring of gay included Anthony Blunt, a tutor of French; Donald Maclean, a career civil servant who served in the Foreign Office, Paris, Washington and Cairo; Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby, a journalist who as an agent in MI6 was a double agent also working for the Russians; and John Cairncross, the private secretary to Lord Hankey who was Secretary for Security.
On May 26, 1951, Burgess and MacLean defected to the Soviet Union, brining their espionage to light. It took the next 20 years for the others to be identified and the damage assessed.
it’s common sense, an openly gay person who is totally out to everyone to friends and family cannot be blackmailed
It is MI5 and MI6 not M15 and M16
Oh I did not even catch the typo.
Yes, an M15 is an assault rifle.
And the M16 has been the American answer to the AK-47 since Vietnam. (not as prolific, but it’s ours)
M15 and m16 sounds like motorways
The change is well overdue, but after the way gay people were treated do they really expect us to come running with open arms. I think not.
I was in British Military for 2 years served in NI and Bosnia almost got my arm blew off fighting for queen and country they found out I was gay, not only did they interrogate me for almost three days, but they had audacity to question my family until I finally admitted defeat. Fair enough things are more liberal in UK now, but that doesn’t alter the fact of their shameless witch hunt they put myself and thousands of other men and women not so many moons ago
As already noted, it’s MI5, not M15, for Military Intelligence, Section 5. Somebody must not be watching James Bond movies.