Your Life as Every Rank in MI6

Every Rank in MI6. You are born in Britain in 1955, and at eighteen, in 1973, you join the Army and are posted to the listening station on the Teufelsberg in West Berlin, headphones on Soviet radio traffic — the first level, before the Service knows your name. The ladder you climb is the Secret Intelligence Service's own: approached quietly at twenty-three; trained at Fort Monckton in surveillance, hard driving and agent meetings; a junior officer running your first agent in a Warsaw Pact capital; in the support around the July 1985 exfiltration, when the Service drove Oleg Gordievsky out of Moscow in the boot of a car to the Finnish border — never as one of its named officers; the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; Bosnia in the 1990s; 1994, when the Intelligence Services Act admits in law that the Service exists and it moves into Vauxhall Cross; the Real IRA rocket that hits the building in September 2000; Head of Station in a hard posting after 2001; Controller; Director — and never C, the one officer whose name is public, who still signs in green ink as Mansfield Cumming did in 1909. Say at every level what the rank pays, in civil-service pounds of that year, rounded and said as approximate, and what the job takes from home — the wife who is told you work for the Foreign Office. At most two levels at a desk. Real people by name and public deeds only. End on the Service's rule: you retire with a pension and a cover story, and nothing you did is ever yours to tell.