Ewan Scott is an agent with Department RE.
The proper name is "Department RE (for Research and Evaluation)", sometimes labeled just RE). It is a "section of the British Civil Service established sixteen years previously" and is a member of the larger British Intelligence community. It is said to be "not only clearly unorthodox but also highly important". We first learn of the organization through the eyes of two women working for its duo Directors, men named Sleightley (referred to as K) and Pond (known as C), and it is from them that we are told that none of the friends of these two ladies in the Service knew anything about the Department. This is noteworthy because they knew that you learned a lot more about your own organization "from outside the department than from daily contact with one's bosses inside" and to their amazement, they were learning that no one not in RE knew anything about it, at least not the highly covert intel side of it.
Officially the other side of the operations was tasked to "collect and assess information relating to commercial and theoretical trends and practices, which helped other Civil Service departments i their forward planning and purchasing" (whew!). This free range gave the organization extremely powerful abilities and cover to conduct the secret side of its unofficial mandate. Put another way, RE has "no responsibility to, and owed no loyalty to, either the British Government of the day or its acknowledged anti-subversion and counter-espionage arms, MI5 and MI6.
Another very telling piece of intel on RE is that Sleightley had sometime back successfully bugged the private phone of the Director of sister agency, MI6, and routinely monitored it and made notes.
Ewan Scott is said to be "one of their most experienced agents, an ex-Fleet Air Arm pilot well skilled in flying just about anything - "planes, helicopters, and suchlike". He is "Scottish by birth and educated in England", pleased that his last name "matched his nationality". His specialty, besides being extremely good at survival all alone in the very dangerous world, seems to be blending in. He demonstrates several times his ability to be absorbed into a group and largely ignored until he wants to be noticed, as well as the sense to know when it is a good idea to just quietly slip away. He is not a person to choose violence as a primary method of dealing with a problem but should it be necessary, he is very good at it.
Also playing a major role in the first recorded adventure before heading to her own solo mission is fellow RE agent who would go on to have her own solo adventure later. She is described in Pond's mind as "startlingly beautiful" and who is shown to be even more ruthless when needed than Scott.
Good Lines:
- "Vice-Admiral Pink ... ruled the Special Intelligence Service with the exquisite subtlety of a Sherman tank knocking over a brick wall."
- "The Department considered all SIS hit men to be either cowboys or hip-shooters, and frequently both."
- One of the RE Directors said of a sister agency, "SIS have the remarkable facility of not worrying about anything until it's happened, by which time it is generally too late".