secret service

{{Short description|Type of government agency}}

{{About|the form of government policing|other uses|Secret Service (disambiguation)}}

A secret service is a government agency, intelligence agency, or the activities of a government agency, concerned with the gathering of intelligence data. The tasks and powers of a secret service can vary greatly from one country to another. For instance, a country may establish a secret service which has some policing powers (such as surveillance) but not others. The powers and duties of a government organization may be partly secret and partly not. The person may be said to operate openly at home and secretly abroad, or vice versa. Secret police and the FBI can usually be considered secret services.{{cite web|title=F. Dvornik, Origins of Intelligence Services - 1|url=https://macedonia.kroraina.com/en/fdois/fdois_1.htm|access-date=2023-01-30|website=macedonia.kroraina.com}}

Various states and regimes, at different times and places, established bodies that could be described as a secret service or secret police – for example, the agentes in rebus of the late Roman Empire were sometimes defined as such. In modern times, the French police officer Joseph Fouché is sometimes regarded as a pioneer of secret intelligence; among other things, he is alleged to have prevented several murder attempts on Napoleon during his time as First Consul (1799–1804) through a large and tight net of various informants. William Wickham is also credited with establishing one of the earliest intelligence services that would be recognized as such today and a pioneer of basic concepts of the profession, such as the "intelligence cycle."Michael Durey, "William Wickham, the Christ Church Connection and the Rise and Fall of the Security Service in Britain, 1793-1801" The English Historical Review (June 2006), pp. 714-745 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3806357Elizabeth Sparrow, Secret Service: British Agents in France. 1792-1815 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999)