Not everyone who joins the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) ends up furtively meeting agents in the dead of night in some far-off country.

As the agency seeks to expand beyond its 2,000-strong workforce to cope with the rising threat from terrorism and weapons proliferation, the thinking man’s James Bond back in the office trying to draw together key bits of intelligence plays just as vital a role as the action man or action woman out in the field.

MI6, which has been running for nearly 100 years, now recruits openly, like other employers, and no longer relies on the famous “tap on the shoulder” routine, the customary method when the service focused its recruiting on the brightest Oxbridge undergraduates.

Today the agency is open to all offers and is increasingly looking for more women and more people from ethnic minority backgrounds. About 36 per cent of the most recent recruits were women and just under 10 per cent were of ethnic minority origin.

People who have already had one career but are seeking greater challenges are also being headhunted, especially when the experience they have gleaned has a relevance to secret intelligence work. Recent recruits have joined from the City, elsewhere in Whitehall and from business.

More opportunities are also now opening up for MI6 personnel to be given secondments to other areas of Whitehall, such as the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, which is run by MI5.

Maggie, who is in her mid-twenties, is soon to be posted to an MI6 station in SouthEast Asia. She is part of the counter-terrorism team and has learnt Arabic. “My partner knows what I do,” she says. “Gone are the days when you were not supposed to talk about your work to your spouse or partner. It’s very different today, but he has had to be vetted.”

Robert, who is in his early thirties and married with children, was recruited into MI6 from a publishing firm. His first job was as a case officer, travelling in South America. After two years he was posted to an MI6 station in a European city with a United Nations presence. He made rapid progress and was promoted to head of a station in an African country, and is now back in London. “I’m in charge of a team of up to six people focusing on counter-terrorism, quite a switch for me.” Geoff, who is in his early thirties, is a targeting officer, specialising in building up intelligence pictures at MI6 headquarters and advising operational officers out in the field where to create their networks of agents. “One objective is to try to disrupt terrorist planning,” he says.

Michael Evans is the defence editor of The Times

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