Strange Intelligence: Memoirs of Naval Secret Service

Strange Intelligence is the story of Hector Bywater, perhaps the British secret service’s finest agent operating in Germany before the First World War. Although British, he was working at the time as a journalist for the New York Herald and would later write for the Daily Telegraph. Mansfield Cumming, the first ‘C’ (or head of what would become MI6), recruited Bywater and gave him the designation ‘H2O’, in what was a rather obvious play on his name. Not quite 007, the charming, courageous Bywater was probably as close to the popular image of James Bond as any British secret agent ever came. Bywater’s main role was collecting intelligence on naval installations in northern Germany ahead of the First World War.