XPD [antikvár]

in May 1979, only days after Britain's new Conservative government came to power, the yellow box that contains the daily report from MI6 to the Prime Minister was delivered to her by a deputy secretary in the Cabinet Office. He was the PM's liaison with the intelligence services. Although the contents of the yellow box are never graded into secret, top secret and so on - because all MI6 documents are in the ultra secret category - one rather hastily handwritten report was 'flagged'. The PM noted with some surprise that it was the handwriting of Sir Sydney Ryden, the director general of MI6, and selected that document for immediate attention. Attached to the corner of it there was an advertisement, clipped from a film journal published in California the previous week. A film producer, unlisted in any of the department's reference books, announced that he was preparing what the advert described as 'A major motion picture with a budget of fifteen million plus!' It was a Second World War story about plundering German gold in the final days of the fighting. The cutting bore the rubber stamp of 'Desk 32 Research' and was signed by the clerk who had found it 'What is the final secret of the Kaiseroda mine?' asked the advertisement. Kaiseroda had been underlined in red pencil to show the word which had alerted the Secret Intelligence Service clerk to the advert's possible importance. Normally the space the blue rubber-stamp mark provided for reference would have been filled with a file number but, to his considerable surprise, the research clerk had been referred to no file under the Kaiseroda reference. Instead