The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [157]
The so-called 30 May Massacre at the International Settlement in Shanghai in 1925, when Chinese demonstrators were shot by British and British-Indian police, was followed by a wave of strikes and anti-British protests in southern China and Hong Kong. Perhaps slightly defensively (but also evidently to flag up SIS’s capabilities in the region), Sinclair told Nevile Bland at the Foreign Office that ‘in view of the present trouble at Shanghai, it may be of interest to recall that we gave advance information of this in April last, which has already been confirmed up to the hilt by what has actually happened’. In April, for example, SIS had circulated ‘a translation of a very secret despatch dated 26 February, 1925, from the Executive Committee of the 3rd International to its centre at Vladivostock’, containing ‘clear proof of the implication of the 3rd International in the present strike movement in Shanghai’. On 25 June Sinclair sent Tyrrell at the Foreign Office a three-page ‘recapitulation of information, mainly documentary, and obtained from a number of sources’, which ‘clearly shows that the unrest is very largely due to the intrigues of the Soviet Government, and has been very cleverly organised by them’. SIS also acquired copies of the correspondence of the Soviet ambassador, L. M. Karakhan, through an employee of the Soviet consulate-general in Shanghai, despatches which were so inflammatory that they thought ‘he must have been drunk when he wrote them’.
Steptoe had other interests, too. In an intriguing signal to London in June 1928 he proposed paying $2,000 to an American naval rating stationed on the Philippines ‘to supply detailed information on Corregidor defences’. In July 1929 he took on a Chinese man in Shanghai (for ‘$100 a month, plus reasonable expenses’). ‘In addition to knowing the leading Chinese, both bankers, officials and merchants, he also knows the leading members of the present Nanking [Nanjing] Government.’ Unusually, Steptoe had arranged to see this agent personally, ‘since it must be remembered that Chinese agents are very [?often] in possession of information which they will not, repeat not, commit to paper, and which can only be abstracted from them by careful cross-questioning’. But, he reassured Sinclair, ‘I have taken reasonable precautions to see that this agent does not know my real identity either personally, or in my official capacity’. Another target was Formosa (Taiwan), then a Japanese possession. Steptoe found a British merchant in Amoy (Xiamen) on the south-east China coast who undertook ‘to find suitable man either in Amoy or Formosa for penetration Pescadores’, a strategically important group of fortified islands off Formosa’s west coast where there was a Japanese naval base.
By 1930 Steptoe had become ‘28,000’, the senior SIS representative in China, but something of a one-man band. Not only were there no funds for any extensive organisation, but his own success in developing intelligence work in the late 1920s was accompanied by a conviction of the need for a personal relationship with his Chinese agents, which made it very difficult to find even a temporary replacement for him. In dealing with agents, he told London, ‘especially when they are orientals, it is necessary not only to use tact but above all to exercise considerable ingenuity in putting to them certain questions in order to draw from them more information than they are usually disposed to put on paper’. The need for back-up intensified as his health became more precarious. In 1926 he contracted amoebic dysentery, which necessitated six months’ home leave. In July 1930, after another health scare, Sinclair approved his immediate return to England, while instructing that it was ‘imperative that reports should continue on the Chinese political situation not only in the North, but in the Centre and South