What MI5 Actually Does, and What Spy Fiction Gets Wrong
MI5 can't arrest anyone, employs more than 5,000 people and names only one of them. What the Security Service does, and why Sarah Sterling is an MI5 officer.
Read the note →Writing from inside the experience: twenty years in the UK military, fourteen in UK Special Forces, then close protection, intelligence and security work. These notes cover espionage fiction, operational tradecraft, and the research behind The Key Series.
MI5 can't arrest anyone, employs more than 5,000 people and names only one of them. What the Security Service does, and why Sarah Sterling is an MI5 officer.
Read the note →A stolen simulation drive isn't a weapon. It's the map of every vulnerability someone already found, and that's what makes the threat in The Lost Key real.
Read the note →Most security budgets point outward. The bigger risk is usually already inside, holding a key you handed over yourself.
Read the note →A few people have asked since The Ghost Key came out: is that it? Is the trilogy finished? No, and here's what happens next.
Read the note →Belfast taught me most of what I know about surveillance detection. The same discipline that kept me clean in the field now runs through every route James O'Neill walks in The Lost Key.
Read the note →Most spy thrillers get it wrong. Not dishonestly — the writers are skilled, the research is genuine — but the version of intelligence work that fills most fiction is built from other fiction. Here is what the genre gets right, what it consistently gets wrong, and why it matters to readers.
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