Probably no general has received so much intelligence about his enemy as the Duke of Wellington when he fought the Peninsular campaign during the Napoleonic wars. That intelligence began at the Spanish frontier, at Irun, where a cobbler sat in the doorway of his shop and counted the French battalions coming in and the survivors going out. All his observations reached Wellington, as did countless reports from a superbly mounted band of exploring officers and a myriad of Spanish and Portuguese guerril-leros, who made travel for French couriers a nightmare. Dispatches were sent in triplicate because the French knew some would be captured and, naturally, the documents were in code. For a time almost everyone in Wellington's headquarters, from the general downwards, turned their hand to decoding. One officer, George Scovell, made it his speciality, and now Mark Urban, the bbc's diplomatic correspondent, recounts Scovell's exploits in "The Man who Broke Napoleon's Codes".
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