Information - Protected or Extracted!

    Number 6 once said in an electoral speech that in some place, at some time, all of them held positions of a secret nature, and had knowledge that was invaluable to an enemy. Like him they are there {in The Village} to have that knowledge protected to extracted. Now I can understand that with the Prisoner having handed in his resignation, the British Intelligence Service would want to protect the knowledge which the Prisoner has in his head. Thereby the Prisoner was abducted and placed in The Village, perhaps for the Prisoner's own protection, but chiefly for the protection of the knowledge which he had.
    What I cannot understand, if as I have always thought, The Village is run by British Intelligence, is why the need to extract any such information from the Prisoner-Number 6, when they would have known about any such information in the first place?! In 'Dance of the Dead' the doctor Number 40 is extremely keen on extracting information, his main occupation having been Roland Walter Dutton. But he also tried to extract information from Number 6 using Dutton as a medium. But why the need to extract information about the files he has seen, the projects he knows about, just headings, not details, when British Intelligence would have known about them anyway! And yet would they?
    Perhaps MI9 knew about the information inside Number 6's head, but its quite on the cards that neither MI5 or MI6, or even Naval Intelligence for that matter didn't, but wanted to know. Different sections within British Intelligence {in fiction at least} rarely, if ever, communicate with each other. All have their own secrets which they jealously guard from other departments. So if one section of British Intelligence is responsible for The Village, and the Prisoner worked for a different department, then to try and extract the secret information in the Prisoner's head would be quite natural. This would also account for Sir Charles Portland not knowing where his daughter's fiance is, that he has no knowledge of The Village, if its a different department than his, responsible for the detention centre.
    The Colonel arrived in The Village on assignment. The assignment being that he and Number 6 should change minds, and that having done so the Prisoner's mind in the Colonel's body should be returned to London. The Prisoner's memory erased back to the morning he was due to hand in his resignation. The Prisoner went to see Sir Charles Portland, the man the Prisoner used to work for. But in the guise of the Colonel, Sir Charles didn't recognise him. More than that he didn't recognise the face of the Colonel. So I think we can assume that the Colonel didn't work for Sir Charles Portland's department, so had any of the other Colonel's? Quite obviously the Prisoner had, he had been an old colleague to both, and possibly Colonel Hawke-Englishe! And yet although the Colonel's title is never mentioned within hearing of the Prisoner, the Prisoner knows who he is. The man flying out of The Village is not the man Number 2 thought it was. "The good doctor's mind now inhabits a body perhaps not to his liking, the Colonel's!" So presumably the Prisoner must have known the colonel!
   I think that had it not been the Colonel who had arrived in The Village on assignment, the Prisoner might very well have reported to him back in London, and not Sir Charles Portland, who otherwise would have been superfluous to the story.

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