Rocus Pocus
The two service attaches who have just been recalled, at the request of the Foreign Office, from the Soviet Embassy in London seem to have employed exactly the same ham-fisted and ineffective methods of espionage 'which led, two or three years ago, to the recall of a Russian diplomat called Kuznetsov. And Petrov's activities in Australia seem, so far, to have been only less amateurish than the directives he received from the centre in Moscow of the MVD's elaborate but rather dowdy spider's web. The mechanics of ' building up a spy- ring ' always sound vaguely impressive—the contacts, the code-names, the rendezvous, the dossiers, the ciphers and the microfilm; but you don't, in hard fact, make a second- or third-rate human being more reliable or more effective by referring to him, when communicating with your superiors, as ' Gregor' or ' Johnnie ' or ' No. 42,' and you don't auto- matically improve the accuracy or the value of the information he gives you by using a hole in a railway-bridge as an in-tray.. You do, of course, enhance the prestige of your ultimate superior, whose wall-maps become encrusted with ,little coloured pins and whose staff has to be increased in order adequately to card-index Gregor and Johnnie and their widen- ing circle of friends. But very often, I suspect, that is about all you do achieve. •
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