Jack Bremer reports for The First Post:
London bankers and traders are quitting the City to work as intelligence agents. That's the claim made by MI6 - otherwise known as the Secret Intelligence Service - which, in an effort to win more recruits to the growing business of terror prevention, gave an interview yesterday to the London freesheet, the Evening Standard.
"We have a lot of people in the City applying to join us," said the spy agency's head of recruitment who, disappointingly, did not give his name as P or R but 'John'.
Bankers make good potential spies, he said, because they have good inter-personal skills and expertise at developing relationships, have travelled widely and have an understanding of different cultures.
Other professionals had also abandoned their jobs to join the spy service, said John, including lawyers and doctors, but the most noticeable trend was among bankers. (Possibly because so many of them have lost their jobs.)
'John' was so desperate for recruits that he even said that "previously radicalised individuals" would not automatically be disqualified from the service. "If they can convincingly show over a period of time they had renounced their previous views, then I would be prepared to consider them," he said.
Most important was that recruits have a minimum 2.2 university degree. The service is particularly keen to attract more women and members of ethnic minorities, especially if they have any of the following languages: Farsi, Dari, Mandarin, Arabic, Pashto, Urdu, Korean and Russian.
Just in case the last one strikes a chord, John was at pains to stress that would-be James Bonds should not get over-excited by this recruitment drive. "There are no Aston Martins in the garage," he said.
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