Chapter 6 Chapter Four

Four days later, I was at Leconfield Hall for an interview with the selection committee.The frost-covered glass compartments around me opened, and a pair of eyes looked at me carefully.Although my face was familiar, I had to wait patiently for the security guards to call Cumming's office to send someone to show me in because I didn't yet have a grounds pass. "Sir, are you here to see the director?" Someone asked me.He pressed the button of the elevator, and the iron door opened with a dull sound.It was an old-fashioned elevator, operated by a joystick in a brass box.The elevator clanked and clanked, and began to go up with a wheezing sound.I counted the floors I passed until I reached the sixth floor.The offices of the senior leaders of MI5 are located here.

We walked a few steps down a corridor and into a large rectangular room.This is the Secretary's secretary's office. It looks like any other office in Whitehall. The secretaries are all pampered and neatly dressed. They greet time with the sound of typewriters all day long. The combination safe reveals the nature of the place.On the other side of the wall of the room, there is a door leading to the director's office.The depth of the outer room was designed to prevent any trespasser from entering.This depth gives the chief enough time to engage the automatic lock before anyone breaks in.At this time, the green light on the door of the director's room was on, and a secretary accompanied me through the outer room and led me into the director's office.

The director's office is bright and pleasant, full of fresh air.The antique walnut furniture and leather-backed chairs in the interior make one think this is in the financial building on Bond Street rather than Whitehall.On one side of the wall hung portraits of the three former bureau chiefs, their eyes full of sternness and sternness.On the other side, at a clean conference table, sat the entire committee.I only know Cumming and Hollis, I don't know anyone else. The Chief, Sir Dick Goldsmith White, bid me to sit down.I have been to Cumming's office many times and met him there.But this is just a one-sided acquaintance.Ironically, he also attended Bishop's Stortford Academy and holds the college record for the mile.Of course that was many years before I entered this academy.He was tall, with a healthy red glow on his lean face and sharp eyes.He had a David Niven-like air about him, the same English manner, lighthearted and neatly dressed, which made him shine even more brilliantly than the rest of the committee.

When we were seated, he began to speak solemnly. "I hear you wish to do it with us, Mr. Wright. You may be able to give your reasons," he said. I told them that I had done a lot for the Security Service, and reiterated that I would not be able to serve in the Security Service without full confidence in me.These points I have reiterated to Cumming before. "I would like to say a few words on behalf of the whole committee," he replied, "that we do not intend to bring in a scientist if we cannot provide him here with everything he needs for his work. You should fully understand that. clear."

Cumming nodded in agreement. "However," White continued, "it should be clear to you that the Security Service is not like any other department in Whitehall with which you are familiar. If you come in, you have no chance of being promoted." He explained that people who enter the security department are generally older than civilian staff in other departments, and must have various qualities that have been trained in various departments of MI5. Due to quota restrictions, almost none of them can Promoted to the position of senior officer (later known as the position of Assistant Director).As for becoming a member of the Committee of Six, that is an unrealistic fantasy.Since I have come in as a senior official to take on a special job, of course it is impossible to become a member of the committee.I told the committee frankly that I was born to be a solitary cultivator, not a master, and I didn't care if I could improve.

We briefly talked about how working together with Whitehall is extremely important in terms of technology.After twenty minutes, everyone felt that there was nothing to talk about, so Chuck White concluded. "Mr. Wright, my opinion is that I'm not sure whether our Security Bureau needs someone like you to work." He paused and said, "But if you are ready to try, we are willing." The restrained atmosphere eased.Members of the committee rose from behind their desks one by one, and I talked to them for a few minutes.As I was about to take my leave, Dick White nodded to me and beckoned me to his desk at the far end of the room.

"Peter, you and Hugh Winterborn will work first in Division A, Section 2. Malcolm is responsible for arranging tasks. I have told him that I hope you will mainly work on Division D, which is the Soviet Union." His fingers flicked the diary on the desk lightly, and his eyes were fixed on the direction of the Russian embassy in Kensington outside the window. "We exhausted our efforts and failed to defeat them." White snapped the diary shut.He wished me good luck to make things better. After lunch, I went back to the sixth floor.As a matter of routine, the Director of Personnel, John Marriott, had to speak to me face to face.During the war, Marriott was secretary of the Double Agent Commission, the agency that gave MI5 its wartime victories and developed a dozen double agents within Nazi intelligence.After the war he worked for the Middle East of the Security Intelligence Service before returning to Leconfield House.He is a very trusted official.

"We're just talking casually, to get a little background on you personally," he said, shaking mine in a distinctive Masonic handshake.At this time, I remembered that my father was also a member of the Freemasonry. No wonder he tried to persuade me to join the Freemasonry when I first talked to him about officially working for MI5. "You have to make sure you're not a communist, and you should understand that." He said it as if he thought such things were unacceptable to MI5.In the weeks leading up to Cumming's final showdown with me, I had heard that a retired policeman from the chief's secretary's office had come to Marconi's to conduct a routine investigation of all my affairs.After my interview with the Director of Personnel, I have not received any other review.Although it was the time when MI5 established a strict censorship system for the whole of Whitehall, it was not until the mid-1960s that MI5 gradually implemented systematic censorship.

There was nothing on Marriott's desk.I assume the conversation was taped and put in my file.Although Marriott conducted the interview very carefully, he only asked a few questions. "You were a fanatical leftist in your youth, weren't you?" "Perhaps a little. I was a teacher at the Workers' Education Association in the Thirties." "A true communist, isn't he?" "Not in Cornwall," I replied. "You voted Labor in 1945, didn't you?" "I think most people in the army voted Labor." "So you're a centrist now?"

I told him I hated Nazism and Communism.He seemed content with my tirade.Then the conversation turned to my personal life.He went round and round on this question for a long time, and finally asked: "Have you ever been drunk in the past, for any reason?" "I've never had a gaffe like this in my life." He looked at me. "Has anyone ever asked you to do secret work?" "Only you, no one else." He almost laughed.But obviously, he has heard this sentence countless times.He opened a drawer of his desk and pulled out a form for me to fill out, including information on immediate family members.In this way, I passed the review. No wonder Philby, Burgess, McLean, Brent, etc. passed the review so easily.

Before I officially entered the work of the second section of Division A, I received a two-day training with a young official who had just graduated from university.The training subjects were run by a man named John Cackney.Cackney was a stern taciturn official with whom I got on very well.He can be very vicious at times, but it quickly became clear to me that he just hates the job of training newbies.He is completely different from other MI5 officials. He is not content with the same boring life. He likes to wander around and do his own way, thinking that only outside the MI5 can there be an open world.So I'm not surprised that he later left Five Places and went into business with great success.He first worked in the Victoria Investment Company for a while, and then worked for the Royal Real Estate Company, where he served as the president of the Port of London.Now John Cackney is the president of Western Helicopters. When Cackney trained us, he gave us the customary explanation of MI5's legal status. He said bluntly: "The Security Service (MI5) has no legal status, and it is impossible to have a normal status within Whitehall, because its work often violates some rules and laws." Cackney described a number of situations in which conflicts could arise, such as unauthorized entry into a home, or invasion of personal privacy.He clearly told us that MI5 operates on the basis of the Eleventh Commandment, that is, "You must not be caught." Once caught, MI5 has no way to protect its own people.He also told us how to get in touch with the police. In the event of an accident, the police can come to help MI5 anytime and anywhere, especially when you meet the right people, things will turn into good luck.But the relationship between the Security Bureau and the police in the Special Division has always been tense. "They want to do what we do, but we don't want to do what they do," he said. Cockney gave us the current internal address book of MI5, and explained to us the internal organizational structure of MI5.The Security Bureau has six departments: Department A is in charge of materials; Department B is in charge of personnel; Department C is in charge of security and inspection of personnel of the entire government agency; Department D is responsible for counterintelligence; Department E is responsible for intelligence work in the colonies, as well as Malaya and Kenya counter-insurgency operations; F Branch was the domestic surveillance center for the British Communist Party, especially its links with the trade union movement. Cockney briefly mentioned the situation of the sister agency, the British Secret Intelligence Service, which most people in Whitehall were more accustomed to calling MI6.He gave us the standard MI6 address book and told us that we had very little contact with MI6, except MI6's counterintelligence branch and a small research office for Communist affairs.These agencies were dismantled shortly after I joined MI5.Cockney becomes wary when it comes to these matters.It wasn't until later, when I established contact with MI6 technicians, that I realized how deep the conflict between the two bureaus was. The training was over, we went to have our pictures taken, and got our MI5 passes.Cackney introduced us to a retired special service officer from Division C and asked him to teach us how to keep the documents.He told us that no matter what the circumstances, no documents should be taken out of the office, no documents should be placed in the drawer of the desk, and the door must be locked even if you leave the office for ten minutes.He also told me the lock code of the combination safe he was using, and that a copy of the code was stored in the chief's safe, so that superiors could get anything from an officer's safe, day or night. document.These measures are so practical that I can't help but draw comparisons to the weak review process for personnel changes. A week passed, and Cackney took me into an office.There was nothing in the room except a table with a tape recorder on it.He took several large tapes from the cupboard. "Here," he said, "this stuff will tell you everything." The titles of the tapes are marked on the scrolls: A Brief History of the British Security Service, by Guy Liddell.He was the bureau's deputy director from 1946 to 1951.In the annals of MI5, Liddell is a prominent figure.He was transferred from the Special Branch to MI5 in 1927.When he was in the special department, he was independently responsible for the counterintelligence program against the Soviet Union.Throughout the war, he presided over MI5's counterintelligence work with extraordinary perseverance and enthusiasm.In 1946, he became the most ideal candidate for the director of the Security Bureau.However, Prime Minister Attlee appointed a policeman named Yossi Sillitoe as Commissioner.This personnel change is undoubtedly a blow to MI5.Attlee suspected MI5 of being behind the Zinoviev letters in 1929.With great difficulty, Liddell restrained his dissatisfaction and performed his duties under Sillitoe.But in 1951 he was caught up in the Burgess-McLean scandal.He has always maintained a friendly relationship with Burgess. Now that Burgess is gone, what is he going to do?He was so exhausted that he soon retired to serve on the Atomic Energy Commission. I carefully loaded the tape, put on my headphones, and a soft, elegant voice described the secret history of British security work.MI5 was founded in 1909 by Colonel Vernon Kyle.At the time, the Ministry of Defense realized that the looming conflict in Europe would require at least a small number of counterintelligence personnel.Soon after the outbreak of the war, almost all German spies operating in Britain were caught by MI5, which shows its excellent record.Liddell warmly praised Kyle's great achievements, thinking that he had built MI5 into a prestigious organization from scratch with his own perseverance.After World War I, MI5's budget was severely restricted.MI6 chattered and lobbied everywhere in an attempt to annex its competitors, but Kyle was shrewd and capable, maintained control of MI5, and gradually expanded its influence in all aspects. In 1927, MI5 successfully raided the All-Russian Society of Cooperative Societies, which brought its post-World War I prestige to a peak.Under the orders of MI5, the police searched the offices of the Soviet Trade Mission and the All-Russian Society of Cooperative Society at 49 Moorgate Street, and found a large amount of espionage material, which made MI5 internally It was agreed that the newly formed Soviet state was Britain's main enemy and that all possible measures should be taken against it.This understanding was further deepened by the espionage incidents that followed in the 1930s.The 1938 case of the Soviet Union attempting to send engineers by West Graden into the Woolwich arsenal was representative of all these cases.Gradin was employed by the arsenal and was an old Communist.MI5's brilliant spy expert Maxwell Knight was very successful in installing a female agent in the Soviet Union, who entrusted the Soviet conspiracy plan to the British. In 1939, Kyle was getting old and Liddell was reflecting on MI5's mistakes in preparations for World War II.After Churchill took office as prime minister, he decided to substantially adjust the Whitehall team to make Whitehall absolutely obey him.Kyle's departure was only a matter of time.While Liddell was heartbroken over MI5's loss of Kyle, he also welcomed the new director, Sir David Petrie, warmly.Petrie was in charge of recruiting a large number of highly gifted intellectuals, and under his supervision (along with Liddell's cooperation, though this is not mentioned), the famous system of double agents arose.German spies who set foot on British soil were either captured or sent back to the German High Command to provide disinformation.This activity was so successful that it was impossible for the Germans to know exactly where the massive Allied invasion of Europe would land.Liddell has a simple assessment of MI5's work during the war: "the best combination of different minds in the history of intelligence." Liddell's account speaks only of the postwar period.To be honest, his lectures were rough, and although he covered various cases and incidents, he got off topic when it came to the mystery of how MI5 had been successful for so long.He knew very well that MI5 had little to show for in the post-war period, for reasons that went back to the Thirties.He did not mention Burgess and McClain, or what their existence meant, nor did he mention the vast and long-delayed modernization program that he and White knew about in the late forties. In every respect, Liddell is a very sad figure.Because of his brilliance, he was popular with the Security Service and fully deserved to be the main architect of Britain's wartime intelligence superiority.Unfortunately, because of his contacts with Burgess and McLean, he failed to make his career as he wished.From the tone of his voice on the tape, he seems to be muttering in a dark room, going back to history to justify his doom. I also listened to tapes of Dick White's lectures on Russian intelligence.It was apparently recorded at a seminar for junior officers new to the Security Service, and the audience can be heard laughing.White was fond of a few humorous remarks, and his eloquence was full of Oxbridge pedantry.His speech is fluent and free, often with puns, epigrams and quotations from Russian literature.White is very prestigious in Soviet affairs. Before he became the director, he was the director of Division B (formerly the Counterintelligence Division). He speaks vividly of how the Russians became obsessed with secrecy and how the modern KGB evolved from the Tsarist secret police.His analysis illustrates the historical importance of the KGB to the Bolsheviks.His analysis is very thorough and convincing.In such a large and often lurking hostile country, Russian intelligence services are the guarantor of the party leadership.He also talked about why British intelligence and Russian intelligence were inevitably the main opponents in the game of espionage.Both countries have long histories of clandestine and intelligence work that reflect the poise and patience of their respective national characteristics.He said it was in stark contrast to the enthusiastic and overly brash activity of "our American cousin".The audience present were all happy. Beautiful as his oratory was, White was largely an orthodox figure.He believed in the most fashionable idea of ​​"containing" the Soviet Union, and believed that MI5 would play an important role in suppressing Soviet influence in British espionage.He repeatedly mentioned the motives that motivated the Communists, referring to the documents found in the All-Russian Society of Cooperative Society.These documents show that Russian intelligence services have an attempt to subvert the British government.He attached great importance to the new censorship system being introduced in Whitehall as the most effective way to prevent Russian intelligence services from infiltrating the British government. He believed that MI5 was in the midst of a major transformation.In a sense, it was under his guidance.He came across most clearly as a strong sense of pride in his work for the Security Service.He had always felt this way, even after he left MI5 and was transferred to MI6.He's a man of action, confident that the organizations he's built will remain what they should be.This drives him to try to be a beloved man, though he remains a modest ascetic. Towards the end of training, I started touring the building, accompanied by Cackney or Winterborn.The whole environment is very crowded, there are four officials in one office.It seems that I have been treated preferentially. I have a separate office on the sixth floor. In fact, this is just a tool room for odds and ends.Hugh Winterborn's office is next door.The space problem is the result of a longstanding feud between MI5 and MI6.At the end of the war, a plan was drawn up to set up a joint office building for the intelligence department, so that the two departments could share it, and a place on Horsferry Road was selected as the location for the building.But for years, a working group in the two departments has been at loggerheads over exactly how to allocate office space.Because of the Kim Philby affair, MI5 secretly complained that MI6 could not be trusted.The problem remained unresolved until the 1960s, when MI6 later moved to their own office building across the Thames, Century Towers. In a sense, Whitehall's indecision in this allocation of space speaks to its lack of a right and clear head in its handling of the relationship between MI5 and MI6.Before the 1970s, the situation did not improve much.It was not until the 1970s that MI5 persuaded the Treasury to allocate funds to move it to a dedicated, permanent headquarters, Curzon Building.Prior to the move to the Curzon Building, the overcrowding of the office space had to be solved by renting out rooms on a short-term basis.The first rented house was on Kirk Street, which was the busiest center of C in the 1950s.Then an office building in Marlborough Street became a counterespionage center in the sixties.If we wanted to see classified documents, we had to go through Soho Market, where there were streetwalkers, flower sellers, and rotting vegetable leaves.This arrangement may be convenient, but it is impractical. In the 1950s, MI5 seemed to be covered in a thick layer of dust from the war, and the organization was like Dickens's Miss Havishim.During the war, celebrities from all walks of life admired her, but from 1945 onwards, celebrities spurned her.They ran to the outside world to seek new worlds, abandoned MI5, and plunged it into the dark land to recall the good old days, and rarely had contact with other departments of Whitehall. The atmosphere reminds me of a small public school.The director and deputy director of MI5 are surrounded by flattery all day long, just like school teachers are flattered by students, as if they are the only ones who can be called "sir".This atmosphere of MI5 has bred and created a group of strange and presumptuous characters.The men and women here are so engrossed in the great game of intelligence that they despise its insignificance and create endless fascinating careers. On the surface, life at MI5 is full of fun and color, but stale.When the annual ball game is held, the office is closed.MI5 also had a small, unofficial space in the Nobles' Tavern near the match ground.Senior officials, almost without exception, spend half an hour each morning doing the Times crossword.Those scrambled calls, normally used to convey the top secrets of the Western world, were now being used by officials to relay outlandish, coded questions from one office to another. For example: "There is something wrong with my left buttock", which means "I can't guess what the seventh word in the last line of the left corner is"; What's the word?" Courtney Young was the Bureau's premier crossword puzzler and head of the Anti-Soviet Espionage Section (D Branch) in the 1950s.He always said that the game was too easy to do with a pencil and should be done with the brain.For almost a year, I watched his tricks, and finally I couldn't resist the temptation anymore and challenged him.He immediately filled in all the answers without hesitation.As a result, I had to buy him a drink every night for a week in a nearby tavern, and he couldn't help it. The nerve center of MI5 is the archives.The entire ground floor of the Leconfield Building was its domain.During the Second World War, the archives were moved to Wormwood-Scrubbs Prison in order to avoid the loss or damage of documents when the London home was bombed, but this move was a misstep.In less than a year, the prison was bombed and many documents were burned to ashes.The salvaged documents were kept in moisture-proof polyethylene bags.In the 1960s, when we studied this period of history during the expansion period of the 1930s, we often had to consult some pre-war documents and archives.It's a real pain in the ass, you'll have to use tweezers and a wooden scraper for those burnt sheets. After the disaster at Wormwood-Scrubbs, MI5 racked their brains to design a secure archive.Sir David Petrie's wartime agent was Brigadier-General Harker, an ideal executive assistant.He hired a specialist from the business system named Harold Porter and asked him to reorganize the archives.Choosing Potter for the job was the right choice.Porter has a flexible mind and clear thinking, even in the chaos of war, he can be methodical. In 1955 Porter was about to retire, but he still showed me around with gusto.The Archives is located in the Central Hall and houses the main documents and index of documents.Additional specialized card indexes are stored in rooms around the central hall.Copies of all documents and indexes are made entirely on microfilm and are kept in MI5 warehouses in Cheltham.These warehouses are specially secured to prevent a repeat of Wormwood's catastrophe.Potter's office was in an unassuming corner of the archives, very tidy and organized. "You must promise to return your borrowed papers promptly, you hear, Peter? You don't want to follow some fellows, I don't want to follow behind and rush you." Potter should actually be a kind and kind-hearted librarian in a small town.To his disappointment, I ended up being one of the many rascals who were not welcome in the archives, often with a huge backlog of papers that I never returned.But I am nothing compared to Millicent Bagot.Baggott was the legendary old lady of F, who had been monitoring the international communist movement for decades.I always thought she was like Connie, the heroine in John le Carry's novels.She's a little neurotic, but has an uncanny memory for facts and dossiers.Potter and his successor in the Archives had no illusions about recovering the papers that Millicent had borrowed.After each request for a large stack of documents from F, Potter would mutter to himself: "I only hope to get the documents back when she retires." The archives are a place that always makes me feel new and curious.This place fills my heart with expectations. Once I am in these piles of papers, I can't help but want to look for clues inside.Porter told me about the procedures for checking out and returning documents to see if they had been checked out or processed.He designed a file management system, in which each material is arranged in chronological order, all files and attachments are placed on the right, and indexes and memos are placed on the left, which facilitates quick search. The whole system is based on the premise of precise and rigorous classification.Officials had to get permission from Porter's clerks to file documents.Some officials who borrowed documents were turned away because of the generality of their requests.When borrowing documents, you need to fill out the borrowing application form.These requests are required to be documented.If there are more than two queries on a certain person's file, it is natural to create a separate file for this person.Documents in the Archives fall into three basic categories.The first category is character files, or human files.Light yellow cover, arranged in alphabetical order.When I joined the Security Service in 1955, there were about two million personal files.This number has been maintained steadily, and only in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with the upsurge of the student and labor movement, this number began to increase.The second category is thematic archives, or organizational archives, such as the archives about the British Communist Party.Thematic files are often divided into several volumes, which are cross-referenced with character files.The third category is catalog archives, which have an egg blue cover, and are generally included in materials collected from a certain case but not easily included in the scope of the first two types of archives.In addition, there is a so-called "Y box", which is mainly used to distinguish especially confidential documents from general documents.For example, the files of all suspected espionage belonged to "Box Y", as did the files of most defectors.General officials who want to borrow materials in the "Y box" must obtain the approval of the official in charge of the materials, and sometimes even the approval of the director himself. “The integrity of the documents is paramount,” Porter told me, warning me that under no circumstances should documents be withdrawn from the archives without written approval from senior officials.Every official, from the day he started to work, has been repeatedly indoctrinated to regard documents and archives as gods. Finding files is done with a card index.Porter invented a set of mechanical retrieval methods: each card has a series of holes pierced, and different types of file cards are punched with different holes. When searching for a certain file, you only need to pull out the corresponding guide card for this type of file.For example, if you want to find the file of a Russian secret agent who has used several aliases, you only need to find the index card.The guide cards are arranged at the front of the corresponding series of sub-cards, and they are threaded through the card rods, so that they can be searched by hand at will.It's an old-fashioned approach, and while it works, it speaks volumes for MI5's complete disregard for enabling computerized retrieval, even though it should have been done long ago. The central hall of the archives is a perennially busy place.Trolleys were constantly transporting documents back and forth from the shelves in the archives to dedicated elevators.The trolleys slide on tracks to quickly deliver documents to case officers upstairs. F is on the second floor, E is on the third floor, D is on the fourth and fifth floors, and A is on the sixth floor.The Archives Office employs many young girls to do the bulk of the document sending and receiving work in the building, including sorting, checking and filing.These girls, known as the "Goddesses of the Archives", were recruited from noble families or MI5 officials' families when Kyle was the chief.Kyle's reason for doing this is simple. The family background of these people is the most reliable check on them.These young girls who are not deeply involved in the world are both beautiful and rich.Therefore, many officials in the Security Bureau married them.They generally didn't work in the archives for more than nine months, so this has become a joke: the ninth month when a goddess of archives enters the archives is the time when she is pregnant. In the early 1970s, the manpower problem in the archives room had become a major problem for MI5.At that time, there were more than 300 girls. With the increase of files, there was still a need to continuously recruit staff.Open recruitment is out of the question.It is not an easy task to recruit girls who meet these conditions to work, not to mention that they have to be reviewed one by one.On at least one occasion, the Communist Party managed to sneak a girl into the archives, but she was quickly discovered, and the archives quietly fired her.It was this event, not the aging archival system itself, that was the main reason for MI5 to finally agree to a computer search. There are many basements below the archives, which are mainly used as storage rooms and workshops.Leslie Jagger was in charge here, working under A-Second Officer Hugh Winterborn, and one of Cumming's famous acquaintances, a tall, broad-shouldered, broad-chested man.He had been a major in the Rifle Brigade with Cumming.He always wore the black smock of an undertaker. Jagger was an MI5 handyman technician, and he must have had some misgivings when I joined MI5, but he never showed it, and we quickly became good friends.Jagger possesses many unique skills, the one that impressed me the most is his lockpicking technique.When I first started my training, I heard him give formal lectures for MI5 and MI6 in his lockpicking workshop.Every wall in this basement is covered with rows of keys, at least thousands of them, all of which are numbered.He told me that MI5 had obtained or secretly copied many keys to offices, hotels and private homes, each numbered.This is how they have been used to gain access to houses across the UK for many years. "You never know when one of the keys will come in handy," Jagger explained to me.I was stunned by this masterpiece of his collection. "First of all, it must be remembered that picking locks is a last resort when it comes to entering other people's rooms," Jagger said in the first sentence of his lecture. "It's absolutely impossible to pick the lock without scratching the paint. A trained intelligence officer can tell at a glance that someone has entered the room. What you should do is get a key. This There are two ways: one is to measure the lock, the other is to duplicate a key." Jagger demonstrated how to pick a variety of locks.波马牌锁是一种主要装在珠宝保险柜上的锁，最难撬开。其锁栓是穿过锁簧活动的，根本不可能撬开。匠布牌锁虽然是号称无法撬开的铁将军，可它在贾格尔手里却变成了儿戏。 “你们以后会经常跟这种锁打交道的。” 他从堆在柜子上的耶鲁牌机械锁中拣了一把来给我们做具体的撬锁示范。他解释说，耶鲁锁有一系列销栓，排在锁眼内的不同位置上。钥匙伸进锁内，其齿把锁眼内的销栓顶上去后，才能转动。贾格尔拿出一根铁丝，铁丝的一端有钩子。他把铁丝插进锁眼内，然后开始平稳而有节奏地捅着。 “先捅第一个销栓，”他的手腕时而紧张，时而放松，“直到它伸进一个回进去的地方，你就知道捅开了一个销栓。” 他那双大手宛如音乐会上一个手握琴弓的小提琴演奏家的手，紧张地挥动着，一个接一个的销栓被捅开了。 “在没有捅开所有的销栓之前，必须保持压力……”他转动手中的铁丝，耶鲁锁立即弹开了。“这下你就可以进屋了……当然，进了房间以后，你要干什么，那是你的事了，我可管不着。” 我们大家被他的话逗乐了。 莱斯利对他从什么地方学来的这些撬锁专门知识总是不透露一丝口风。多年来，我一直带着他为我制作的一根铁丝和撬锁工具。 “你随时都要带上你的警察证件。”他第一次把铁丝交给我时就这样对我说。他指出，我携带这些盗窃工具是违法的。 “总不能把我们当作一般的或花园里的窃贼吧？”我说。 他由衷地笑着，大步走回地下室去了。