Free Saving the Queen by William F. Buckley

made depending on how your mission goes. Remember, you are whoever you actually are, living a perfectly normal life in London, pursuing whatever it is you are pursuing.”
    Blackford took the note papers, read them over, and returned them to Alistair.
    â€œNow a general word on the British situation. On the whole, the British don’t like American intelligence operations conducted in their country. I say on the whole,’ because since the Klaus Fuchs affair, they have grudgingly admitted that we have certain information they don’t have; or that, in any case, if only on account of the proddings of McCarthy, we’ll act on certain information they can’t, or won’t, act on. But they don’t really want to know about it in any formal way. At the highest level, the P.M. is aware that we’re a presence. But anything we turn up, they want handed to them through diplomatic, not intelligence, channels. This embargo on any official contact between British and American intelligence in England is so rigid that when we need stuff they have that we are sure they’d be willing to give us, we ask for it from Paris or directly from Washington. Never from London.
    â€œNow,” he said, “the situation in England is very grave. Fuchs stole atomic secrets and gave them to the Soviets. That was a considerable public scandal, and they tightened up security at the obvious levels—atomic research plants, that kind of thing. But the Soviets have people everywhere. I mean everywhere . I mean, places you would never dream of. Recruiting by the Commies during the late thirties was very successful. And, during the war, there was the grand alliance. Now, in the Cold War, there is a surviving band of pro-Soviet Englishmen who think the West is on the wrong side of history. We know something about the general sources of Soviet intelligence, a lot about the actual information they’re getting away with, and very little about who the people actually are. Their cover is superb. We are operating now mostly by deduction: Somebody, in this office, is leaking information. Who? Is that somebody a clerk-typist? A branch head? A division head? An Agency head? A spy? Or is he merely careless? We aren’t in a position to check whether the Brits have their own man trying to penetrate an operation, and we’ve even had a grotesque situation in which after fourteen months of diligent work, we fingered the guy we knew was guilty—only to discover he was a deep-cover British agent dogging the same trail. We blew his cover. That one required a long afternoon’s chat between Ache-son and the British ambassador.
    â€œThe Soviets obviously have to be more cautious operating in London than they do in most places. But the purges back home have been flogging them on to tremendous efforts—”
    â€œTremendous efforts to do what?”
    Alistair looked at once disappointed and patient.
    â€œThe Communists always have a lot to do. Right now they want to put pressure on Attlee to put pressure on Truman not to use the bomb in Korea. They wanted MacArthur fired. They want to get in the way of any moves toward European solidarity. They want to heighten English suspicion of French and German intentions. They want knowledge, on a day-by-day basis, of the disposition of NATO forces, with special emphasis on the location of atomic warheads. They want to know what kind of progress the Brits are making on the development of a tactical and a strategic missile. And they want every piece of dirt they can accumulate on anyone, just as a matter of course.
    â€œAs I was saying, they have to watch their step in England, and they do. But when they get desperate, they act all the more ruthlessly. We had two men in the field missing this last year, no explanation, no record, no trace. The two had been on the trail of Klaus Fuchs. Both were deep-cover agents with satisfactory and plausible public identifications. We were