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Outlook: The spy who pretended to be homeless

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A homeless man sits in the streets of London

19/10/2021 GMT

The spy who pretended to be homeless

BBC World Service - Outlook, The spy who pretended to be homeless

Tom Marcus went undercover as a homeless man to stop extremist attacks in Britain

Tom Marcus - not his real name - was a spy; an undercover agent for the British security agency, MI5 who pretended to be a homeless man living on the streets of London.

To mark the latest James Bond film release, we speak to three people who've been on Outlook in the past, all with an intriguing connection to 007.

Tom Marcus - not his real name - was a spy; an undercover agent for the British security agency, MI5. For several months, he pretended to be a homeless man living on the streets of London. He went to great lengths to blend in, and it was all worth it when he ended up preventing two coaches full of school children from being blown up. He gave this interview in January 2017.

Hum Fleming is the great-niece of Bond creator Ian, and she has her own unique story to tell. When was 13 she had her first epileptic seizure. It took a while to work out that she has temporal lobe epilepsy, and that the seizures had left a scar on her hippocampus - part of the brain that's involved in forming new memories and storing them longer term. This means that most of her memories fade after around six months. Hum hid her condition for years because she was afraid of people's reactions but started talking about it to try to raise awareness of epilepsy. Jo Fidgen spoke to her in May 2019.

And finally, we dug deep into the archives to find out what life is like for a real-life James Bond. This James Bond, who we found in an edition of Outlook which aired in 2002, was a computer salesman from the UK.  

Get in touch: outlook@bbc.com

Picture: A homeless man in the streets of London
Credit: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

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