• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2757 0

to be an important nursery of officers who were to serve in SIS until the Second World War and beyond. Valentine Vivian, Rhys Samson’s deputy in 1919 (and successor as head of station from 1920 to 1923), was one. Among other colleagues who worked for the Service in early postwar Turkey were Harold Gibson and Wilfred Dunderdale. Gibson – ‘Gibbie’ – worked in Istanbul from October 1919 until 1922, when he was posted to Sofia in September and Bucharest (where he became head of station) in December. In Istanbul both Dunderdale and Gibson recruited networks of Russian anti-Communist agents. It was not unusual for agents and their case-officers to strike up close relationships and the two SIS men continued to run some of these agents when they moved on to other stations. One former Tsarist officer (whose motives were described as ‘finance, anti-Bolshevik, pro-British’), ‘HV/109’, moved with Gibson to Bucharest, from where he ran a large group of sub-agents in the Ukraine and Bessarabia. But he also forged links with other foreign intelligence services, including the Romanians and Bulgarians. By November 1930 it was thought likely that the OGPU had become aware of him. SIS also worked on the Turkish target, though this was not without risk. One successful agent, ‘RV/5’, gathered information in his men’s outfitting shop, which was patronised by officers associated with the reformist Committee of Union and Progress. But one of the tailor’s sub-agents in the Turkish Foreign Ministry was caught red-handed, following which RV/5 himself was transferred to Egypt ‘because his position in Constantinople was endangered’.

SIS’s efforts to collect intelligence on Kemal and the Nationalist movement met with varying success. During 1921 Vivian submitted weekly situation reports which Woollcombe in London thought were ‘of immense value’. At the Turkish end, however (and demonstrating how problematic SIS’s relations with customers could be), Vivian complained in December that Colonel Gribbon of Army Intelligence had tried to persuade him to ‘recant on one of my Situation Reports, not on the grounds that the information was not well supported, but on the grounds that he would like it to have a different twist in order to help a policy which he favoured . . . Of course I refused,’ wrote Vivian, though ‘tactfully enough not to offend him.’ One ‘very reliable’ agent, ‘JQ/6’, a ‘Turkman of European appearance’, Russian education and a former Russian cavalry officer who spoke ‘Turkman, Tartar, Turkish, Russian, Rumanian and fair English and German’, with good contacts in Turkmeni, Caucasian and Azerbaijani circles, set up a coffee shop in Istanbul which became a centre of Kemalist political gatherings. But by January 1923, having become known to many ‘Azerbaijanis now working for Turks’, he had to be got quickly out of Istanbul. SIS ‘bought him a perfectly genuine Polish passport . . . with all the necessary visas’ and moved him to Romania. Vivian described him as ‘one of the very best agents we have got’. He was ‘ardently Anglophile, and being still young I have great hopes of his future usefulness’. JQ/6 went on to Berlin, where SIS remained in contact. In 1929 he was sent to Baghdad (masquerading as an Iranian, but also carrying a German passport) to work on Soviet activity in the region. There he was to set up a transport business, for which SIS would provide a modest amount of capital, optimistically hoping that ‘in time’ the business ‘should pay for itself and even make a profit’. But the agent (who was perhaps not so reliable after all) disappeared without trace between Marseilles and Baghdad and was never heard of again.

In the immediate postwar years, an Indian, who went under the pseudonym ‘Parsifal’, was run by Vivian, who asserted long afterwards that he had penetrated Kemalist circles and, until discovered in 1921, had provided most of SIS’s information on Kemal’s intentions and activities. An early SIS report from agent ‘MS/1’ in December 1920 quoted Dimitri Atchkoff, a Bulgarian parliamentarian and close friend of Kemal, as asserting