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as ordering Mackenzie to pay £100 towards the costs of the prosecution. For The Times, the lesson from the case was that the Official Secrets Act did not exist only to restrain ‘sinister machinations’ such as ‘espionage and other felonies’, but its scope was ‘much wider’. Lending weight to Mackenzie’s supposition that the prosecution might have been aimed against political memoirs as much as secret service ones, the newspaper reckoned that it might have ‘something of a message for the authors, and in particular the autobiographers, of our own time’. It had an effect on Mackenzie. In his final volume of wartime memoirs, published eight years later, he ‘suppressed a certain amount of interesting material about espionage because, although the publication of it twenty-two years later could do no harm to anybody or anything’, he could not ‘be bothered with any more arguments about Intelligence work’.60

In the meantime Mackenzie got his revenge with a novel, Water on the Brain (‘a deliberate caricature of Intelligence’), which savagely satirised the whole world of secret service. N, the chief of M.Q.99(E), the Directorate of Extraordinary Intelligence, warns his new recruit, Arthur Blenkinsop, that their work did not ‘consist entirely of meeting mysterious Polish countesses in old castles’. The ‘greater part of the work’ was ‘routine stuff. Card-indexing, filing, making out lists, putting agents’ reports into proper English’. The headquarters of the organisation is a detached house, Pomona Lodge, in north London which, abandoned by the service after a security lapse, was to become a home ‘for the servants of bureaucracy who have been driven mad in the service of their country’. At the time of Mackenzie’s novel, however, it was ‘not yet officially a lunatic asylum’. Here N, using ‘that green ink which is reserved for the correspondence of high officials in the Secret Service’, kept a strict eye on security. The archives, for example, had been protected by a band of ‘muscular deaf-mutes’, who had had to be dismissed ‘after the man-handling of a high official in the Home Office who had not taken the precaution to arrange beforehand with N that he was going to call and who in consequence had been suspected of being a foreign agent by these worthy fellows’.61

Another hazard for the Service lay in the overseas publication of espionage memoirs. In 1934 the reputable New York firm of G. P. Putnam’s Sons published All’s Fair: The Story of the British Secret Service behind the German Lines, by Henry Landau, who had been part of Cumming’s organisation in the Netherlands and, among other things, had helped run the Dame Blanche network. The book sold extremely well, going into seven impressions by the end of the year. ‘One of my chief objects’ in writing it, claimed Landau, was ‘to place on record the splendid services which the Secret Service agents of Belgian and French nationality rendered the Allied cause during the War’. Recognising the problem of naming agents, he asserted that he had ‘only mentioned such names as were known to the Germans through the arrests they made; others I have either changed, or not mentioned at all’. He had done this ‘in order to protect former agents in the event of another invasion of Belgium and France during their lifetime’ and maintained that he was ‘the best judge of what information would compromise them’. Since he had ‘protected their lives during the War’, he was, ‘therefore, competent now to know what can be divulged’.62 SIS was not so sure. One reader at the Rotterdam station considered that, with only one exception, ‘its perusal by interested German authorities’ could have ‘no repercussion on the activities of this post’. But that exception was a Dutch agent whose ‘connections with this post’ had ‘for the last ten years’ been ‘forgotten’, and it was ‘regrettable that Landau should have chosen him by name for mention in his book’. An officer in London also worried that the important agent TR/16 (whom Landau called ‘the Dane’) might be identifiable. When consulted in August 1934, however, TR/16 felt