Bond's last thing: British MI-6 recalls its spies due to hacking Snowden files

According to the British newspaper The Sunday Times , UK intelligence MI-6 withdraws its spies from Russia and China. The reason was that the intelligence officers became aware of the decoding of secret information, which Snowden took with him into exile. Among the decrypted information contains facts that may allow the identification of British spies.

The newspaper refers to unnamed sources close to British Prime Minister David Cameron and the home office. The home office is the British counterpart of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, a department of the UK government responsible for immigration control, security and order.
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According to the same sources, there is no evidence that someone was injured as a result of these events. A source in British intelligence told Reuters that as a result of Snowden's actions, they had to intervene and withdraw their agents more than once so that they would not be calculated and eliminated. Now, information about the hacking of encrypted files prevented the intelligence officers, according to the source, from gaining access to "vital information."

In 2013, Snowden gained access to nearly 2 million secret files owned by the US and UK agencies. He promised not to make public the facts that could threaten the lives of intelligence officers. He claimed that, as an encryption specialist, he was concerned that it was impossible to decrypt these files. But Western intelligence was confident that he received asylum in Russia for a reason.

“With regard to these allegations, I want to say that we never comment on intelligence work, so I cannot say what we did, or did not do to eliminate the consequences of Snowden’s actions,” said British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond. “But there should be no doubt that he caused substantial damage.”

This story surfaced just at the moment when the British Parliament is debating about the need to tighten the use of encryption by ordinary people. David Cameron, before re-election, promised to raise the issue of the need to oblige all manufacturers of devices and programs that support encryption, to leave "black moves" for government agencies.