TheCodeBreakers
:' Secret Office and their domestic ones from the Private - Office, both
subdivisions of the Post Office. The Secret Office was quartered in three
rooms adjoining the Foreign Office and entered privately from Abchurch
Lane. Fire and candles burned constantly in one room; the staff lodged in
the others. It included men who made their life's work the specialty of
unsealing diplomatic packets with such, deftness that they could be
resealed without evidence of tampering; one such opener was J. E. Bode,
father of John Bode, Jr. He regularly spent three hours on the dispatches
of the King of Prussia, opening them and then re-sealing them with
special wax and carefully counterfeited seals. Perhaps surprisingly in a
bastion of human rights, its interceptions enjoyed full legality. The
statute of 1657 that established the postal service declared outright that
the mails were the best means of discovering dangerous and wicked
annaabi.ee 
