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what’s eating them and then convey that back. But our methods of spying nowadays are so ludicrous. Everything is really known technologically so that I should suppose that it won’t be long now before, if you want to know what’s going on in the Kremlin you could throw a switch somewhere in Pomona and listen to it. Which would be a great relief. A few jobs would be lost but in fact it would be a great relief because nothing very much is going on in the Kremlin that isn’t going on just in this room. It’s an attempt to bolster an idiocy, to blow it up as something important when it really isn’t important at all. Nevertheless, one does have some exciting times. We had once an illustration which struck me as useful. There is one absolutely cardinal thing that the British are supreme masters of, and that is to say nothing and look idiotic. I’m not joking. Several times, just by not saying anything and not doing anything, people don’t believe it’s true. They come to you panicky with some bit of information such as the German’s are 10 kilometers away, and you say, “Are they?” And it’s clear that you wouldn’t be in that complacent state if they were. So by not doing anything sometimes you can get away with murder. There is one particular example: in one of the most brilliant Italian feats during the war, three men in a baby submarine—commandos—came in and stuck plastic on the bottom of the biggest battleship we had at the moment in Alexandria harbour, the flagship of the Mediterranean fleet. In the middle of the night there was a dull explosion and the thing went down about 2 or 3 feet, but it stayed at anchor. As press attaché, they rang me up and said, “Do you know what’s happened? We’ve caught these men but they’ve blown the whole bottom out of this ship.” And of course these ships were surveyed all the time by the Germans by air making their calculations about the strength of the Mediterranean fleet in case of a fight at Oran or whatever. So it was really rather critical. They suggested that, “The best thing was to pretend that nothing has happened, old boy.” It seemed to me quite a big pretend, but I said, “Okay, yes. We don’t do anything.” He said, “Absolutely nothing. Don’t mention it.” But though the explosion was very badly muffled the whole town felt it. It was like an earthquake. But it was muffled by the water and it was so deep down below, that, though the ship had subsided slightly and was absolutely out of action, it hadn’t moved. So we just went around with what, in technical terms in my profession, is known as an operation poe-face—a chamberpot expression—for about five days. Strangely enough the event wasn’t picked up by the press, nor by anybody, and that ship lay there for nearly five months before the enemy realised that it had the bottom blown completely out of if. A very useful thing, silence.
    Also I had another ship experience that didn’t endear the navy to me at all. I had one of those old rolltop desks, you know that kind you get in cheap offices everywhere downtown, and my secretary had got Jane’s Fighting Ships and we got the entire Mediterranean fleet. We were trying to influence the French to give us a battleship and they wouldn’t. We locked up all the machinery on their warships so they actually couldn’t shoot at us, but they wouldn’t go ashore and they wouldn’t do anything. We didn’t want to offend the Free French, you know, and so we were trying to get the French Admiral to come out on our side—trying to coerce a little bit. Then they said to me, “Can’t you do some articles about the glories of the French fleet, and so on.” So I had some articles like that and I put them in the rolltop desk. The next morning when I opened the desk to launch these articles they had disappeared. I said,