Think of spies and you might picture a suave James Bond-like gentleman
working for a rich and mysterious organisation with all the characteristics
of a traditional British public school. In fact, it is only very
recently that official intelligence organisations were founded and
spying was established as a profession. Britain’s permanent
secret service was founded in the twentieth century. It was then
that spying started to lose its stigma as a dishonest and disreputable
way of making a living and started to become seen as a legitimate
way of collecting military intelligence. However, even before spying became a professional business, spies
played an important part in British history. There is no better
place to find out about these shadowy figures than in the files
of the National Archives. Here are the stories of three spies and the nature of espionage
in their time. There is the Elizabethan spy, whose loyalties and
responsibilities were sometimes ambiguous; there is the nineteenth
century spy, who would have denied being a spy at all; and the Second
World War spy, who operated in a complex network of agencies and
alliances.
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