On His Majesty's Secret Service

A book review of how MI-6 became MI-6; highlights below...

Put ashore in Nazi-occupied Holland just before five o’clock in the morning of November 23, 1940, Tazelaar wore full evening dress beneath his specially designed wetsuit, allowing him to walk directly into the seafront casino at Scheveningen. For greater verisimilitude, one of his fellow agents sprinkled him with Hennessy XO brandy beforehand. 
 ...
“Surely we can not be expected to sit in the office month by month doing absolutely nothing?” he complained to one of his colleagues. But he soon found his stride: working every day of the year, including Christmas, he bought himself a fake beard and toupee and even took to carrying a swordstick, despite the fact that nobody ever attacked him.
...
Cumming’s antics—injured in a car crash during World War I, he cut off his leg with a penknife and later tested potential recruits by whipping out the knife and stabbing it into his wooden leg—set the tone for many of MI6’s escapades. 
 ...
Only a few years after the Bureau’s foundation, its agents were smuggling information out of German-occupied Belgium inside boxes of chocolates, while at one stage they experimented with using human semen as invisible ink, even requesting samples of the “female equivalent” from a London lunatic asylum for testing.

[The New Republic]