Miscellany
While stationed as a secret agent in Bern in 1917, future CIA director Allen W. Dulles received a phone call from a Russian exile with an urgent message to deliver to the United States. Having already arranged a rendezvous with Swiss twin sisters at a country inn, Dulles demurred, finding out only later that the caller was Vladimir Lenin, who returned to Russia in a sealed train the next day.
Miscellany
Walter Kirke, British deputy head of military intelligence in France, noted in his diary in October 1915 that the chief (“C”) of the Secret Intelligence Service had come upon a solution for how to send secret messages: “Heard from C that the best invisible ink is semen,” Kirke wrote. The substance, it turned out, was hard to detect by the common revealing method of iodine vapor. The chief’s name: Mansfield Cumming.
Miscellany
A Spanish gallant in the sixteenth century who followed the contemporary fashion of padding his trunk-hose with quantities of bran was surprised to learn while entertaining ladies that a nail on his chair had opened a hole in his hose, and bran had started trickling out. The ladies laughed. He continued, encouraged, but bran soon was pouring forth. The ladies’ laughter increased. Finally, the gallant noticed the bran, bowed, and left in shame.
Miscellany
William Gladstone, prime minister of England four times between 1868 and 1894, walked the streets of London at night hoping to rescue prostitutes from their lives of vice. In 1848 he cofounded the Church Penitentiary Society Association for the Reclamation of Fallen Women; he would, it is said, offer streetwalkers a place to sleep, protection from their procurers, and a chance to give up their way of life.
Pages
