A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
SECRET intelligence organisations are difficult things to run. Behind a thick veil of secrecy inter-departmental feuds and jealousies luxuriate, duties overlap, conflicting policies are pursued and the end-product (which in times of peace is, or ought to be, reliable and up-to-date infor- mation of a type which cannot be extracted from works of reference, the Press and other public sources) is apt not to be worth very much. Neither the MVD nor the less recondite branches of the Russian intelligence seem to be making much sense at the moment. A penchant for gadgets is always a sign f silliness in a clandestine organisation, and it is clear that Captain Khokhlov's superiors were gadget-minded. For one assassination—which he declined to carry out—he was offered an electrically fired fountain pen, and after that there was his famous lethal cigarette-case. Somewhere in Russia— heavily guarded and surrounded by barbed wire and mumbo jumbo—there is a research station which designs these things: a high-level committee which approves or rejects the designs: a factory which makes them. They are unnecessary and foolish devices, and any department advocating their use in reference to more conventional and almost certainly more accurate weapons is unlikely to be run on sensible lines.
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