The group’s “political aims” included, “if necessary, to remove this Prime Minister and replace with one fit for purpose”, and “in due course, to cleanse the polluted civil service from top to bottom”.Įach page of Prins’s plan, which was among the thousands of leaked emails and documents, was watermarked “top secret” in red capital letters, as if classified as a genuine government plan. The declared goal of Operation Surprise was to create a “Continuity Leave vehicle” to “block any deal” negotiated by then Prime Minister Theresa May. In August 2018, after leaving Cambridge, Dearlove joined with retired history academic Professor Gwythian Prins to launch a covert operation called Operation Surprise. Soon after the Iraq war, Dearlove left SIS to become master of Pembroke College Cambridge.

Dearlove was chief of the UK Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) from 1999 to 2004, holding the post immortalised in James Bond films and fiction as “M” – although in real life the role is known as “C”. The group’s greatest success to date has been to publicly compromise emails and documents from Richard Dearlove, a top British spy chief and former head of MI6, as well as over 60 others in a secretive network of right-wing activists set up in 1988 to campaign for extreme separation of Britain from the European Union. A Russian cyber attack group has been targeting politicians, journalists, and military and intelligence officials across Britain and Europe for at least seven years, and may have stockpiled access to and data from target computers and phones for future operations, according to data analysed by Computer Weekly.

Proton email hack