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existed under Passport Control Office cover and liaised with the French security service primarily on counter-espionage matters. In 1926 a second station (‘45000’) was set up under Wilfred Dunderdale, to deal with the Deuxième Bureau principally on Soviet and German armed forces intelligence. Dunderdale, known both as Bill and ‘Biffy’, the latter apparently from his prowess as a boxer in the navy at the end of the First World War, was born on Christmas Eve 1899, the son of a British naval engineer based in Odessa. Fluent in Russian, he was employed by Naval Intelligence as an interpreter for the British Senior Naval Officer in Sevastopol in 1919, and also on ‘special intelligence duties’, the latter involving reporting on the military and political situation generally in south Russia. A man of great charm and savoir-faire, in old age he became an incorrigible raconteur. He liked to tell the story of how, while still in his teens, as interpreter for a White Russian general, he found himself translating outside a railway sleeping compartment where the general and his British mistress were seducing each other. He was a great friend of Ian Fleming, and claimed that he found parts of his own stories in the James Bond novels. When head of the SIS Paris station in the 1930s, he had a penchant for pretty women and fast cars, and has been proposed as one of the possible models for Bond.22

Dunderdale was involved in the debriefing of the first high-level Soviet Party official to defect to the West after the revolution, Boris Georgievitch Bajanov, a Politburo secretary who had been an assistant to Stalin in 1923. In early 1928, along with a Russian cavalry officer, Arkady Maximov, he arrived in India, claiming to have important information on the organisation of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, on the Comintern budget and on the working of the OGPU in the Soviet Union and abroad. Alerted to their arrival by IPI, Sinclair declared himself ‘strongly opposed’ to their coming to England, seeing it merely as ‘a transparent ruse to effect their desire to make their way to Europe’. But it was arranged with the Deuxième Bureau to bring the two men to France, where Dunderdale (who concealed his connection with SIS) ran their interrogation. He reported that Maximov was of ‘absolutely no interest to us as he is a typical low-class post-revolutionary officer’, but Bajanov was ‘an exceptionally intelligent man’, from whom he had ‘extracted 140 pages of information’. We are, he told Menzies, ‘producing a whole book mainly on the Polit Bureau and the [O.]G.P.U.’, which he hoped would ‘be a very important guide’. The material included a ‘description of the Government mechanism’ and lively pen-portraits of some two dozen ‘Bolshevist leaders’. While the former was described as ‘very accurate’, London was advised that the latter were less reliable, being ‘the somewhat prejudiced views of an unsuccessful Communist who now has leanings towards Fascism’. Dunderdale also thought that Bajanov (who quickly settled into the Russian émigré community in Paris) ‘considerably exaggerates the strength of the anti-Bolsheviks and the results attained by them in their secret anti-Soviet work abroad’. Towards the end of 1928 an agent in Denmark reported that the OGPU, finding that Bajanov had ‘taken very important documents with him’, had ‘given very urgent instructions to its agents in Paris, London, Berlin, etc. to endeavour to render him innocuous’. Valentine Vivian thought that by now the Soviets had ‘missed the bus’, but in any case he understood Bajanov to be ill and ‘that Tuberculosis is likely to save the G.P.U. agents the expense of a cartridge’. Bajanov, in fact, survived to recount a version of his story to a British journalist in Paris in the 1970s.23

During the war Cumming’s representatives in Iberia – by the end of 1917 he had men in both Madrid and Lisbon – had played second fiddle to Blinker Hall’s Naval Intelligence Department. By 1919 – 20, however, SIS was established in both Madrid and Barcelona, but in 1922 with the abolition of visas