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By Root 2729 0

between Spain and the United Kingdom the Passport Control Office in the Spanish capital was closed down and the Service’s resources were concentrated in Barcelona. This office was run from Geneva until it, too, was wound up in December 1923. For the rest of the 1920s a skeleton network was maintained mostly under business cover, with agents communicating in a variety of ways. One, who worked for a Liverpool-based shipping company, was to receive messages written inside the postal wrappers for copies of the Observer newspaper mailed from England. Another, a merchant in Valencia, was instructed to use three envelopes. The inner one was to be ‘addressed only to X/O’ (the appropriate person at Head Office). This was to be placed in one marked ‘for “C”’, which in turn went into one addressed to ‘G. N. Bland Esq’, the whole package being given to the British consul in Valencia for transmission to London in a diplomatic bag. Reflecting an increasingly professional approach to intelligence work, in February 1924 this agent was specifically told that ‘information from public sources, from the press or of historical interest only’ was ‘not required’. Bearing in mind the growing discontent in Spain and the apparently precarious position of the military regime of General Primo de Rivera (who had seized power in September 1923), the main priority was for political intelligence, including ‘inside and advance information of a violent upheaval against the Military Régime’. London was also interested in ‘relations between Spain and Italy, which may affect the strategical situation in the Mediterranean’, the ‘policy of Spain with regard to Gibraltar’, and the political and military situation of Spanish Morocco. With this agent, at least, London expressed no interest at all in Communists.

After the Armistice in 1918 Major Hans Vischer, who was based in Berne, was instructed to open stations in the capitals of countries emerging from the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian empire: Vienna, Prague and Budapest. Captain Ernan Forbes-Dennis was Passport Control Officer and head of station at Vienna from December 1919 to October 1922. Many years afterwards he recalled that he had been given no specific instructions and that ‘the diplomats at the Legation were still very much of the old school who cultivated the members of the old aristocratic families’ rather than establishing any contacts with the circles now controlling the country. Forbes-Dennis managed to establish ‘a firm relationship’ with the social-democrat head of the Vienna police, Dr Johannes Schober, founder of the International Criminal Police Association, later Interpol. But he did not run agents, had no covert sources and had his hands full with Passport Control work. One acquaintance who passed through Vienna in the summer of 1920 told Desmond Morton he was ‘very sorry for Forbes-Dennis here. He is having a devil of a time with no help and surrounded by what appear to be thousands of seekers after passport visas.’ In 1922 Forbes-Dennis resigned. He and his wife, the novelist Phyllis Bottome, set up a finishing school in Kitzbühel, Austria, where Ian Fleming was later a pupil.24 He was replaced by his assistant, whom Forbes-Dennis dismissed as having ‘decidedly leftish views’ and alleged had been ‘constantly catching VD and having to have medical treatment’. He was succeeded by Captain Thomas J. Kendrick in December 1925. Kendrick, a South African who had served in Field Intelligence Security during the war, and with MI1(c) in Cologne after the war, remained head of station until he was arrested by the Gestapo in August 1938.

In the interwar years, Kendrick was regarded by London as one of their best heads of station. Leaving the bulk of the Passport Control duties to assistants, he concentrated on Communist groups in Austria, as well as developing networks working on Czechoslovakia. One of these was run by an ex-officer of the Imperial Austrian Army, who worked in the Czechoslovak Ministry of Defence. Designated ‘44084’, he was an ethnic German who, although rabidly anti-Czech, had automatically