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Barrie Gane's extraordinary career within Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service MI6 unfolded as a gripping international spy tale, spanning from Laos and Hong Kong to Northern Ireland during a war with the IRA. It was a remarkable journey laid bare in an unusually revealing obituary that followed Gane’s death in December 2023.
“There are all sorts of details here which we would normally never expect to read, not least about his work in Northern Ireland,” said Professor Anthony Glees, an intelligence expert and author of The Secrets of the Service. “MI6 was briefly involved but it was a huge deal because it implied Northern Ireland was a 'foreign' place rather than the UK. MI5 was reportedly furious and MI6 [was] removed from the Province.”
MI6 is Britain’s foreign spy service and - much like CIA - its role is to run external operations, not monitor citizens at home, but at the time of Gane's posting Northern Ireland was in the midst of ‘The Troubles’, a decades-long conflict that began in the 1960s. Some 3,500 people lost their lives to violence and Britain’s security services didn’t always follow the rules. Intelligence officers, it seems, are not above turf wars either.
Gane headed a joint Security Service and MI6 station in Northern Ireland where “intelligence diplomacy was of the essence because local special branches, police, and military intelligence were often too intent on guarding their patches to contribute as well as they might to the general good,” according to The Times’ obituary.
Gane’s espionage ‘disaster’
Northern Ireland was one of Gane’s many bases during a 32-year career that began when he joined MI6 in 1960. Not all of his missions were a success. The Times describes one Polish operation as a ‘disaster’ although Gane wasn’t to blame.
It seems Gane was posted to Warsaw where MI6 ran a young, brash Polish military spy who provided Cold War ciphers on Warsaw Pact communications. The Polish spy wanted to try recruiting his superior and was told ‘no’ - an MI6 warning he apparently ignored. When Gane arrived at the rendezvous point to meet the young man for the first time, Gane was instead greeted by secret police. The agent was condemned to death.
MI6 spy stories
Gane was born in Birmingham, England in 1935. After his National Service as a midshipman in the Royal Navy, he became the first of his family to go to university. He studied history at Cambridge, joined MI6, and rose to deputy head of the agency.
Gane’s first posting was to Laos, a country engulfed in civil war between the communist Pathet Lao and the monarchy, intensified by the engagement of the US, China, North Vietnam, and the Soviet Union. Not only did Gane perform well in the challenging environment, he found time to dispatch a much-coveted bronze Laotian drum requested by a superior.
His next posting in the Malaysian state of Sarawak was a paramilitary role where Gane gathered intel in support of the British, Commonwealth, and Malaysian troops fighting the Indonesian Army. He was rewarded with an Order of the British Empire, a British order of chivalry.
