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Inside the 20-year MI6 operation to find Russian spy in its ranks
British intelligence chiefs spent 20 years hunting for a suspected Russian mole inside MI6 but failed to track down a traitor, it has been revealed.
An elaborate investigation, called Operation Wedlock, is said to have spanned several continents and lasted until around 2015 before finally being labelled 'inconclusive'.
The investigation was led by MI6's sister agency, MI5, in what sources described as an extraordinary case of one UK intelligence agency effectively spying on another.
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MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, is the UK spy agency responsible for overseas intelligence, while MI5, the Security Service, is the domestic intelligence agency that handles national security threats.
After being tipped off by the CIA about an alleged double agent in the 1990s, MI5 is said to have deployed a team of up to 35 surveillance, planning and desk officers, who travelled across the world in pursuit of the mole.
Their hunt for the traitor has been documented in a recently published book, The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB, by the former BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera. The book says the CIA was concerned that an unknown MI6 officer had been 'turned by Moscow' and was relaying secrets to Russia.
Sources with close knowledge of the operation have since disclosed to The Guardian that the UK identified a suspect within the agency and tasked MI5 with surveilling him.
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'[We were told] the target was a Russian spy … The US believed he was leaking information to the Russians. He was suspect 1A. The job was taken more seriously than any other [MI5] was involved in. Wedlock eclipsed them all,' one source said.
The Wedlock team did not operate from MI5 headquarters at Thames House in Westminster and was instead based in a building in Wandsworth, south London, close to MI6's riverside building in Vauxhall.
The team went to great lengths to monitor their man. MI5's technical operations team, known then as A1, is reported to have bugged the MI6 officer's home, covertly breaking in to plant listening and video devices. A live feed then beamed images back to an operations room.
One source said they also parked a car outside his house, which was fitted with a camera inside a tissue box on the ledge behind the back seats.
Over the years surveillance teams are said to have tracked the suspect's movements abroad, following him to cities across Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Doing so is considered very high-risk move as operating overseas is outside MI5's jurisdiction.
When the team was sent into a country with real passports under false names, or somewhere without the knowledge of the local government, the agents were reportedly warned that they were 'on their own' if detained.
The operation is understood to have continued, in one form or another, until at least 2015, by which time the suspect had left MI6.
However, he was not thought to be working alone, a source said, with two other people, also based in London, believed to be helping him.
Wedlock was described as a 'highly unusual operation … the longest in recent memory and probably the most expensive'.
Despite their efforts, the MI5 team was ultimately unable to establish whether there was a mole — raising the possibility that an agent may have got away with spying for Russia.
'MI5 never got the conclusive proof it was looking for,' the source said, adding that if it was not him, then it was possible that MI6 'still has a mole to find'.
