The feeling is that the speed with which the government reacted after discovering the site on Wednesday indicates the accuracy of the list, although officials claim it is at least partly fictitious.

The government maintains the information in the website is not ``widely disclosed'', and ``officials here hope they will have this website removed as speedily as possible.'' But it is more than likely that its content will already have been indexed and stored or appeared on other websites.

The BBC has confirmed that other sites already exist. While the government was naming no names, suspicion has fallen on RichardTomlinson, the ``rogue'' MI6 agent, who has been hounded around the globe by the British authorities and is currently in Switzerland. Tomlinson, has twice threatened to publish such a list, but told the BBC via e-mail message that his list included names that have already appeared in affidavits in cases against MI6 and during the Princess Diana inquiry.

Thirty five-year-old Tomlinson, is a first class Cambridge graduate, with a degree in aeronautical engineering. He worked as an MI6 spy for four years, trawling such sensitive areas as Moscow, Bosnia and the Middle East. He was fired in 1995 and refused the right to go to an industrial tribunal. While at MI6, Tomlinson is supposed to have embarrassed bosses by raising concerns about Serbian donations to the British Conservative Party.

After being thrown out, Tomlinson told MI6 that he intended to write a book about his time in the service; MI6 claims to have paid him money to buy his silence. In 1997 Tomlinson was arrested on charges of breaking theofficial secrets act for showing a seven-page book synopsis on his career to a publisher in Australia. He was jailed for six months and has been on the run since his release.

John Wadham, director of human rights organisation, Liberty, and Tomlinson's lawyer, said on Wednesday: ``He was sacked by MI6, he thinks unfairly. He has had injunctions against him in every country he has visited, been ejected from Australia, the US and France, and has not been able to obtain a visa to settle anywhere to build a new life.'' The last straw apparently was his inability to obtain a visa for New Zealand where he was born.

Investigative journalist Duncan Campbell, who he has been in touch with Tomlinson through e-mail said: ``By making an international pariah of him they perhaps have driven him to the wall.'' Tomlinson has, in the last two years, published bits of information on his website saying this is to push the secret services to become more accountable. Among his revelations was the name of the British spy at theGerman Bundesbank and detailed MI6 plans to assassinate Slobodan Milosevic.

Tomlinson also told the magistrate probing Diana's death that the French chauffeur, Henri Paul, who died with her, was an MI6 employee. The government's response has been likened to shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Its helplessness when faced with information spread through the internet is obvious. Twice in the last fortnight the British Government obtained injunctions preventing Richard Tomlinson from disclosing information on the internet or by any other means. Two web-sites he created, first based in Geneva and then in California, were shut down. But, Duncan Campbell said that other internet users in the US were already offering to display Tomlinson's information on their own websites, in a bid to stifle what they saw as censorship.