The gas, though banned internationally under the 1925 Geneva Protocol, was the Allied chiefs' secret precaution in case the enemy resorted to chemicals.
"Judges, lawyers, politicians, police chiefs, secret services, even newspaper editors... suppressing uncomfortable evidence or undermining the credibility of witnesses whose evidence contradicts the official narrative".
A conspiracy organised not by a single scheming arch-fiend, but collectively by the British establishment – judges, lawyers, politicians, police chiefs, secret services, even newspaper editors – all of whom have been appointed to their positions because they are "a safe pair of hands".
Stephen Greenblatt, reviewing "Wolf Hall" in The New York Review of Books, likened Cromwell to Beria, Stalin's chief of secret police, and marvelled that Mantel had taken him on.
There is Lavrenty Beria, Stalin's sinister chief of secret police, who lured young Moscow girls to their destruction in his lair.
Not only did Tsar Nicholas I's decision to oversee his career oblige him to submit all his manuscripts for inspection, but his perennially desperate finances entailed humiliating negotiations with the tsar's chief of secret police over his loans.
Analogies have been made with Stalin's chief of secret police and the Inner party member O'Brien in Orwell's 1984, but Cromwell's stocky person moves through these pages more like that of a mobster.
Together, these teenagers so alarmed the authorities that Brighton's senior police officers and council chiefs held secret meetings in early 2014 to discuss the possibility of a terror attack from its residents – and the seaside city was placed on the register of areas requiring extra support under the government's counter-extremism strategy.
The committee of MPs and peers normally takes evidence from the security chiefs in secret.
The man who had supervised the effort, the pitiless chief of the secret police, Lavrenti Beria, raced to telephone Stalin.
