How was Britain’s intelligence agency Mi5 caught enemy from lemon?

… and the double agent escaped

The exhibition started on Saturday and it also depicts some less glorious matters of the agency. The Cold War section displays a passport and a briefcase left by the British diplomat Gai Burges at a club in London. Gai Burges was a Russian double agent since World War II. He fled to Moscow in 1951, as he started laying a trap against him.

A note is also displayed in the exhibition, which confirmed that the private secretary of Queen Elizabeth II told the Queen in the early 1970s that her art advisor Anthony Blunt was a Soviet agent. It is written in the note that the Queen reacted “very peacefully and without any surprise”.

The recently displayed commodities include the mortar shell fired by the Irish Republican Army in 1991 in the Prime Minister’s Niwas 10 Downing Street garden.

Comments of unnamed agents also included

The exhibition also includes comments from anonymous MI5 agents. In 2024, one wrote, “Agents remain one of the most important sources of intelligence used by MI5.” However, the management of agents is very ‘complex’. He gave a list of necessary questions and said that it is necessary to answer them, such as “what is their inspiration?”, “Are they telling the truth?”, “How do you assess that they are working for the other side?”

About 48 percent women employees in Mi5

In the initial days, the number of men in the intelligence department was high, while in 2022, about 48 percent of the employees in the MI5 were women. Famous agent Maxwell Night was one of the first people to suggest in the 1930s that women could become a good detective.

He wrote, “The intuition of a woman is sometimes surprisingly helpful and surprisingly correct.”

This free exhibition will end on 28 September.