Interesting: The New York Times reports on the brand new web site of Great Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, aka MI6. The Times seems to be less than certain that the info on the site can be fully trusted...
If there is an institution that the fictional James Bond made famous with all his derring-do it was, to quote from the thriller and movie of the same name, Her Majesty's Secret Service.As of Thursday, the service was not quite as secret as it had been.
At midnight, Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6 - the equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency - introduced its first publicly accessible Web site, raising the hem of its cloak (if not its dagger) to just a modicum of scrutiny.
So intense was the interest in this move by an intelligence service - once so secret that it denied its own existence - that the site recorded 3.5 million hits in its first few hours, slowing access to a crawl, said Nev Johnson, a British Foreign Office press officer who speaks on behalf of the Secret Intelligence Service.
"It's been pretty astronomical," he said.
Girding for the fight against global terrorism, the agency developed the site primarily to recruit agents, operatives and analysts from a much broader academic and social background than in the past and to let would-be spies know how to join.
So wide is the net that the site has versions in Spanish, French, Arabic, Chinese and Russian - hardly the kind of overture that would have been expected in the cold war heyday of writers like John le Carré, or double-agents like Kim Philby and Guy Burgess, when the point was to keep foes at bay by the most devious of means.
But times have changed.
• British Secret Intelligence Service - official web site
• Wikipedia - Secret Intelligence Service