The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5

by Christopher Andrew

Sir Roger Casement made us a speech [at Limburg POW camp] asking us to join an Irish Brigade, that this was ‘our chance of striking a blow for our country’. He was booed out of the camp …

though one censor reported a worrying trend among Indian soldiers to write poetry, which he considered ‘an ominous sign of mental disquietude’.

‘One and a half million Frenchmen cannot fail.’

The most successful German subversion operation of the war was to transport Lenin back to Petrograd (‘like a plague bacillus’, said Churchill) in a ‘sealed’ train from exile in Switzerland in the spring of 1917.

The detailed regulations, covering such issues as smoking and the use of lavatories, which Lenin imposed upon his fellow travellers, gave an early indication of the authoritarian one-party state which he was later to create in Russia.94

Kell was driven more sedately to work each morning by his chauffeur Maclean in a car which, for reasons his staff found difficult to fathom, flew a small pennant with the picture of a tortoise (not an image likely to have appealed to Sinclair).