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to be of 46,000 tons (gross) with an armament of twelve 16” guns’. Hankey was sufficiently impressed to congratulate him warmly ‘on obtaining such an important and remarkable piece of information’. Drage, apparently producing some good information from Formosa, was much less successful with Japan. Steptoe continued to report primarily on political matters from Shanghai, while Frank Liot Hill, appointed head of station in Peking in the early 1930s with an ambitious brief to penetrate eastern Siberia, Manchuria and Korea, as well as north China, does not seem to have been producing very much. Hill was still endeavouring to establish viable networks in late 1939, and his list of agents shows that some of his reporting was based on one or two Chinese sources strategically placed at the important Fengtai railway junction just south-west of Peking. In theory they should have been able to provide detailed intelligence on Japanese order of battle as troop trains moved through the junction from the coast and onwards to central China.

The Jonny Case

The case of Johann (‘Jonny’) Heinrich de Graff, a German Communist and agent of both the Comintern and the Fourth Department of the Red Army Staff (later the GRU, Soviet Military Intelligence), was one of the most striking SIS successes of the 1930s. It provided, through a rare penetration lasting for five years, a unique insight into the working practices and personalities of the Comintern. It enabled SIS to forestall a planned Communist revolution in Brazil and was thus an early case of clandestine political action by the Service in Britain’s interests. Geographically, the case spanned Moscow, the United Kingdom, Germany, China and Latin America, and it provided a fuller understanding than hitherto of the extent of Soviet policies and methods of interference in other countries in pursuit of both its political revolutionary and its paramilitary aims. The information from de Graff was confirmed and complemented by two additional sources: another early Soviet defector, an NKVD agent who also started talking to SIS in 1933; and ‘Mask’ intercept material from Comintern communications provided by GC&CS.19

In modern parlance de Graff was a walk-in. The first contact with him was made by Frank Foley, SIS head of station in Berlin since 1923. On 13 February 1933 Foley reported to Sinclair that he was in touch with one Ludwig Dinkelmeyer (de Graff’s alias), ‘German born May 11th ’94’, a ‘Member of Executive of Communist International and Secretary General of illegal Red Front Fighters Union here’. The German, who said he had visited England twice in 1931-2 ‘to report to Moscow on Communist Party of Great Britain’, had, Foley’s signal continued, ‘offered to become agent for me. He states he can give me complete information about Communist propaganda amongst British Armed Forces and continue to keep me informed of most Communist work in England arranged from here.’ De Graff wanted money: 2,000 Reichsmarks down and 500 per month (about £144 and £36; in modern prices something over £7,300 and £1,800 respectively). ‘Consider this most important contact I have yet made and convinced his genuineness. May I continue negotiations?’ asked Foley.

The ‘Jonny Case’, as it became known in SIS, entered the Service folklore, and the story - certainly a good one - undoubtedly grew with the telling. Years afterwards, Vivian said that, after he had been urgently summoned to his office by Sinclair and shown Foley’s telegram, the Chief said he was immediately to go to Berlin. When Vivian protested that he had no overnight luggage, Sinclair said, ‘I’ve done all that, your wife will be up at 11.00 with a suitcase packed for a week and here are your reservations. ’ The archive record more prosaically shows, rather, that Sinclair sent a signal to Berlin summoning Foley home at once. While Foley, and others, helped run the agent, Vivian became Jonny’s principal case-officer, writing up the reports and providing information against which Jonny’s reporting was checked. But Sinclair also took an extremely close interest,