MI6’s ethics chief has argued that spies cannot justify their existence with moral arguments alone and must accept they exist to “promote the national interest” in a struggle as “potent now as it was during the cold war”.
The frank argument is made in a review of a book, Spying Through a Glass Darkly, a discussion of the ethics of espionage, which argues that the entirely values-based justification for spying advanced by the author is too restrictive.
