Thursday, April 26, 2007

Now you see it, then you don’t

So you want to see the parts that other maps don’t show you? The Ordinance Survey may have omitted 16,000 square kilometres of military warehouses, buildings and other installations which add up to over 1,00o contaminated sites and a further 3,000 sites but they are now available for all to see.

So who broke the secrets? Why and how are they now available?

The answer is straight out of a John Le Carre novel – well almost. Landmark’s MD Richard Pawley, whose company now publish these hidden sites says, “There were 100,000 paper maps in a railway carriage in a siding in Estonia when the communist regime collapsed.”

Were they left behind deliberately, merely forgotten in the haste to disappear or part of some cold war plot? No one knows the answer expect perhaps Smiley’s Russian counterpart.