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Thursday 30 November 2017

Secret Service

The agentes in rebus were the late Roman imperial courier service and general agents of the central government from the 4th to the 7th centuries. Two were appointed to each province in 357, one in 395 and more again after 412.

In modern times, the French police officer Joseph Fouché is sometimes regarded as the primary pioneer within secret intelligence. Among other things, he is alleged to have prevented several murder attempts on Napoleon, through a large and tight net of various informers.

By the end of the American Civil War, between one-third and one-half of all U.S. paper currency in circulation was counterfeit. This served as the catalyst behind the formation of the U.S. Secret Service. On July 5, 1865, the Secret Service was created under the U.S. Treasury Department in Washington, D.C

Badge of the United States Secret Service

The legislation creating the agency was on Abraham Lincoln's desk on April 14, 1865, the same day he was assassinated.

The secret service did not start protecting the President until after President William McKinley was shot and killed in 1901.The following year, President Theodore Roosevelt became the first President to be protected by Secret Service agents. Since then, every president has received Secret Service Protection.

In 1902, William Craig became the first Secret Service agent to die while serving, in a road accident while riding in the presidential carriage.

Eleanor Roosevelt regularly refused Secret Service protection, and instead traveled with a .22 Smith and Wesson on her person.

James Brady, the Secret Service agent that saved President Reagan's life became a Secret Service agent after seeing a movie starring Ronald Reagan as a Secret Service Agent.

Secret Service agents respond to the assassination attempt of Ronald Reagan

In 1565 Ivan the Terrible set up the Oprichnik, who were the forerunner of the KGB. Riding black horses and led by Ivan himself, the private army terrorized the populace. After seven years of abuse Ivan disbanded them.

The KGB was the main Soviet security agency, intelligence agency or spy agency, and the secret police agency during the Cold War. It was formed on March 13, 1954 as a successor of earlier agencies, the Cheka, NKGB, and MGB.


KGB is an initialism for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, which translated in English as Committee for State Security,

During the Cold War it was Soviet policy for the KGB to monitor public and private opinion, internal subversion and possible counter-revolutionary plots in the Soviet Bloc. The KGB was instrumental in crushing the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and the Prague Spring of "Socialism with a Human Face", in 1968 Czechoslovakia.

Vladimir Putin was a KGB Foreign Intelligence Officer for 16 years. He gave up his position in the KGB in 1991, during the putsch against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

Putin in KGB uniform, circa 1980

After the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the KGB was split into the Federal Security Service and the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation.

Belarus is the only post-Soviet Union era country where the national security organization is still called "KGB", albeit it is lost in translation when written in Belarusian (becoming KDB rather than KGB).

The British Intelligence Agency MI6 was formed in 1909 but it was kept such a secret that it wasn't formally acknowledged until the year 1994.

The British Secret Service (James Bond's employer) really can issue a "license to kill". It's called a Class Seven authorization, and must be approved by the MI6 agent's superiors all the way up to the Foreign Minister.

Because the American Secret Service aren't allowed into the Oval Office, they turned the floor into a giant, digital scale so that they can monitor where the President is at all times.

All presidents and first ladies have secret service protection for life, and further that any children of former presidents get secret service protection until they turn 16.

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