The interviews with two British Asian agents were recorded at MI5's headquarters at Thames House on Millbank.
In the interviews, the agents talk about the challenges that their jobs present to the other parts of their lives.
Jayshree, an agent analyses intelligence from a variety of sources, including overseas, said: "When out with friends or relations I tend to be quite vague about my work -- I don't want the unnecessary attention."
She also said that her parents knew about where she worked, but they were not as interested as she thought they might be.
"To the point that once my father said 'What's there to get excited about? You work for MFI', and I had to remind him that I don't work for a furniture store, I work for the security services."
The male Asian agent Shazad said he felt no conflict in working for MI5 because their roles were not about targeting communities, but rather individuals.
"If you look at the bigger picture, I think you realise this isn't about spying on your own community, or letting your own community down, or any of those things. It is about protecting people like yourself -- others out there from threats, and there can be a number of different kinds of threats."
MI6, which allowed two agents to be interviewed about their work on Colin Murray's Radio 1 show last November, is returning to the station this week.
The agency took the opportunity to dispel the myth that it was like the service as portrayed by James Bond.
"I think it gives people a false impression of what working for the organisation is actually like," the head of MI6 recruitment -- named only as "Mark" -- told BBC Radio One's Newsbeat programme on Monday.
"So it does tend to turn up quite a lot of thrill seekers and fantasists and we're really not interested in them".
Similarly, Jayshree said that life in MI5 bore no comparison with the BBC drama 'Spooks' referencing the now infamous scene in the first series where the character Helen, played by Lisa Faulkner, was gruesomely dispatched via a deep-fat fryer.
"I think, particularly being a female in the service, I'd always be worried that a baddie would want to chuck my head in a deep fat fryer -- so I'm particularly grateful that our work doesn't represent 'Spooks'."
Radio's 1 'Newsbeat' programme will run a number of interviews with different MI6 officers over the week, and started with a female Muslim officer today. The voices of the officers will be distorted to protect their identity.
MI5's aim is to boost its staff numbers from 3,000 to 4,000 by 2011 to cope with its increased workload, and also to raise the proportion of its black and other ethnic minority staff from its current 6.5%.
The agency took the first steps in being more open in its recruitment process by launching a website in 2005 and running ads in The Times and The Economist last year.
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