MI6 set up a surrogate news agency in central London as a front for recruiting Russians to spy for Britain, the rogue British intelligence officer, Mr Richard Tomlinson, alleges in a book which the service has been trying to ban.
In what he describes as a botched and short-lived operation in 1992, the former MI6 officer claims the service wasted almost £40,000 on a futile effort to obtain Russian military secrets.
The three-month operation of the Truefax news agency resulted in not a single military secret being obtained and it was closed down, according to extracts from Mr Tomlinson's book, The Big Breach, published in Russia yesterday.
A Russian military analyst Mr Tomlinson said he tried to recruit as an MI6 spy confirmed the existence of Truefax yesterday, disclosing that he had done some work for the phoney news agency.
Mr Tomlinson says that Truefax was established in Conduit Street in central London by him and a KGB defector in 1992 with a view to cultivating Russian journalists, obtaining military secrets and recruiting Russian agents.
"This venture did not get us a single secret document and cost $60,000," he writes, as translated from the Russian.
After failing to publish The Big Breach on Monday as promised, Mr Tomlinson's Moscow publisher, Mr Sergei Korovin, yesterday said the book, the subject of a High Court injunction obtained by MI6 against the Sunday Times last Friday, would definitely be launched this week, perhaps today.
Mr Korovin and Narodny Variant, the publishing company set up solely for the Tomlinson book project, have been leaking snippets to Komsomolskaya Pravda, the best-selling Moscow tabloid, and to the Internet, thus releasing more of its contents into the public domain and increasing the pressure on MI6 and the courts to allow the book to be issued in Britain.
Pavel Felgenhauer, a prominent Moscow journalist and military analyst, confirmed the existence of Truefax yesterday but cast doubt on Mr Tomlinson's version of events as it applied to him. He told the Guardian he was commissioned to write an article on Russian biological warfare strategy in 1992.
He said: "Truefax contacted me and I wrote one article about biological warfare. I still have it in my computer. They paid me £400. They didn't pay me $12,000. Maybe they stole it . . . I wrote my piece and then they disappeared . . ."