"It is the almost hilarious case, but perfectly true, that while the CIA "cousins" use banks of computers in which are stored millions and millions of facial fe

"It is the almost hilarious case, but perfectly true, that while the CIA "cousins" use banks of computers in which are stored millions and millions of facial features to try to match up the incoming daily flow of photographs, Britain uses Blodwyn. An elderly and often ill-used lady, forever harassed by her younger male colleagues for a quick identification, Blodwyn has been in the job forty years and works underneath Sentinel House, where she presides over the huge archive of pictures that make up MI6's "mug book." Not a book at all, it is in fact a cavernous vault where are stored rows and rows of volumes of photographs, of which Blodwyn alone possesses an encyclopedic knowledge. Her mind is something like the CIA's computer bank, which she can occasionally defeat. In her memory is stored not the tiniest detail of the Thirty Years' War or even the Wall Street stock prices; her mind stores faces. Shapes of noses, lines of jaws, casts of eyes; the sag of a cheek, the curve of a lip, the way a glass or cigarette is held, the glint of a capped tooth in a smile taken in an Australian pub and showing up years later in a London supermarket--all are grist to the mill of her remarkable memory." (The Fourth Protocol, Frederick Forsyth, 1984.)