The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [155]
The Far East
During the early twentieth century the United Kingdom had very extensive commercial, imperial and strategic interests across South-East and East Asia. Flanked by Britain’s imperial possessions of India and Burma, and with garrison outposts at Hong Kong in the south and Weihaiwei (Weihei) in the north (the latter held until 1930), China was especially important for British trade and investment. With its weak central government and perennial internal divisions, China presented more of an opportunity than a threat to British interests, while Japan, from the late nineteenth century a rapidly industrialising and ambitious maritime power, represented a very serious potential challenge. While this had been alleviated by the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, and Japan had fought (though fairly half-heartedly) on the Allied side in the First World War, some British policy-makers continued to regard it as a real threat, particularly after the alliance lapsed in 1923. In London, too, there was an increasing appreciation in the 1920s and 1930s that Britain’s imperial resources were scarcely adequate to meet its responsibilities to defend its widely scattered Far Eastern interests. In such circumstances good and timely intelligence could be of vital assistance.13
From a very early stage Cumming had intentions to develop secret service work in the Far East, but while his postwar plans for the region were quite expansive, they appear to have been of comparatively marginal importance. When in 1920 Winston Churchill presented his Cabinet colleagues with schemes for £125,000 and £65,000 Secret Service budgets, the biggest cut Cumming proposed for the latter was the Far East, from £15,000 to £1,000.14 Bearing in mind the Admiralty’s interest in the region, however, this may have been a tactical suggestion on Cumming’s part. If so, it seems to have been successful, since in 1923 (even after the Secret Service allocation had been reduced to £90,000) the Far Eastern Group retained a total budget of £18,200, of which only £1,200 was Passport Control money. But the reductions which affected all aspects of SIS work had their impact here too. In 1934-5, the next year for which we have reliable figures, only £6,460 was devoted to both China and Japan.
As elsewhere, SIS’s Far Eastern dispositions in the 1920s were primarily directed against the Bolshevik target. In December 1920 Cumming agreed with the India Office jointly to send out Godfrey Denham, who had been Deputy Director of the Delhi Intelligence Bureau (which monitored subversive activities within India), to be ‘head of the organisation’ in the Far East, the India Office ‘paying him his salary & office fund’, and Cumming ‘providing £10,000 a year for 3 years of our work’. The following February Denham went out to Shanghai ‘with a mandate to be in charge of all our work in Japan, China, Tibet and Siberia and Southern Asia’. In June 1921 he produced a forty-five-page paper on ‘Bolshevism and Chinese Communism and Anarchism’ which pulled together all the available information on left-wing personalities, organisations and activities in China. His conclusion was one of balanced gloom: ‘Thus with Bolshevik activity in the North and a growing Chinese Anarchist party in the South, both of which are extremely anti-British in their propaganda, there is every need for care in the future.’ In 1921-2 Denham reported extensively (and expansively) on the political situation in both China and Japan. Had he confined himself to the collection and circulation of secret intelligence he might have ruffled