REUTER’S NEWS AGENCY• 447dian Ocean. Similarly, St. Helena was used to accommodate the son
of a Gulf potentate who had plotted against his father in the 1960s.
More recently the British sovereign bases at Akrotiri and Dhekelia
on Cyprus have provided secure housing for informants withdrawn
fromNorthern Ireland.
Although the process of resettlement can be traumatic, theSecret
Intelligence Servicehas suffered only one public embarrassment of
adefectorcomplaining about his treatment, andViktor Makarov,a
formerKGBofficer exfiltrated to England, was compensated with a
payment of £65,000 following a public campaign for better treat-
ment.REUTER’S NEWS AGENCY.In 1894 Lord Rosebery agreed to pay
Reuter’s £500 from thesecret service fundsin return for confiden-
tial reports from its correspondents across the world. The arrange-
ment was terminated by Lord Salisbury in 1898 when Reuter’s
submitted a dispatch from Port Arthur about the Royal Navy that
turned out to have been fabricated. In 1909 a limited service, amount-
ing to £200 for information from the Reuter’s North China News
Agency, was contracted to keep the enterprise afloat and not suc-
cumbing to German competition.
For many years thereafter, Reuter’s received a concealed subsidy
from the Foreign Office dating back to the secret 1916 guarantee
given to the original company to enable Sir Roderick Jones to buy it,
following the suicide of Baron Hubert de Reuter. The fact that Jones,
who had been Reuter’s South Africa correspondent during theBoer
War, bought the agency using financial support from thesecret vote
was never disclosed, although his appointment as director of Cable
and Wireless War Propaganda was officially announced, as was his
subsequent position as director of propaganda when the Ministry of
Information was created.
Numerous overseas Reuter’s offices were opened for the sole pur-
pose of gathering intelligence, and both during and after World War
II several Reuter’s correspondents pursued a parallel clandestine ca-
reer. Peter Brown, formerly theMorning Post’s correspondent in Bel-
grade, joined Reuter’s before he was recruited byDavid Footman
into the political section of theSecret Intelligence Service(SIS) as
an expert on left-wing movements in Europe. Leslie Smith, who