The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [159]
One matter increasingly of concern to SIS in the 1930s was that of communications. In general the Service favoured supplying stations with wireless sets which would provide secure (given that reliable cyphers were employed), autonomous communications, not dependent on the world-wide (albeit British-dominated) cable network. But wireless sets could not be introduced without the permission of the British diplomatic mission in the country concerned. When SIS proposed to install a set in the Shanghai consulate-general in July 1933, Lampson turned it down flat, taking the opportunity again to complain about the Service in general (and presumably Steptoe in particular). They should keep ‘to their own province’ and report ‘on such things as communist activities, Indian movements, drug traffic etc instead of encroaching on the political side’. Sinclair thought Lampson’s attitude ‘extremely unfair’ and that he had ‘completely misunderstood the functions of S.I.S.’, which were ‘primarily to supply information to the Foreign Office and the Fighting Forces which cannot be obtained through official channels’. The British government, he added, was ‘hardly likely to expend some £100,000 a year on obtaining information solely about such comparatively unimportant matters as drug traffic, or even Communism’.
The clear priority which Sinclair gave here to ‘Foreign Office’ and ‘Fighting Force’ information echoed a paper on SIS’s position in the Far East which he had circulated to the three armed service Intelligence Directors in March 1928. The ‘primary Far East intelligence target’, he said, was Japan. After five years of repeated failures and the expenditure of large sums of money, all that had been achieved was the establishment of a skeleton organisation which aimed to give warning of Japanese mobilisation. In April 1923 Cumming had sent out a representative, ‘CT/60’, working under business cover to report on Japanese naval and air matters. After two years he had a network of some dozen contacts located in several locations, including Tokyo, Kobe and Nagasaki, but claimed that he could only proceed very slowly because of ‘the complete mistrust that these people (from the highest to the lowest) have of their fellow beings’. Evidently frustrated by the continued lack of progress (and having spent some £5,000 on the organisation), in April 1928 Sinclair bluntly asked the service intelligence chiefs if they considered further expenditure on the Japanese intelligence target was justified. The Admiralty said ‘No’, the War Office and Air Ministry ‘Yes’, but the Foreign Office decided against any further expenditure, noting that ‘valuable information’ was already provided from time to time from an unspecified ‘Japanese source’, though this was presumably signals intelligence from GC&CS, which had had some success with Japanese codes.
The arrival in May 1933 of a new naval Commander-in-Chief, Far East Station, Admiral Sir Frederic Dreyer, stirred things up. The forceful and ambitious Dreyer had been Deputy Chief of the Naval Staff and had been expected to rise to the very top of the navy, but his career had been cut short by the Invergordon Mutiny of 1931 for which the Staff had to take some collective responsibility, and so he had to be content with the China station. Convinced that war with Japan was inevitable, he complained to Sinclair in September about the attitude of Admiral Gerald Dickens, the Director of Naval Intelligence: ‘How in the name of hell can he expect the powers that be to put their shoulders to the wheel and give me the ships, men, harbour defence gear, etc., of which I am so lamentably short, if he, the D.N.I., tells me that