Espionage

MI6 Boot Camp: Fort Monckton

This is the UK’s spy school central where undercover agents are trained in the dark arts

Czechoslovakian ČZ vzor 52 semiautomatic pistol chambered in 7.62x25 mm Tokarev cartridge. Credit: By Anonymous — Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8497604

I lived near Fort Monckton for a few years in the 1990s and drove past it regularly on my way to where my boat was moored in Portsmouth Harbour. The ‘Fort’ is a training school for MI6, the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service, broadly equivalent to the US’s CIA and Russia’s SVR.

Fort Monckton’s shadow conceals tales not just of wartime grit but also of the world of espionage. Not of ELINT, but HUMINT. It dates back to 1545 and its 18th-century rebuild as a coastal defence against American revolutionaries and its Victorian-era makeover as a Palmerston fort are fascinating, it is the fort’s modern-day role as a clandestine training ground for MI6, Britain’s intelligence agency, that stimulates the imagination.

It it really an MI6 training school?

In his book The Big Breach, former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson states that Fort Monckton is now the SIS’s field operations training centre, where both basic and advanced field training is given to SIS personnel, and liaison training with other services including the Special Air Service and Special Boat Service is undertaken.

Now referred to as…