真实世界中的007是怎样一种体验？

Real-life James Bonds: Actual spooks reveal what a job in MI6 is really like

By Frank Gardner

It’s slick, it’s fast-paced and it’s . But that’s the cinema. , the latest James Bond thriller starring opens in cinemas on Monday to critical acclaim.

敏捷、神速、性感……这只是电影。丹尼尔·克雷格主演的最新一部007电影《幽灵党》周一上映，饱受影评界赞誉。

slick: Deftly executed; adroit

thriller: One that thrills, especially a sensational or suspenseful book, story, play, or movie.

Pure fantasy? Or are there any similarities with the work of a real-life operative in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), better known as MI6? I’ve gone to meet two serving SIS officers to find out.

纯属虚构？还是和真实世界中的英国军情六处特工有所相似？我们来见识一下两个英国现役特工。

I don’t notice them at first, there are so many people in the room. Are they part of the camera crew? A couple of people sent up from hotel reception perhaps, to check we have everything we need?

一开始我没找到他们，屋子里有不少人，他们难道混在摄制团队吗？抑或是酒店大堂来确认服务是否到位的那两个人？

But then we are introduced. “Kamal” – and I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that is probably not his real name – is 30-something, unshaven, quietly confident. “Kirsty” is only slightly older. Neatly dressed, she looks like she could be running a medium-sized IT company. In fact, she is in recruiting, having already done the hard yards in the field overseas.

过了一阵答案揭晓了。其中一位被称为“Kamal"，我斗胆猜测这可能并非真名，他三十来岁，没刮胡子，不说话却很有气场。还有一位叫"Kirsty"，年纪稍大，她穿着整洁，看起来像一家中型IT公司的老板，实际上，她是现役军人，已经执行过海外任务了。

Kamal speaks first. “I’m what people would classify as an agent-runner,” he tells me. “Our job is to find individuals with access to secret intelligence of value to the UK government. My job [within MI6] is to build a relationship with these individuals and work with them to obtain the secrets they have access to, securely.”

Kamal先说的话。“我就是人们所说的谍报人员。我的工作是找出对英国政府有情报价值的人，与这些人建立关系，并和他们一起获取他们能接触到的秘密，安全获取。”

And bang, up in smoke goes one of the biggest misnomers about espionage and spies. , and all the true-life men and women who work inside those sandstone and emerald-coloured headquarters at Vauxhall Cross on the banks of the Thames are not “secret agents”.

砰！从浓烟中挑出，这是对间谍的最大误会之一。詹姆斯·邦德和所有在泰晤士河畔碧绿色砂岩墙的沃克斯豪尔大厦工作的男男女女都并非“密探”。

They are intelligence officers. The people overseas who they persuade to spy for them are the actual agents.

他们是情报人员。他们劝说的那些在海外为他们获取信息的人才是真正的间谍。

Daniel Craig in the latest Bond film, SPECTRE

As an , Kamal’s job is at the sharp end of intelligence-gathering. Put bluntly, he has to try to recruit people to do difficult and dangerous things, sometimes betraying the very organisations they have worked with for years. How, I ask him, do you do that? Is it money? Or charm? Or will power?

谍报人员Kamal处在收集情报的最前沿。说白了，他雇人完成困难和危险的工作，后者又是要背叛自己工作多年的机构。我问他，怎么做到这一点呢？用钱？色诱？意志力？

“It’s a combination of all these things and a little bit more,” he says. “People have different motivations for working with the UK but the thing that underpins them all is that they willingly enter into a relationship where they’re passing intelligence to the United Kingdom.”

“兼而有之，还不止如此。为英国工作的人动机不同，共同点在于他们自愿建立这种关系，把情报传给英国。”

It all sounds, to be honest, a bit other-worldly; a throwback, perhaps, to the monochrome world of , where people stubbed out cigarettes beneath their heel while waiting for a defector at Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie.

说实话，这听起来有点不真实，好像倒退回小说家约翰·勒卡雷描述的单调世界，在柏林查理检查站等待叛变者时用靴子捻灭烟头。

I wonder if, in this digital cyber age of drones and satellites and intercepts, there is still a place for the sort of old-school human spycraft Kamal is alluding to.

我不明白在无人机、卫星和监听设备发达的数字网络时代，Kamal提到的这些老套谍报手段怎么还有用武之地。

The MI6 building in Vauxhall, London

“The nature of the world is such that we can’t operate in isolation,” he says. “So we work very closely with [the UK’s domestic Security Service] and GCHQ [the secret listening station at Cheltenham]. It’s that combination of technical and human intelligence that allows us to answer the questions that key individuals in Whitehall want to know about.”

“这个世界的版只是我们没法独自行动。所以我们和军情五处与切尔滕纳姆监听站（GCHQ）密切合作。正是技术和人力的合作让我们获得英国政府的大佬想要知道的问题答案。

Like what, for example? “It’s a variety of different threats. Traditionally, we have faced states and organisations that have sought to penetrate the heart of the UK government and key UK institutions and then steal their secrets. Those still exist, they haven’t gone away.”

比方说什么问题呢？“有各种各样的威胁。传统上，我们面临国家和组织试图渗透英国政府和重要部门并窃取机密。现在仍然如此，并未消失。”

Kamal does not mention Russia once, but I remember an MI5 officer telling journalists not so long ago that there were just as many operating in Britain in the 2000s as there were during the Cold War in the early 1980s.

Kamal并未提及俄罗斯，可我记得军情五处探员曾告诉记者，不久前，21世纪在英国的俄罗斯谍报人员和上世纪八十年代早期的冷战时期一样多。

“Alongside those threats,” continues Kamal, “we have the terrorist threat, we have states and organisations looking to proliferate weapons of mass destruction and nuclear technology. We have states with territorial ambitions and more recently we have people looking to conduct cyber espionage against the UK.”

Kamal说：“除了这些威胁，我们还面临恐怖主义威胁，还有国家和组织试图扩散大规模杀伤性武器和核技术。还有的国家试图扩张，最近还有人对英国从事网络间谍活动。”

So how does it work, I ask. Do you just walk in each morning, pour yourself a skinny latte, log onto your computer and then discuss what the latest threat is? That turns out to be not too far from the truth, but there is method. Kamal explains something called

我问，你们如何工作呢？每天早上来上班，泡上一杯低脂拿铁，登陆计算机然后讨论最新的威胁是什么？结果的确差不多，可其中有些门道。Kamal解释了什么是“情报圈”。

It works like this: the political leaders in Whitehall decide there is a requirement to find out something secret, for example – and these are my suggested examples here, not theirs - how many nuclear centrifuges Iran is operating below ground, or which routes ISIS is using to smuggle recruits into Syria.

情报圈是这样的：英国政府的领导人认为有必要知道某个秘密，我举个例子，伊朗在地下有多少核离心机，伊斯兰国在叙利亚招兵买马的路线？

The targeting officer then works with MI5 and GCHQ to identify the individual overseas who is best placed to know the answers. Next, a “reports officer” articulates these questions to the agent runner and tasks him or her to get the information. A whole team of people then works out how best to get the agent-runner in front of the potential informant.

目标军官就与军情五处和GCHQ合作，确定海外某个最能找出答案的人。接下来，“报告军官”将这些问题告诉谍报人员，要求他或她获取信息。然后整个团队制定方案怎样让谍报人员找到潜在的知情人。

007 steps out of his car looking suave

Some approaches fail. “Often”, admits Kamal, “the people we identify are simply unsuitable for intelligence work for a whole host of reasons.”

有时接触失败。Kamal承认：“常常失败。我们认定的人处于很多原因不适于完成情报工作。”

But when it works and the agent starts to produce intelligence, this gets passed up the chain to the reports officer, who assesses whether it is credible. “Once they are satisfied it is, they pass it back to the individual in Whitehall who asked the question in the first place. That is the cycle.”

可如果可行，探员就开始获取情报，情报上传给报告军官，后者评估是否可信。“一旦他们认为可信，就传给英国政府的大佬。就是这么个过程。”

But what about life inside MI6? Is it not, I suggest, a tremendous to be living a secret life that you can tell almost no one about?

那么军情六处的生活呢？我问，是不是压力巨大，不能很和人说你在从事秘密工作？

“When people join the organisation they are given a cover role,” says Kirsty. “They get a number of security briefings to help them manage that cover and actually it becomes second nature. So most people may tell their nearest and dearest but to everyone else they would live that cover story for the rest of their career.”

Kirsty说：“人们加入这个组织时有一个掩护身份。他们有一系列安全简报做掩护，简直成了第二属性。大部分人会告诉他们至亲至近的人，对其他人则缄口不言。”

Could it, I venture, even sometimes be fun, pretending you are something you are not? “Absolutely” says Kamal. “It is one of the best parts of the job. It’s theatre. On occasion it allows you to engage your more flamboyant side, which of course is wonderful.”

我猜假装自己不是自己，有时会不会很有趣？Kamal说：“绝对是这样，这就是这个工作最牛的，就像演戏。有时还让你接触到你最浮夸的一面，这当然很棒。”

We are going off-piste here and I remember I have some more serious questions that need asking. I want to know about the danger. Bond, of course, is mysteriously invincible, apparently no matter what threats he faces. But in real life, how is it?

我们要言归正传，我记得我还有不少严肃的问题要问。我想知道危险何在。邦德当然是神奇而不可战胜的，无论什么样的威胁都能全身而退。可真实生活中是怎样呢？

Kirsty chooses her words carefully here. “It would be untrue for me to say that all of our work is free of danger.

Kirsty斟酌地说：“说我们所有的工作都是没有危险的，这可能不真实。”

However, we have a team of security advisors who ensure that both we and our agents are as secure as we can be. No operation would go ahead if we had any doubts about our security, or that of our agent.”

但我们有安全团队确保探员尽可能安全。如果对自身安全或探员的安全有疑虑，不会采取行动。

I am almost embarrassed to ask but I do it anyway: is anyone in SIS (MI6) licensed to kill? “Absolutely not,” replies Kamal.

我有点不敢问这个问题，但还是问了：军情六处会批准谁大开杀戒吗？“绝对不会。”Kamal说。

“The mythology around espionage and around SIS in particular is extremely misleading. We are an organisation that revels in subtlety and the methods 007 employs – crash-banging across cities in both hemispheres – is entirely misleading. We seek to operate in the shadows and we don’t like to draw attention to ourselves. Having a licence to kill is the antithesis of that.”

“间谍工作和军情六处的神话极具误导性。我们沉迷于007那种手段和办法，在两个半球的各个城市砰砰砰，这纯属舞蹈。我们要低调行事，不喜欢引人注意。批准杀戮不合常理。”

GCHQ headquarters in Cheltenham

Yet some myths turn out to be true. The Chief is still known as “C” and is the only person allowed to sign papers in green ink. The gadgets and innovations department depicted in Bond as “Q” branch really does exist.

但有些传说的确是真的。被称为C的老板是唯一用绿笔签署文件的人。电影中所说的新玩意和器材部门Q趋势存在。

“I think”, says Kirsty, clearly warming to her subject, “ would be surprised at the technology we have in the modern-day MI6. We have brilliant technologists who can come up with some amazing devices that can help enable intelligence officers to do their jobs better.”

Kirsty对这个很感冒。“我想弗莱明肯定会为当代军情六处的技术感到惊讶。我们有许多令人耳目一新的技术，可以让情报人员的工作更出色。”

Including weapons? “No. We stop short of anything that will do harm to other humans and certainly nothing related to knives coming out of tyres and exploding pens.”

包括武器吗？“不。我们不会伤害他人，也不会有轮胎插刀和爆炸钢笔。”

And Bond? They both laugh. “I think that is where the fiction ends and the fact begins,” says Kamal. “Because we are not like Bond, we don’t have officers that seek to fulfil their missions at any cost. Our officers operate within the law…The fact we need to ensure we continue operating in the shadows means we wouldn’t dream of having anybody like Bond in our organisation. He has got all manner of , which I think would be very, very unhelpful in an organisation like ours.”

有邦德这样的人吗？他们都笑了。Kamal说：“我想这就是小说结束，事实开始的地方。我们都不是邦德，也没有像他一样不计代价完成任务的人。我们的探员在法律内工作……我们要低调行事，做梦也不会想我们的机构里有邦德那样的人。他太有个性了，我想这对我们这样的组织，是非常有害的。”