Luftwaffe

At 21, he was a fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain, a three-month period when air force personnel defended the skies against a large-scale assault by the German air force, the Luftwaffe.

It was a cause of acute embarrassment for Berlin given that a brigadier general in the Luftwaffe appeared to allow spies into the secure call by dialling in on an insecure line.

This kind of siren, so strongly associated in Britain with World War Two, is actually more than a century old, and has been used for all kinds of emergencies - not just Luftwaffe bombing raids.

The mosquitos, as I remember, were as vicious as the Luftwaffe.

But whoever it was that picked up an insecure line in a Singapore hotel room late one February night, this Luftwaffe leak has been damaging for Germany.