For the first time in its 97-year history, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) is blowing its cover and trawling openly for recruits.

The inaugural advertisement appears in The Times today, accompanied by illustrations of exotic locations ranging from the tropical to the nomadic, from Middle Eastern to African. A golden mosque features prominently in the row of photographs to remind would-be recruits that these days, many key operational posts are in Islamic countries.

The advertisement, in The Economist as well as The Times, is seen as a significant step for a service that has never been keen on raising its head above the parapet, let alone contemplating creating for itself a corporate image along the lines of other more public organisations.

However, one intelligence source said that there was no intention to turn MI6 into a brand name “with appropriate T-shirts and caps”. The service will continue to have no official logo and no motto. John Scarlett, the chief of the SIS, will still be known as “C”, not CEO.

The agency is searching for administrators, analysts, linguists and information technology experts, as well as “operational officers”, the men and women posted as “diplomats” in British embassies around the world whose function is to gather secret intelligence.

Until the early 1990s, the old “tap on the shoulder” method of recruitment for a promising undergraduate was fine. But now that the agency employs about 2,000 staff and is expanding to meet the rising challenge posed by international terrorism, nuclear proliferation and drugs trafficking, it needs to recruit from a wider pool of talent.

In October MI6 set up its own website, which included a section on recruiting, but today’s advertisement in The Times careers section is intended to be the first of a more general campaign to persuade new graduates and people in other jobs considering a career switch to try their luck in the secret world.

Interest in the agency may well have been raised during the “rock in Moscow” incident in January. An MI6 officer was photographed by Russian counter-espionage personnel downloading information from a fake rock that was acting as an electronic dead-letter box containing secret information left by an agent. The Russians made a huge fuss, but the MI6 officer was not expelled.

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