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opposed to the killing of one of his own agents, got Muruzov to release him, but (presumably to be on the safe side) had him dismissed from SIS employment. The affair clearly rocked the Service. Reviewing the situation at Broadway in January 1936, some officers felt that the Bucharest station could no longer be relied upon for Soviet information. Menzies was ‘profoundly disturbed’ about the extent of OGPU penetration in the Romanian networks, but he also maintained that SIS could not prove 109/18’s guilt. His impression, indeed, was that ‘much valuable material’ had come ‘from this station during the regime of the present 14000 [Chidson]’. The War Office had cast no serious doubt upon the reliability of SIS’s sources and (straining perhaps to make the best of the situation) he felt it ‘almost impossible that the O.G.P.U. should have fed us with genuine material for years’. In Bucharest Chidson was equally reluctant to accept that his entire operation was compromised. During February, in an effort to contact two of 313’s sources and resume work, he sent a trusted agent into the Soviet Union. Neither he nor 313’s contacts were heard of again. Presumed betrayed to the OGPU through 109/18, by April 1936 they had been reported as casualties. This was, in effect, the end of SIS’s Soviet operations in Romania.

Chidson was subsequently transferred to The Hague, and in August 1936 Archie Gibson took over as head of station at Bucharest. Shortly afterwards he reported Muruzov’s annoyance at SIS’s attempts to try to sustain an organisation in Romania, which the latter correctly presumed could not operate against the Soviet Union and which he therefore assumed was either working or preparing to work against Romania. Muruzov, wrote Gibson, had in fact been very helpful to the British, ‘putting his own men at our disposal’, providing facilities for frontier-crossing, ‘to say nothing of information which came from his sources and many other favours. From us,’ reported Gibson, ‘he has had a gold cigarette case, an occasional gift of cigarettes and, from time to time, some information.’ But the Bucharest station (and the Anglo-Romanian intelligence relationship as a whole) never recovered from the Flemmer debacle. The whole affair amply demonstrated a recurring dilemma whereby continuing and apparently well-founded intelligence operations are suddenly undermined by the discovery of possible treachery. Perhaps hoping against hope and clearly reluctant to abandon years of careful intelligence work, neither Chidson nor Menzies was initially willing to concede that SIS’s Romania operations might have been thoroughly compromised. While in one sense (and in marked contrast to Muruzov’s much more hard-nosed and ruthless attitude) this embodied a commendable faith in their existing agents, if not also (and less admirably) in their own good judgment, in the end it appears to have had fatal consequences for the network Chidson tried to revive in the spring of 1936. Chidson’s perhaps overly trusting attitude was also to have disastrous consequences at his next posting, where Folkert van Koutrik, the assistant to SIS’s head agent at The Hague station, was turned by the Abwehr and betrayed leading German agents of both SIS and MI5.

In contrast to Romania, which had taken the Allied side during the First World War, Bulgaria had been an enemy power, and between the wars the SIS station in Sofia had little or no official contact with the local security services. Here, indeed, the generally applied prohibition on working against the country of residence did not apply and at the start the station concentrated on looking out for breaches of the Neuilly peace treaty, which the Bulgarians had signed in November 1919. Subversive activities of Communists and the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (a violent extreme nationalist group with ambitions to add Greek and Yugoslav territory to Bulgaria) were important targets. Throughout the interwar years Sofia set its net wider and began to gather intelligence on Yugoslavia, Romania, Turkey, Italy, the