Shhh! They're watching us. Over there. Don't look! Bloody amateur. Listen, I'm leaving now. Wait nine minutes and follow me out. Make three right turns around the block to see if you're being tailed, then head to the park, by the carousel. Ask the vendor for a blue cotton candy "with extra gravy." In the paper cone, you will find the answer to your question, which will be: Nobody knows for sure, but educated estimators put the number in the low thousands.
Government agencies, including the FBI, CIA, and NSA, declined to hazard a guess, or, indeed, to offer any comment at all. But figure it thusly: There are many different types of "spies" working to ferret out our secrets. Most common are your garden-variety intelligence officers posted to embassies and consulates around the country. These folks usually have some BS "official cover" like "Assistant Minister for the Promotion of Shrubbery." "They do that job enough to maintain the cover," says Steve Bucci, a research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, a political think tank, and a former Army Special Forces officer and Pentagon official. "The rest of their time they spend wandering around Washington, D.C., trying to make contact with people who they can then get to share information."
Well.....I'll have to give you a name I seem to be continually frequenting the same threads. As its spies hows about Matta?
Though it sounds more Indian than Jewish but it will do for now.
Well Matta.....I thought it was you who composed the above but silly me you do only write one liners.
Though it does contain a semblance of humour I can also see why it was so quickly derailed.
How many spies? - If we knew that they wouldn't be spies.
You may laugh but I was once a spy. I was 21 and Convener in a North West Textile comp. We'd learnt that the company was buying cheap German Textile's and putting Union Jack labels on and selling them in this country at British prices.
Illegal under EEC Regs. One night a workmate and I climbed up to a second floor office window which was slightly ajar.
We managed to get in and careful not to disturb anything searched for files that would prove the fraud. It didn't take long before we discovered invoices in German. I took the lot, had them copied and returned them the following night.
Of course I sent them all to Union Headquarters.
In 1979 the Mill, closed but two weeks before that I was sacked. The manager hated my guts and told colleagues I'd been a pain in the arse and thorn in his side his entire management. I'd been there since leaving school 7 years and was the only person ever to get sacked. The reason he did it was he wanted everything to go smoothly and didn't want to offer severance pay to the workers. With me out of the way he could get away with it, or so he thought.
I told my sidekick who'd helped me break in, to get a thick chain and heavy lock and six smaller chains and locks.
Early morning on the last day we got six of the most militant lads to chain themselves to the most expensive machines and my mate and another couple of guys to chain the front gates shut so the management office workers etc couldn't enter the premises. all the other workers I told to go to the canteen and have a sit in and refuse to leave, which they did.
I had to do all the orchestrating by phone once it started.
The manager arrived and couldn't believe his eyes and demanded they opened the gates calling them thugs and criminals
and threatened to call the police, but the lads held firm. He then phoned a firm to send a guy with a electric saw.
Every time the guy started sawing through the chain, my lads would rattle the iron gates and the saw blade would either snap or warp. After several hours though and as the chain was about to break my three gate men legged it to the canteen.
The manager who had been on the phone to the owner, who also owned two other mills and had been giving him shit, cheered up as he saw the chain begin to break and my mate said he heard him tell the owner - "Were in!"
As he walked down on to the factory floor and noticed my mate stood at the entrance to the canteen backed by all the other workers then turned to see lads chained to the machines he burst into tears and left.
Now it was up to me to keep the strikers in food and drink. I'd managed to find a way around the back through a field that led to the canteen window but how long before the workers resolve began to weaken?
After 24 hours the management gave in and the workers all got there severance pay about six weeks pay each.
Of course having been sacked I didn't qualify, which was a bit rough as being a party animal at the time, I hadn't bothered
saving. The majority of workers were Asian and being elected against two candidates that were 2 and nearly 3 times the age of me to give the workers their first white convener was a proud moment, but it cost me.
The manager was so bitter that when I went to sign on unemployed for the first and only time ever, I was told I'd been suspended for six weeks cos my former employer said I'd been guilty of 'gross misconduct' bordering on criminal behaviour. I wasn't even there when he got locked out but he knew I was behind it.
My Union appealed and i with my union rep had to appear before a tribunal.
We were about to start proceedings when guess who walked in?......My ex manager!
My union rep couldn't believe he'd bother. It was only to decide six weeks unemployment benefit.
Anyway in cross examining him I ripped him apart showing him up for the lying, bitter, twisted and greedy tyke he was.
I won the appeal and the benefits were backdated. We had to share the lift when leaving and my ex manager just stair'd down until the ground floor was reached only then did he look me in the eye and I swear it was such a psychotic stare that if he had a knife he would have hacked at me and not stopped until he was dragged off.
I'm a pretty laid back and amiable guy and never experienced pure hatred like that before or since. I still occasionally think back and wonder. Why could he not accept that I was only doing what I'd been elected to do - represent his employees interests?
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