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60 free MI6 trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This MI6 trivia quiz covers the real Secret Intelligence Service rather than the one that employs James Bond, though the films that borrowed its riverside headquarters get a look in. The easy questions cover what MI6 actually does, where it sits on the Thames, the letter its chief signs with and which sister agencies handle domestic security and signals. From there the quiz walks through the history: the 1909 Secret Service Bureau, Mansfield Cumming's green ink, the Zinoviev letter, the Venlo ambush, Bletchley's Ultra and the Cambridge spies who hollowed the service out during the Cold War. The harder end goes to the moles and defectors (Blake, Penkovsky, Gordievsky, Goleniewski), the tunnel operations, the E Squadron paramilitary unit, the RPG fired at the building in 2000, the training fort at Gosport and the succession of chiefs up to Blaise Metreweli, the first woman to hold the post. Difficulty runs from a first-timer's warm-up to questions that will test people who read intelligence histories for fun. Every answer was checked against the service's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this, our James Bond and FBI quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01MI6 is the common name of which British organisation?
Secret Intelligence Service
The name MI6 was a convenient label from the Second World War era that stuck in popular culture; the service itself has used the SIS title since around 1920.
Q 02What kind of work is MI6 primarily responsible for?
Foreign espionage overseas
Unlike MI5 and GCHQ, the law only lets SIS operate against people outside the British Islands.
Q 03By what single letter is the chief of MI6 traditionally known?
C
Ian Fleming borrowed the idea for James Bond's boss but changed the letter to M.
Q 04To which cabinet minister is the chief of MI6 directly accountable?
Foreign Secretary
MI6 sits under the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, whereas MI5 answers to the Home Secretary.
Q 05In which year was the Secret Service Bureau, the ancestor of MI6, founded?
1909
It was a joint Admiralty and War Office initiative aimed largely at Imperial Germany, and its naval section became the foreign-intelligence arm.
Q 06Who was the first director of the service?
Mansfield Smith-Cumming
He usually dropped the Smith from his name and became known simply as Cumming.
Q 07What colour of ink did the first chief use to sign his initial, a habit that became a tradition?
Green
Every subsequent chief has signed as C to keep the anonymity, and the tradition still holds.
Q 08The existence of MI6 was not officially acknowledged by the British government until which year?
1994
The Intelligence Services Act of that year put the service on a statutory footing for the first time.
Q 09On the bank of which river does MI6's headquarters stand?
Thames
The building at Vauxhall Cross sits on the south bank next to Vauxhall Bridge.
Q 10What is the street address usually given for the SIS headquarters?
85 Vauxhall Cross
All four addresses have housed the service at some point; the others were earlier homes going back to 1911.
Q 11Which architect designed the MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall Cross, opened in 1994?
Terry Farrell
Margaret Thatcher's government approved the purchase in December 1987, and the final bill came to more than £150 million.
Q 12What was MI6's Lambeth headquarters called before its mid-1990s move to the riverside?
Century House
Century House on Westminster Bridge Road in Lambeth housed the service from 1966 until the move.
Q 13In September 2000 the MI6 building was hit by what kind of weapon?
An anti-tank rocket
The Russian-built RPG-22 struck the eighth floor and did only superficial damage; police blamed the Real IRA.
Q 21What was the codename for intelligence gained from breaking German Enigma messages?
Ultra
Distributing this material made MI6 an important branch of government for the first time.
Q 22Which ally's intelligence supplied 48 percent of the reports British secret services got from Europe in WWII?
Poland
A joint 2005 report unveiled the figure; Polish networks also helped airlift a captured V-2 rocket to Britain.
Q 23Which Soviet double agent in MI6 tipped off Moscow about would-be defector Konstantin Volkov?
Kim Philby
He had joined SIS in 1940 after being vetted by a friend who was also secretly working for Moscow.
Q 14Which James Bond film was the first that MI6 allowed to film its actual headquarters building?
The World Is Not Enough
The pre-credits sequence has a briefcase bomb blow out an exterior wall of the building.
Q 15In which Bond film is the MI6 building blown up via a cyber attack that ignites a gas line?
Skyfall
After the blast, operations in the film move to a secret underground facility.
Q 16Which forged document did MI6 leak to the Daily Mail days before the 1924 general election?
The Zinoviev letter
Supposedly from the head of the Comintern, it helped sink Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government; whether MI6 knew it was fake is still unclear.
Q 17In which neutral city was MI6's main European office during the First World War?
Rotterdam
From there it coordinated espionage in Germany and occupied Belgium, since it never managed to build a network inside Germany itself.
Q 18Which adventurer, later called the 'Ace of Spies', did MI6 send to Russia in 1918 to plot against the Bolsheviks?
Sidney Reilly
Despite the Irish-sounding name he was a Russian-Jewish adventurer whose official job was merely to keep Russia in the war.
Q 19What cover job did Cumming create in 1919 to give MI6 officers diplomatic immunity abroad?
Passport Control Officer
The passport control department became the standard cover for MI6 stations in embassies between the wars.
Q 20In November 1939 the SS kidnapped two MI6 officers at a cafe in which Dutch border town?
Venlo
The men thought they were meeting anti-Hitler generals; the fiasco made Britain wary of any German resistance contacts for the rest of the war.
Q 24Which MI6 officer, turned by the Soviets in Korean War internment, betrayed the Berlin tunnel?
George Blake
He was jailed in 1961 but escaped in 1966 and was smuggled to the USSR.
Q 25What was the codename of the Berlin tunnel project to tap Soviet communications?
Operation Gold
Because Blake had betrayed it, the tunnel was blown from the outset.
Q 26The 1956 death of which frogman forced MI6 chief John Sinclair to resign?
Lionel Crabb
Crabb vanished while diving near a visiting Soviet cruiser in Portsmouth harbour.
Q 27MI6 helped the CIA overthrow which country's prime minister, Mohammed Mossadeq, in 1953?
Iran
The coup restored the Shah's power and remains one of the service's most cited covert political actions.
Q 28Which GRU colonel supplied rocketry manuals that helped identify Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962?
Oleg Penkovsky
He photographed several thousand documents over two years before being caught.
Q 29Across which country's border did MI6 exfiltrate KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky from the USSR in 1985?
Finland
He had been run as an MI6 source for the better part of a decade.
Q 30Which Polish defector exposed the MI6 officer who betrayed the Berlin tunnel to the Soviets?
Michael Goleniewski
MI6 had run three moles inside the Polish UB from 1958; the CIA paid it $20 million to expand the operation.