On 12 November 1942, a 30-year-old British man arrived in the USA. He was working for MI6 and was on a mission to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), later known as the CIA. Officially he was there to brief the US secret service about British success in decoding messages sent by the German high command. But his orders from MI6 were to tell the Americans as little as possible about these decoding activities.
The British authorities, fearing leaks which might reach the ears of the Germans, were anxious to keep the details of the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park as secret as possible, even from their US wartime allies. To explain their success at finding out details of German operations, they invented a master-spy, codenamed Boniface, who supposedly ran an extensive, though in reality entirely fictitious, network of secret agents in Germany.
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