19/08/2026
During the First World War, British intelligence entrusted sensitive messages to teenage girls because the Boy Scouts had proved too noisy and unreliable.
When war broke out in 1914, the organization that would become MI5 needed messengers inside its offices. Boy Scouts seemed like the obvious choice. They were already being used across Britain for wartime duties, guarding railway bridges, assisting with communications and even working as temporary messengers for the Home Office.
Inside the Security Service, however, the experiment did not go particularly well.
According to MI5's own later account, the Boy Scouts proved "feckless and noisy." So intelligence officials replaced them with Girl Guides.
The girls they wanted were remarkably young: between 14 and 16 years old. But the requirements were specific. A Guide had to be of "good standing, quick, cheerful and willing."
These teenagers were now carrying messages through the offices of Britain's counterespionage service while the country was hunting German spies.
There was even a performance system. Patrol leaders awarded the girls marks each day. At the end of the month, the patrol with the highest score received a prize picture, which they were allowed to keep until another patrol beat them the following month.
It sounds almost absurdly innocent beside the work happening around them.
Britain's intelligence officers were intercepting communications, tracking suspected enemy agents and confronting a new kind of wartime espionage. Moving information through that secret bureaucracy were teenage Girl Guides whose reliability had earned them a job originally intended for boys.
More than a century later, MI5 itself still tells the story.
The Boy Scouts were too noisy.
So they called in the girls.
