Every Russki in America arrested for spying

[Paul Rigby]

Professor Christopher Andrew, the official historian of MI5 who has also written about Russian and US security services, told Channel 4 News the Russians are, at root, nostalgic about the "glory days" of espionage.

He said: "During the Cold War they were brilliant at producing disguises. It's simply that there isn't very much evidence that these illegals, who spent years and years training for the job, actually collected anything very worthwhile.

leep:leep:leep:

Wot - did stupefyingly tedious Colonel Mustard-flavoured ordure just emerge from the mouth of MI5's officially authorized historian......

Penis-cutting (aka involuntary genital mutilation) apparently leads to increased levels of job satisfaction, according to Christopher Robin:

Hay 2010: Only Mills & Boon can rival British intelligence, says MI5's official historian

Charlotte Higgins
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 2 June 2010 22.00 BST

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/j...andrew-mi5

The official historian of MI5, Christopher Andrew, who spent several years as a member of the service while he undertook the research for his book The Defence of the Realm, suggested a solution to the banking crisis: moving all the people who work in GCHQ to the banks. His point was that the British intelligence services have never much minded employing people who disagree with the orthodox view, nor, more importantly, genuine eccentrics, rather than the management-speak-tamed clones running the banks. He recalled codebreaker Alan Turing's many oddnesses: wearing his gas mask at his job interview because he believed it would diminish the probability of catching a cold; chaining his coffee mug to his radio ("very sensible, but not something to mark you out as a team player"); converting his life savings into silver ingots, burying them in the grounds of Bletchley Park, but then being unable to find them after the war.

He also claimed that the human resources consultants employed to discover the levels of job satisfaction at the British domestic intelligence service had found that there was "only one organisation they had investigated that had higher morale: the publisher Mills & Boon". Perhaps this is partly down to the fact that the spies stage an annual satirical revue with, he recalled, a sketch including a skit on Pirates of the Caribbean. Well, that's certainly a plotline they've not explored in Spooks. Perhaps just as well: the real version didn't sound especially funny.

Which is why MI5 has long been stuffed-full of far-right army types and public schoolboys - diversity, spook-style.

If there is a bigger tosser currently propagandizing for the penis-cutters, we need to know.