Five or six rooms were adequate for its carefully screened employees. It was primarily a communications centre, with private lines to the Home Office, the Foreign Office, the Special Branch, the Passport Office and the headquarters of Customs and Excise at King’s Beam House. Also to the officer in charge of the mobile reserve in Wellington Barracks, the Government telephone-tapping centre at Chelsea and other less publicized departments of the Executive. The head of the Unit at this time was Simon Benz-Fisher. He had taken over when his predecessor was booted out for failing to anticipate, and deal with, the Christine Keeler affair. That he had survived so long in this particular post was a tribute, first to his ingenuity and secondly to his ability to think quickly and adapt his plans to the requirements of the moment. These were talents which his training as a barrister had implanted and developed. Before his name disappeared from the Law List he had been a promising junior Treasury counsel, in a chambers which handled a great deal of criminal work.
