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ends of a larger Secret Service operation that included not only Dron, but also a number of targets in Europe. The US SS had contacted SOCA in London and the OCLCTIC in Paris. 'That's the way we operate,' said the Secret Service spokesman, Edwin Donovan. 'We really push out our collaborative effort, working with police all over the world. We go to the agency that's working these type of crimes and say that we have this target - and of course sharing information is a key in these cases.'

So the Secret Service was sharing information with the police in Britain, Canada and France. But one group of agents they still weren't sharing it with was their colleagues at the FBI. The evident rancour between the two US agencies sowed confusion among the Europeans - in the end, the French worked with the US SS, the Germans with the FBI and the British politely balanced the two. This resulted in a moment of profound irony, as the only people in the world who knew that the FBI and Secret Service were targeting the same person, JiLsi, belonged to a foreign police force, the Serious Organised Crime Agency in London. It got worse - officers from SOCA realised that the competing American forces were actually investigating each other's undercover agents as suspected criminals. Eventually a senior British civil servant gently informed a higher authority in Washington that perhaps the FBI and the Secret Service should put aside their differ- ences, at least for the duration of the investigation.

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