Has anyone met a secret agent or mi5

[Overwhelmed245]

Has anyone met one like do you suspect your partner to be one etc. obviously I know you hear of woman being told the guy there dating works for mi5 but then find out the guy has two lives and another family

I knew someone who's husband is allegedly one. He was/is a lazy sod, didn't lift a finger at home and had an awful personality. He also worked a way a lot so I think it was his excuse for not being at home.

It was meant to be a secret but his wife told everyone who would listen.

I know someone from uni who applied, he put a mutual friend down as a reference. He didn't get it.

Not me, but as a child I was given a bottle of invisible ink.

But never could find it again...

I suspect a woman I know of being M16...
She works in a mundane low paid job.. she & her friend are widows in their 60s who are very ordinary yet travel regularly to fairly hostile countries taking lots of photos of 'scenery'.

She's been to Syria, Myanmar, most recently Iran, China, Russia, her next trip will be Iraq! I asked her why and she said to take photos of scenery of course!!

Hmmm.

years back H reckoned his mate's girlfriend worked for the security service. She was civil service and fiercely clever, but whenever asked for any details of her job she'd always giggle "oh, it's just so incredibly boring, admin really, don't make me think about it when I'm not there". Never even said which department.

Once knew a chap who'd led/recruited /organised volunteers for a spy network /sabotage behind German Lines in WW2. Quiet, unassuming ( but excellent linguist ) - the antithesis of James Bond. I'd have guessed a librarian maybe. I asked him how on earth you recruited people for such a dangerous job - he said 'you have to talk to them'!?

Then another chap who was airlifted into Belgium to link up with the Resistance - very quietly spoken - link was a little late for the rendez-vous as he'd been executing one of the team who'd been betraying them to the Germans - became a Primary School head.

Finally a somewhat sweet 'dizzy ' woman who'd been part of a WW2 'safe house' network in Paris. I guess her 'dizziness' was cultivated to protect herself. She was just a teenage student when someone knocked on her door one night and asked if he could come in as the Gestapo were after him. As she said, she had about half a second to decide whether to send him to certain death ( or much worse) or whether to let him in and start a desperately dangerous life for herself.

In awe of them all.

I'm pretty sure the guy that lives behind us was in MI6. He keeps bees and I bought some honey off him and then googled him out of interest. On linked in it says he was an army officer, worked for the foreign office for twenty years and now works for Hakyult which is a private defence company founded by British secret service agents according to google. It wasn't very hard to work out!

He may have to kill me now 😬

I know a man who was an intelligence agent in the Cold War, moving between East and West Berlin. Had all the papers to prove and some incredible stories when pushed. He seemed a completely unassuming music teacher.

An ex boyfriends step dad used to work in “intelligence” and wasn’t allowed to tell us more. Apparently he was only allowed to tell two people his profession and he had told his mum and ex wife. He told people who asked he worked for bt.

I mean Hakluyt. They'd never recruit me.

Yes.

My ex had a schoolfriend who was married to one. I met him once - pretty dull but very kind, clearly very intelligent, liked running.

Another friend was pals with someone who worked in intelligence, desk based. It seems to attract clever geeky people - perhaps I should apply

I know someone (female) who was a spy. She now actually does work in IT!

I have a friend who discovered her dad had been in the secret service about 10 years after he died, when she saw old footage of him on a documentary about the Cold War. Her mother confirmed that it was indeed him.

I'm fairly sure I once looked after a patient who was something in that world. He was picked up by two men in suits and transferred to a private hospital once he was stable.

My grandfather was a spy during WW2, if asked what he did during the war he had always just said he worked as a translator as he spoke Polish and German fluently. It was only after he died his first wife (not my grandmother) told us all the truth.

My friend was approached and invited to initial interviews/tests by MI5 when we were at university in the 90s. She didn’t get through in the end and that was the end of it. She only told me years later as she said the whole thing was quite bizarre - she was literally approached by a guy on campus and then invited to a series of interviews and psychometric tests. She didn’t think anyone would believe her . She is quite a successful and high profile doctor and medical expert these days but I like to call her M .

My DH was refused a work visa from the Saudi embassy, they seemed to think he was Mi6

Slightly off-topic but I once met an Customs intelligence officer through work. His card said Intelligence Officer on it, wished I'd kept it.

One of the trustees of an organisation I'm involved with died earlier this year. He was very elderly and not in the best of health. I always thought of him as the old gentleman who tended to ramble on at meetings (when he wasn't falling asleep). At the meeting following his death the Chair read out a eulogy written with input from his family that covered his stellar career in the military in the 50s and 60s followed by working as a very senior spy for MI6. None of us had a clue.

My friend works in an intelligence adjacent position

Adjacent. I like that.
A relative of mine works similarly adjacent.

Not me, but my GM. We have a photo of her in a bunker as a baby, being held by an man in an SS officer uniform- it turned out to be a friend of her father's (her father later abandoned my GGM for East Germany), but we don't really know much about her father, let alone his friend (GM grew up in a 'British zone')

Yes.