REGISTRY• 441of Wales, Rees wrote a series of six anonymous articles for thePeo-
pleentitled ‘‘Guy Burgess Stripped Bare: His Closest Friend Speaks
at Last.’’ In it he implicated Blunt—although he was careful not to
identify him by name—and smeared enough other people to spark a
scandal. As soon as he was exposed as the author, he was dismissed
from his academic post and sued for libel. Among the few who
stayed loyal to the tempestuous Welshman, and were named as such
in his memoirs, were his former SIS colleagues,Robert Zaehner,
A. J. Ayer, and Footman.
Having wrecked his careers in intelligence and academia, Rees
took to writing novels and was mildly successful. He was, however,
distrusted by the Security Servicemolehunters, who were convinced
he too had been a spy, and he was shunned by Blunt who thought
Rees had betrayed him. Ironically, Rees died a few months before
Blunt was exposed as a traitor by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
in November 1979 and stripped of his honors.REFERENTURA.See REZIDENT.
REGIONAL SECURITY LIAISON OFFICER (RSLO).During
World War II the Security Service posted representatives known as
RSLOs across the United Kingdom, attached to the local military
districts, to liaise with the military authorities and the local chief con-
stable. All contact withMI5from the police and military was chan-
neled through the RSLO, who carried a pass issued under the
Defence of the Realm Actgranting him almost unlimited powers to
demand cooperation.See alsoSECURITY LIAISON OFFICER.
REGISTRY.The foundation of bothMI5and theSecret Intelligence
Service(SIS) is their ability to retain information so it may be cross-
referenced and retrieved when required. Thus the heart of the Secur-
ity Service has always been the Registry, an efficient storage system
initially based on thousands of hand-sorted card indices managed by
a staff of women clerks supervised by the ‘‘Registry Queen,’’ a figure
of considerable responsibility and power. Individual files were di-
vided between personal and subject files (designated PF and SF, re-
spectively), each with a separate card punched with holes so retrieval
and sorting could be achieved with knitting needles. During World