The leak arrived by accident. A routine government email, meant for a limited audience, carried a spreadsheet of more than twelve hundred names across the British civil service. But among those names sat over seventy officers from the country’s most secretive special operations units. The document mentioned members of the SAS, the SBS, the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, and the Special Forces Support Group.
It also named personnel from a unit so closely guarded that its existence had never been officially acknowledged. That unit is known as E Squadron, or by those inside it, the Increment. For decades, E Squadron operated in the shadows even by the standards of British special forces. Its members were drawn from the ranks of the SAS and SBS, and they worked directly for MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service.
According to former officers, the unit existed to handle tasks that normal intelligence officers could not. Surveillance, extraction of agents, bodyguarding, sabotage, and the preparation of ground for covert operations. Members moved through foreign countries under false identities, often with forged backstories, and carried out the kind of work that intelligence agencies publicly deny. One former MI6 officer, a New Zealander named Richard Tomlinson, wrote about his experiences in the late 1990s.
In his book, he described a unit within MI6 that operated like something out of a spy novel, and he claimed that those working for the service possessed what was commonly called a license to kill. That claim was later confirmed by the head of the secret service during a public hearing. Tomlinson detailed how SAS and SBS personnel became eligible for the Increment. They had to have served for at least five years and reached the rank of sergeant.
They were vetted by MI6 and given a short induction course on the function of the service. If they lacked surveillance training, they took a three-week course. Their military skills were refined, with instruction in improvised explosives, sabotage, advanced VIP protection, guerrilla warfare organization, and high-altitude parachuting from commercial aircraft or covert landings from submarines. Several members even held commercial ship captain’s licenses under their alias names, allowing them to legally hire boats for operations.
Recruitment was deliberately broad. E Squadron reportedly drew members from countries such as Fiji, Malta, and Jamaica, as well as British citizens of Indian, Yemeni, and Nigerian descent. Women were recruited into the unit as well. One source told the British tabloid The Sun that women were often the best at this kind of work, because a group of men turning up always looks suspicious.
The source added that while there had never been a female James Bond in the films, there were already plenty in real life. Matthew Dunn, a former MI6 officer who served in the Increment and later became an author, pushed back against the idea that MI6 was an exclusive club. He said the officer had to be able to interact with any kind of person, and that men who had only lived in gentleman’s club environments simply would not work. Dunn trained in close-quarters and unarmed combat, and he admitted there was an element of James Bond in the job.
But he also noted there were no gadgets like watches that could burn holes through walls, even if an officer might carry a letter containing explosives capable of blowing off a door. Dunn described his first mission as part of a unit targeting rogue states. Officers were eased into the work, beginning with non-lethal operations while shadowing more experienced colleagues before taking on riskier tasks. Eventually, he became an agent runner, responsible for about twenty agents, many of whom would have been tortured and killed if exposed.
He recalled the loneliness of the work as one of the hardest parts. Once you stepped on the plane, you were on your own, dealing with complex individuals with their own agendas, constantly wondering if it was a setup. He also spoke of the bond between an officer and his agents, describing them as family in a way that popular fiction often ignored. During his time with MI6, Dunn conducted around seventy missions, all of which he said were successful.
He was awarded a personal commendation after completing a mission that reportedly ended an international incident, an honor that was extremely rare within the service. The ability to blend in mattered as much as combat skill. While many recruited members could pass as foreign nationals and spoke multiple languages, Dunn was not one of them. He admitted that it was best not to bluff about being a different nationality, because a person could sustain an accent for only about an hour before it fell apart.
He traveled under twelve separate aliases, often alone, and later described the isolation as the real thing. Colin Armstrong, a member of the SAS unit Bravo 20 deployed to Iraq during the Gulf War, spoke about the level of skill required by E Squadron members. He said it was amazing even by SAS standards. Armstrong and his men had been left stranded in the desert after communications equipment failed, an incident that gained public attention years later.
Speaking about the Increment, he said its members underwent incredibly stringent security checks because they were entrusted with the most sensitive operations in the military. To be in the Increment, he said, was to be the best of the best. E Squadron’s operations were rarely documented, but a few became known. According to reports, its troops were among the first British soldiers to deploy to Afghanistan, long before the 2001 US invasion.
They accompanied an MI6 officer who was seeking to make contact with anti-Taliban tribesmen. In 2011, the unit was involved in the overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Along with other MI6 officers, E Squadron members were sent to Libya, but the contacts they planned to meet double-crossed them. Although heavily armed, the Squadron members declined to open fire because MI6 wanted to recruit the revolutionaries, and they feared that shooting would alienate them.
Instead, the unit allowed itself to be apprehended. They were imprisoned in the city of Benghazi until the British ambassador intervened and secured their release. Steven Mitchell, also known by the pseudonym Andy McNab, was another former member of the unit. He had commanded Bravo 20 in Iraq and was the first to publish a book about that ordeal.
Mitchell spent three years in E Squadron during the 1990s, when it was known as the SAS’s Revolutionary Warfare Wing. He described a mad variety of operations, whatever the intelligence service needed. Sometimes he was armed, sometimes not, because a weapon could not be carried into the place he was going. In those cases, weapons were picked up on arrival.
Sometimes he worked with the spies, and sometimes he preempted them. Mitchell said he was chosen in part because of his history of undercover operations, several of which had taken place in Northern Ireland. By 2021, however, the secrecy that had protected E Squadron for decades was compromised. The accidental government email exposed the names of more than seventy special operations officers, including members of E Squadron.
It was the first written proof that the unit existed. The blunder likely forced officers out of undercover work and sidelined them from future operations, although the full consequences remained unknown because of the unit’s secrecy. Even those who left MI6 voluntarily and in good standing found it difficult to return to ordinary life. Matthew Dunn left the service in 2001 to focus on raising a family.
In an interview a decade later, he said it had taken him about ten years to adjust to leaving. It was not like a soldier coming back from the front, because the secrecy and the awareness were still all around you, but you were no longer part of it. He still caught himself checking the entrances and exits of restaurants, and noticing the spacing of tables.
Not through paranoia, he said, but because that was simply what the job had taught him.