Double agents
In the early days of the second world war the various intelligence services were always arresting each other. I was told the following story by the late Sir Desmond Moreton, who had been chief executive of our Secret Service at the time of the Arcos raid, and who designed the Ministry of Economic Warfare four years before the war began, and who was then Special Assistant to Winston Churchill.
Our British military intelligence in the Irish Republic had come to the conclusion that the head of German espionage in southern Ireland was not, as in fact he was, Thomsen, the Counsellor at the German Embassy — who now, I believe, runs an excellent cake shop in Dublin — but a highly suspicious character who lived out at Bray. They therefore watched him carefully and one night when he was walking home from the tram terminal, some gentlemen jumped out of the darkness, hit him over the head with rubber truncheons, put a sack over his head, bundled him into a rubber dinghy and rowed him out to one of HM submarines. When they arrived at Holyhead there emerged from the locker room into which he had been thrust the bloody and bloody-minded features of the chief of British naval intelligence in southern Ireland.
The moral for anyone who wants to start a secret service is that you cannot improvise it. It gives infinite scope, as in the case of the CIA, for empire building, but for it to be effective you must be prepared to run the risk of individual departments acting on their own initiative, and the 'James Bonds' of this world are immensely difficult to control. The reason is obvious. A secret service must be secret.
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