So you want intelligence? Difficult work is the answer. And lots of busy people whose governments pretend they do not exist.

For governments, intelligence is any information from which helpful conclusions might be drawn. Politicians may deny it, but each and every government has an organization that gathers info; shadowy snoopers known as the intelligence forces, or the secret support. High-grade intelligence is essential and reliable; the low-grade variety is trivial and untrustworthy. Much of it deals with the military, political and industrial activities of rival nations. But governments spy on their personal citizens, too; in specific, on members of opposition parties and political pressure groups.

Spies came into-their-own between 1945 and 1989 – the Cold War period. Governments from the Communist East and the Capitalist West had been highly suspicious of each other, and plans had been laid on both sides of the Berlin Wall. Operation Gold was a spying highlight from the 1950s; Britain’s Military Intelligence, Department Six (MI6) dug beneath the Wall to tap into the USSR’s telephone lines, and also the Soviets were told about the 500m tunnel by double-dealing MI6 agent George Blake. MI6 is now officially recognized as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).

The Wall fell in 1989, with Europe’s Communist governments – suddenly there were more spies than things to spy on! Secret agents have been looking for a new role ever since. They claim that the political situation is now much more unstable than ever, and that they should spy on the nations of Eastern Europe and also the Middle East, to ensure that they do not develop nuclear weapons. Britain’s MI5 – the Security Service – has been allotted many police duties in investigating terrorism. And Russia has sent its former political spies to function in the West, to gather commercial intelligence on pc technology.