568 • WEEDING
was called up for military service in France with his regiment, the
Dorsets. A year later he was transferred to intelligence duties and
posted to Security Intelligence Middle East, first in Lebanon and then
in Baghdad. At the end of the war, with the rank of major, he joined
theSecret Intelligence Serviceand was posted to Germany, but he
soon returned to writing and travel. In 1956 his torrid novel set in the
Caribbean,Island in the Sun, which dealt with another sensitive
topic, interracial sex, became a best-seller and a highly successful
film. Thereafter, according to Evelyn, Alec ‘‘never drew another
sober breath.’’ He moved to Tangier, appearing occasionally in Lon-
don to entertain his friends and at a Midwestern university where he
was a writer-in-residence.
Waugh’s second wife, who had moved to Australia with their chil-
dren, died in 1969, and in that year he married his third wife, Vir-
ginia. He released what he termed an ‘‘erotic comedy,’’A Spy in the
Family, the following year, the explicit sex scenes describing fellatio
and cunnilingus, which caused a considerable storm. He died in
Tampa, Florida, in September 1981.WEEDING.The process of eliminating redundant files to make room
for new ones is a process known in the British civil service as ‘‘weed-
ing’’ and is conducted within the terms of the Public Records Act,
which requires departmental papers to be lodged at the National Ar-
chive at Kew.MI5, theSecret Intelligence Service, andGCHQare
exempt from the act under the direction of the lord chancellor, who
is advised by a committee on declassification issues. The agencies
routinely conduct weeding exercises to reduce the burden of keeping
records, employing retirees to undertake the work. In 1866 a retiree,
Dick Ellis, confessed, while engaged as a weeder, to having betrayed
SIS’s secrets before the war.
WEISS, ERNEST.A key figure in what became known as the British
branch of therote kapelle, Ernest D. Weiss was born in Breslau
in 1902 and was recruited into theGRUby a former university con-
temporary. He agreed to travel to England on a long-term mission in
May 1932 and was supervised by an illegal support officer code-
namedharry i, who arranged for him to meet two seamen that sub-
sequently acted as his couriers. This mysterious controller has never