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his network remained very productive. During the 1920s Paris supplied London with a steady stream of reports on Communism in France. On the whole Jeffes’s evaluation of the Communist threat was quite measured. Commenting in November 1926 on an apparently alarmist report sent to him from London, he observed that although the total number of Communists was, ‘at first glance, somewhat disquieting, when viewed in perspective with the remainder of the population they are in a considerable minority’. He asserted that unless the situation developed ‘unexpectedly in such a way as to give the Communists an un-looked for opportunity’, it seemed to him ‘that they have a very long way to go indeed before they can hope to carry through successfully a serious revolutionary movement in France’.

There is ample evidence in the French intelligence records of the productively close and continuous liaison between SIS and its French opposite numbers between the wars. On the SIS side, from the early 1920s the main people involved were Jeffes (who stayed as representative in Paris until 1937, when he returned to London to be Director of the Passport Control Organisation) and Stewart Menzies. Since the principal French intelligence agency, the Deuxième Bureau, was a branch of Military Intelligence, Menzies, as head of the Military Section IV (he also had fluent French), was the appropriate contact in London. A sample of the exchanges between Menzies and Colonel Robert Lainey in Paris during 1925 gives a flavour of the relationship. In March Menzies asked Lainey for information about ‘a certain Muneyuki’, who was believed to be a Japanese naval intelligence agent working under the assistant naval attaché at the Japanese embassy in Paris and working on British as well as French targets. In June there was an enquiry from Lainey about a Japanese aviation expert in London believed to be involved in espionage. The same month Menzies raised the case of two Japanese officers who had got into trouble for taking photographs of fortifications at Calais. ‘I should be greatly obliged’, he wrote, ‘if you could give me any particulars of the incident, especially the names of the two officers concerned, in case they ever attempt the same thing in this country.’ In 1926 the two services exchanged information about alleged Italian intelligence agents.21

Since the French were world leaders in aviation technology, the Air Ministry particularly desired information about developments and capabilities. In May 1925 the SIS Air Section II noted that the ‘collection of aeronautical intelligence’ was ‘undoubtedly quite a different proposition to the collection of naval or military intelligence’. There was ‘a wide and ill-defined gap between pure S.S. work, i.e. the purloining of documents, etc. and the work of an Air Attaché who has always to be thinking of his official position’. As the Air Ministry (unlike the other two service ministries) was responsible for both civil and military matters it needed to be ‘well-informed about all aeronautical development’. And because of the ‘very vague distinction’ between civil and military aeroplanes, an agent, ‘while collecting civil aviation information’, could ‘easily find himself in the position to obtain military information of great value’. Arising from this, journalistic cover was arranged for a British aviation expert based in Paris, who toured the Continent in 1925 allegedly to research a series of articles on the development of civil aviation. He supplied information about aerodromes which was ‘new’ and ‘of interest’, and both the Air Ministry and the Admiralty hoped that he would be able to investigate the important question of oil reserves for aviation fuel. The Air Ministry, too, wanted information on the Dornier aircraft factory at Romanshorn in Switzerland, where it was understood that prototype aircraft were tested, but there is no evidence that the agent did any further work for the Service.

From the mid-1920s two separate SIS organisations operated in Paris. The original station (coded ‘27000’ and headed by Jeffes)