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headquarters of the British Secret Police. However, they do and we are beginning to receive a stream of visitors, all of them offering their services as informers. No question ever arises of payment. Our visitors are prepared to work for us out of pure and unalloyed devotion to the Allied cause. In the main they are drawn from the professional classes, and hand over beautifully engraved cards describing them as Avvocato, Dottore, Ingeniere or Professore . They are all most dignified, some impressive, and they talk in low, conspiratorial voices. We received a visit, too, from a priest with a pocketful of denunciations who asked for a permit to be allowed to carry a pistol. These are the often shabby and warped personalities on which we depend. Once they were called by their real names, now they are officially ‘informants’, and already there is aeuphemistic tendency to turn them into ‘contacts’. They are a special breed, the life’s blood of Intelligence, and the world over they have an extraordinary thing in common: a strange and exclusive loyalty to one particular master. An informer is like a duckling newly freed from its shell and in need of fostering. He can be counted upon to attach himself permanently to the first person who is prepared to listen sympathetically to what he has to say, and prefers never to transfer his allegiance. In these first few days we all made half a dozen or so ‘contacts’.
    All names are checked as a matter of course with our rapidly expanding files, and we find to our amusement that several of these men who have come forward to assist us in every way they can, have been accused by their fellow citizens of being arch-collaborators. We have collected copies from the offices of the German Consulate of many servile and congratulatory letters written by Neapolitan worthies to Adolf Hitler himself. An outstanding example of these was from a Counsellor at the Naples Court of Appeal who had just called to offer his services. This assured the Führer of ‘my great admiration and sympathy for the soldiers of your country’, and concluded, ‘ Con profonde devota osservanza ’.
    What is remarkable to us is the German bureaucratic rectitude with which all these communications, many of them highly nonsensical, have been conscientiously acknowledged, translated, and actually forwarded to the Chancery of the Nazi Party in Berlin, and fulsomely replied to by that office – the reply being returned via the German Embassy in Rome. One’s imagination reels at the thought of the paperwork involved in dealing with thousands of such epistles from the toadies of occupied Europe.
    Complaints are coming in about looting by Allied troops. The officers in this war have shown themselves to be much abler at this kind of thing than the other ranks. The charge has been made that officers of the King’s Dragoon Guards, to whom fell the honour of being the first British unit to enter Naples, have cut the paintings from the frames in the Princess’s Palace, and made off with the collection of Capodimonte china. The OSS have cleaned out Achille Lauro’s sumptuous house. Some of the bulkier items of booty are stated to have been crated up for return to England with the connivance of the Navy.

October 13
    A week in which our activities have been hampered, and even frustrated, by false alarms and scares of every conceivable kind. Anyone whose activities depart in any way from the standards of normality set by the city is regarded as a spy, and we have been involved in endless wild-goose chases. None of these forays out into the night produced results. The suspected spies were always harmless eccentrics. The mysterious stranger in the next flat tinkering with a powerful radio was not an enemy agent operating a transmitter, but a man trying to get the BBC. In houses said to contain caches of arms we found nothing more lethal than unemptied babies’ chamberpots;