So well documented are efforts to bug embassies that diplomats must know better than to discuss real secrets in their own offices
MI5, MI6, GCHQ, and their counterparts in other countries, must have a regularly updated list of painters, plasterers, and plumbers they can rely on to bug foreign embassies.
Peter Wright, the former MI5 officer, described in his memoirs, Spycatcher, how "we bugged and burgled our way across London at the state's behest, while pompous, bowler-hatted civil servants in Whitehall looked the other way".
Government officials may no longer be pompous, certainly not bowler-hatted, but the bugging goes on, as the foreign minister of Ecuador suggested on Wednesday.
Ten years ago, decades after Wright described his exploits, it was reported, and not denied, that British security and intelligence agencies tried to bug the Pakistani high commission in London when it was being redecorated. Shortly afterwards, Britain accused Pakistan of bugging its high commission in Islamabad.
Wright described in meticulous detail how MI5 bugged the Egyptian embassy in London during the 1956 Suez crisis, as well as the Greek and Indonesian embassies. It also bugged the French embassy so that "every move made by the French during our abortive attempt to enter the Common Market was monitored".
The bugging was orchestrated by GCHQ's London office in a squat, prewar, redbrick building in central London.
A former military police officer, Bill Graham, describes in his book, Break-In, how he was asked by MI6 to bug the Soviet trade mission in Highgate, north London, after he had successfully tendered for a double-glazing contract.
For years, until it was found in 1952, the Russians hid a bug behind the great seal in the US embassy in Moscow.
And in the runup to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, America's National Security Agency asked GCHQ, to join an operation to bug the offices and residencies of the UN ambassadors of those critical of the US-UK military plans.
The US has been busy bugging EU offices in the UN and Brussels, according to documents released by Edward Snowden the American whistleblower this week.
Is it all worth it? Surely by now diplomats must be wary of discussing real secrets in their own offices, rather than in sealed rooms, or parks, or bathrooms when the tap is switched on.
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