MI6 sets Christmas card brainteaser: could you solve it?

The British Secret Intelligence Service is getting into the Christmas spirit by sending out greeting cards designed to test the recipient’s code-breaking skills.

At first glance, the card looks like any other festive greeting, featuring “classic Christmas designs - a robin, a bauble, a Christmas pudding - and even a martini glass, possibly a reference to the Service’s most famous (fictional) member, James Bond”, says the Daily Mail.

But inside the card, rather than a greeting or signature, there is just a drawing of a magnifying glass.

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And a second look at the picture on the front reveals that fingerprint-like whorls in each design contain written clues that can only be seen under a strong magnifying glass. Follow these and the recipient should be able to crack the mystery of the sender’s identity.

The Christmas cracker clue reads: “Try the robin, just a cracker, no joke.”

However, the writing on the robin’s breast simply states: “Unfortunately I’m not the message. Try looking at the plum pudding.”

The Christmas pudding directs readers to the reindeer, and then on to the olive of a martini - presumably shaken, not stirred. That too is a trick, though, reading: “I’m a red herring. Try something else.”

But the bauble directs readers to the back of the card, where a message - written in the characteristic green ink of the MI6 Chief, “C”, reads: “You’ve found the secret message. Well done. Wherever you are in the world, have a wonderful Christmas and a prosperous New Year. From your friends in the Secret Intelligence Service.”

The Telegraph says that if the card pops up on “the mantelpiece at a relative’s home this year, have no doubt they either have friends in the highest echelons of Britain’s secret service or are themselves a spy”.

The question of why an organisation tasked with being secret would send out a Christmas card to its associates remains unanswered, however.

The release of the card may be a PR stunt aimed at winning some Christmas goodwill for MI6, after the spy agency was criticised earlier this year for a lack of ministerial oversight of sensitive and potentially unlawful foreign missions, suggests the Financial Times.