"...got a list of contemporary agents (several of them holding jobs in places like military intelligence), and returned to his apartment."
-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 1-53 AT 2, pp. 16-17.
Even if they are low-ranking intelligence officers, they know more than their superiors and will not divulge most of what they know because their loyalty is to another civilization a million years in the future. If CIA, MI6, KGB and GRU agents are in the Patrol, then will at most go through the motions of working against each other.
Stieg Larsson's characters include a Swedish intelligence officer who meets Angleton and drinks whisky in a discrete London club with the head of MI6 whom we know in another series as M. Notionally, many such series connect behind the scenes. How many Patrol agents are in Swedish Internal Security?
4 comments:
Not many -- the Patrol is stretched thin.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
To say nothing of how Patrol agents in the KGB/GRU would have to be esp. on their guard, due to the institutionalized terror/paranoia of both these agencies and life in general in the USSR.
Ad astra! Sean
"got a list of contemporary agents (several of them holding jobs in places like military intelligence)"
Suppose that list fell into the hands of someone who was not in the time patrol, but was in a military intelligence agency. How much trouble could that create for Manse or other time patrol agents?
Kaor, Jim!
I dunno, but I think the Patrol would be aware of such dangers and take steps to minimize the costs to it of such information falling into the wrong hands. Forged evidence could be fed to non-Patrol agencies "proving" such lists were false.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment