MI6 boss thanks Russian TV for airing his spy recruitment advert | UK News

The chief of Britain’s intelligence agency MI6 has thanked Russian state TV for its ‘help’ in encouraging Russians to spy for the UK.

In July, Richard Moore, 60, delivered a speech from the British Embassy in Prague describing how he didn’t exactly blame Yevgeny Prigozhin for staging a mutiny.

Amid Moscow’s war against Ukraine, regular Russians have witnessed the ‘venality, infighting and sheer callous incompetence of their leaders’, Moore said.

‘I invite them to do what others have already done this past 18 months and join hands with us. Our door is always open.’

The speech had rarely, if at all, been broadcast by Russian state-controlled media, a move experts suggested that the Kremlin had ordered news chiefs not to do so.

That is until the nation’s second-watched news network did in late September.

Writing on X on Monday, Moore said: ‘We were puzzling over how to get my message to our target audience in Russia – we never thought Russian state TV would step in to help.

‘Thanks, folks.’

Channel One broadcast an hour-long report about the Secret Intelligence Service chief as part of a programme highlighting the nation’s ‘enemies’ which are depicted as puppets on a string.

The episode outline says: ‘Why does Richard Moore hate Russia, where he spent part of his childhood? And which world leader dances to the tune of MI6?’

But during the show, which saw a panel scrutinise everything from Moore’s education to his body language, the clip from the chief was aired as the show criticised Moore for ‘trying to recruit Russians into the ranks of MI6’.

In the speech, Moore said that the secrets Russia tells intelligence officials ‘will always be safe with us, and together we will work to bring the bloodshed to an end’.

‘My service lives by the principle that our loyalty to our agents is lifelong – and our gratitude eternal.’

Rolling her eyes at the suggestion Russians would spy for the UK, anchor Maria Butina accused Moore of employing ‘cheap recruiting methods’ as she and the panel bashed Moore.

Butina, 35, asked whether Moore would seriously ask Russians ‘to buy into this shameless provocation?’

But Butina herself is a former spy – though she’s long denied it.

She was convicted in 2018 of serving as an unregistered foreign agent sneaking into influential conservative political circles such as the NRA before and after the US presidential election two years before.

Butina was sentenced to 18 months behind bars and now represents the Kirov region in the Duma, Russia’s lower house of Parliament.

Writing on Telegram yesterday, Butina said she was ‘surprised’ Moore took an interest in her show after spending nearly an hour talking about him.

But she questioned why Moore thinks they unintentionally helped with MI6’s Russian recruitment drive and accused the agency of not being able to translate English to Russian.

‘How sad it is in their media they can’t handle the translation themselves, and they need Channel One for this!’ she wrote.

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