How do you keep a building secret?
Maybe you find an undercover location, hidden away from prying eyes.
Or do you design something that blends in,
the kind of place you might walk past without thinking twice …
And who do you keep that building a secret from?
Can you even keep it secret from the people who built it?
And can you really keep anything a secret when it’s the home of this guy:
The name’s Bond, James Bond
This building behind me is not just the London office of the world’s most famous secret agent,
it’s also the real headquarters of SIS, Britain’s secret intelligence service,
known to the world by its nickname, MI6.
The building is a secure, cutting edge fortress but its predecessors have often been the exact
opposite and the story of how the Service ended up here says a lot about how it has evolved.
This is how Britain built its spy headquarters …
Vauxhall Cross, to give the building its proper name, is a monumental edifice of espionage.
Its imposing, imperial design is kind of the modern face of the iconic Service,
but it’s actually come a long way from SIS’ more humble origins …
Before Vauxhall Cross, SIS stayed true to its motto of
“always secret” by simply hiding in plain sight.
In 1909, according to the brass plaque on the exterior, this building was the
office of “Messrs Rasen, Falcon Limited: shippers and exporters”.
Only a select few were aware it was actually the headquarters
of SIS’ founder Sir Mansfield Cumming.
Cumming was a workaholic with a long legacy. He signed his name “C” and wrote exclusively
in green ink, a tradition which continues for the head of the service to this day.
He was also obsessive about secrecy. In 1919 when he moved his office to
this townhouse in West London, visitors were first instructed to go to an office
six kilometres away on the Strand where they were given the address.
He even tried to keep the location from his boss, the Director of Military Intelligence.
SIS continued the practice of renting commercial office space under a false name for the next
few decades, but as the cold war dawned the limitations of that approach became apparent.
In 1964 the service was preparing to move out of this building in the exclusive St. James’
area of West London, where it had been posing as the “Minimax Fire Extinguisher Company”.
Much to the horror of the Service, the current landlord started showing round
prospective tenants before they had moved out.
On one day, a so-called “Russian Trade Delegation” came through,
prompting frantic covering up of maps and other material.
Later that year the service moved south of the Thames and rented the newly built Century House.
This is how the building appeared then. In 2001 it was refurbished and turned into residential flats.
This new HQ wasn’t much better.
At a time when the existence of the service was still officially denied by the government,
the occupants of Century House were widely known.
The Daily Telegraph once quipped, it was "London's worst-kept secret,
known only to every taxi driver, tourist guide and KGB agent"
But it wasn’t just the building’s identity that was an issue. It also had large glass
windows which were perfect for snooping through and a petrol
station at its base made it an obvious target for an attack.
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Each of these headquarters reflected a different part of the service’s history.
The clandestine offices of an embryonic service …
The exclusive Broadway House that housed the Services’ Oxbridge
graduates and minor aristocrats throughout WWII and the 1950s …
And Century House, the dysfunctional HQ of a ramshackled organisation,
riddled with double agents, best summed up in John Le Carre’s Karla trilogy.
By the 1980s the building had become completely compromised.
A 1985 report labelled Century House “irredeemably insecure” and the hunt began for a replacement.
But where to go next? As the Service looked for new premises, most options were ruled out
because of the need to share the space with shops, restaurants or private accommodation.
Any location outside of London was ruled out
because of the distance from the other government agencies.
Out of the blue a solution was put forward.
In 1987 Regalian Properties PLC approached the government offering them the chance to
acquire a proposed development on the south bank of the Thames.
The government quickly agreed, but the intended occupants were kept top secret.
I had no idea I was building for MI6, I was told it was a government headquarters and we guessed,
wrongly very early on that it was the department for the environment.
The building was finished and handed over and I was watching the television and on the screen:
“the British have announced this is the headquarters of MI6”
But just how do you keep a massive new spy headquarters
secret from the people who are actually building it?
Well, a National Audit Office report, published in 2000 shed some light on this.
To avoid any future embarrassment with a landlord,
the decision was quickly taken to buy the building outright, for a price of £135M.
But even this nearly let the cat out of the bag.
Government-funded projects are usually paid in instalments throughout construction,
with each payment offering a chance for public scrutiny.
Instead, the Treasury arranged for the payment to be made in full before construction started.
The property developer, Regalian, would then design and construct the building to
a standard office specification, with the addition of some specialist equipment such
as emergency generators, a document lift – this was, remember, still the 1980s.
Once the main construction phase was completed,
a further £10M was spent fitting the building out to required standards.
The same project managers and construction teams were kept on to complete this,
with SIS itself completing the most secret tasks, ahead of the building’s opening in 1994.
So, the question you’ve been waiting for: what do you actually get in a top secret headquarters?
Well, as you might expect, most of this is top secret, but here’s what we do know:
The building itself is a fortress. 25 different types of glass were used to meet specific needs
of this structure. Its triple glazed windows and stone exterior is bomb and bullet proof.
Extra thick doors were specially designed to make the perimeter as secure as possible.
Inside the complex there is rumoured to be a shooting range, ultra secure areas where
eavesdropping is impossible, and a faraday cage which blocks incoming radio waves.
In a Financial Times interview, a spy said how employees are instructed to
turn off all mobile phones long before they get in the building.
In other words, pretty secure. But there’s just
one more thing, security is one thing… isn’t that supposed to be secret?
If secret payments and minimal subcontractors were this triumph of clandestine bureaucracy,
then failure lay in hiring one of Britain’s most
famous architects to design a massive building overlooking the river Thames …
Well, by this point change had become all but inevitable.
As the cold war ended and the service continued to evolve, the opening of
the new HQ was used as an opportunity to create a more public face of the service.
Prime Minister John Major pledged to “sweep away
the cobwebs of secrecy hanging over Britain’s spy services”.
When the new headquarters was completed, it was named as the SIS HQ, but that was
the first time the British government had ever officially acknowledged the existence of SIS.
Ultimately we’ll never know what really goes on inside Vauxhall Cross,
but what this story tells us is the power of a building to shape the organisation within it.
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