Strange Intelligence: Memoirs of Naval Secret Service
Page 25
A complete record of ID work and achievements during the war period would run into many volumes, and form a story more thrilling, we believe, than any of the histories on other aspects of the great struggle that have yet appeared. But it is a record that will never be printed, because no state, however liberal-minded, can afford to reveal the whole of its arcana. Nor would it be in the public interest to disclose the whole truth about our secret service operations even during the very period when they were most completely justified. Since perpetual peace is not yet assured, a time may come when the safety of the realm may once more necessitate an inquisition into the designs of its enemies, actual and potential, and the mechanism of intelligence that functioned so admirably in the past may have to be set in motion again. That is one reason why it would be improper to divulge ID methods in greater detail, and for the same reason we have preferred to write this narrative in outline, leaving the informed few to dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s for their own satisfaction.
But we have said enough to convey a sufficiently clear and comprehensive idea of what the naval secret service accomplished, and enough, we hope and believe, to vindicate the memory of those who served England valiantly, though in silence and an obscurity from which they themselves prefer not to emerge. They were the men who, at the call of duty, went forth on perilous emprise to ‘search, seek, find out’; who toiled unceasingly to discover and circumvent the plots that were laid for the undoing of their country. Their task is done, and their most fervent wish is that it may never have to be resumed, either in their own lifetime or in that of any succeeding generation.
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 1931 by Constable & Co. Ltd.
This edition published in Great Britain in 2015 by
Biteback Publishing Ltd
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Copyright © Hector C. Bywater, H. C. Ferraby 1931, 2015
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ISBN 978–1–84954–938–7
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