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By 1586 Stafford’s value as an ‘unconscious’ double agent was further reinforced when he became aware of the Spanish plans for an impending invasion of England a good two years before the Armada sailed. Walsingham was informed immediately. Walsingham’s intelligence network was well placed to frustrate Spanish intentions. Using his agents in northern Italy he got the Spanish government’s invoices and bills for loans ‘contested’ when they were presented for payment to the banks at Genoa (who were lending the capital to bankroll the Spanish project to invade England).

Again and again he fed false information to the British camp. He deliberately allowed over-inflated troop lists to fall into the hands of known British spies to mislead the enemy about the strength of the rebel forces and personally prepared fake correspondence in his own handwriting to add to the deception. It worked: the British didn’t realise just how weak their opponents really were. Washington also used disinformation as an offensive weapon. His planting of false ‘intelligence’ to protect the French landings at Newport in 1780 is a classic example of using disinformation to force the enemy into doing the wrong thing.

The Islamic agents of the Caliphate were as anxious to discover the secrets of Byzantium’s terror weapon as the defenders of Christendom’s Eastern Empire were to keep its secrets. For several hundred years, its formula was a Moorish intelligence priority. Astonishingly, and despite the systematic torture of thousands of captives over the years, and the lure of treachery and gold, the Byzantines appear to have kept their jealously guarded secret safe until about 1100. The other major intelligence collectors of the Middle East at the time were the fanatical followers of Hassan-i Sabbah, known as the ‘Assassins’.