The Wanganui Chronicle. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 1945. THE BRITISH SECRET SERVICE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 89, Issue 225, 22 September 1945, Page 4

The Wanganui Chronicle. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 1945. THE BRITISH SECRET SERVICE

MANY more men than Himmler have been baffled by the efiiiee'iicy of the British Secret Service. The result is that this service has provided fiction writers with a splendid and never stale theme. Nothing is too fantastic to be ascribed to the el'ficency of the Secret Service. Himmler in his book admitted that he was puzzled by this organisation which seems to have eyes everywhere and which never fails to enlist first-class brains. The fact that the Secret Service is secret and not a general understanding to keep quiet about various important matters is its strength. The Secret Service is recruited from, men in various walks of life.

The Secret Serviceman is not engaged in secret servicing. Therein lies its strength. A man who has no obvious contact with a special field would immediately arouse suspicion were he to venture into it without apparent reason. The Secret Service men are' required for particular work, which is not a career in itself. Those who are required to work abroad are tested thoroughly in respect to their knowledge of language to see whether they know not only the grammar, but every piece of slang and colloquialism that may be used by a native. If a man cannot flirt like a native with a girl he is useless for the requirements of the Secret. Service. But he must know more than that about the country in which he is to operate. He is required to carry out some special function and to do that without requiring obvious aid. When Lawrence of Arabia was called upon to work behind the Turkish lines he had two things in his favour; his smallness of stature which permitted him to disguise himself as a woman in a country where women are despised and ignored, and his language was that of the coolie class picked up while he was working in the desert to discover pottery and other archaeological material. It. was his intimate knowledge of crude tribesmen that, was Lawrence’s great strength when the testing time came for him to work as a secret agent.

When working in enemy countries the strain of always being on guard against detection is tremendous and few men can bear it for long. The care which has to be exercised was revealed to a corporal in charge of stores during Allenby’s Palestine campaign, lie was importuned by a Bedouin for camel feed, and eventually, losing his patience, drove the Bedouin away. Shrugging his shoulders the Bedouin wont a little distance and sat down and started marking the ground with a stick. The. corporal, becoming intrigued, went and looked over the Bedouin’s shoulder and saw written in the sand in English the words “Give me Tibbin.” The Bedouin, a secret service man desiring to draw stores before fading into the desert, would not risk speaking English for fear that he would be overhead.