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By Root 2713 0

anxious to keep tabs on Irish political opinion and MI5 was asked to set up an organisation to report on Eire. Kell, recalled Vivian some years later, ‘refused point blank on the grounds that such a project was too dangerous and that, moreover, he had no suitable personnel or means to carry it out’. The Prime Minister then sent for Sinclair, told him that now Eire had to be regarded as a ‘foreign country’, SIS would have ‘to do what Kell had refused to do’. Sinclair deputed Vivian to provide ‘a periodical survey of the situation in Ireland, with particular reference to extremist republican opinion, the I.R.A. and German penetration’. This task, reflected Vivian, was ‘not within our regular range of duties’, and was ‘undertaken reluctantly as no other Department was willing to take the risk’. Because of the ‘extraordinary delicacy and dangers’ of the operation, he was instructed to report only to Sinclair and not to mention the matter to anyone inside or outside the Service, unless directly involved. Essentially, this was not an intelligence operation, and there was no real network of agents, but, in the words of an MI5 review of its wartime activities in Ireland, it constituted a ‘very restricted information service’, in which Vivian, using Southern Irish contacts principally secured through the Royal Ulster Constabulary, provided ‘a limited cross section of private opinion of current events of political or public interest in Eire’.27 After the outbreak of war, when Ireland remained neutral, there were heightened worries, especially in the Admiralty, that German submarines might re-provision in Ireland or the country be used for intelligence activities against the United Kingdom. There was a modest expansion of SIS’s work but, after MI5 finally engaged with Eire, Britain’s security requirements in this area were met by an eventually close liaison between the Security Service and the Irish authorities.28

9

Approaching war

In the spring of 1932 the British Cabinet abandoned the ten-year rule it had adopted in 1919, though, because of the desperate economic circumstances of the time, this was not taken to be a signal that defence expenditure might immediately be increased. Nevertheless, in the mid-1930s the government’s purse-strings began slowly to be loosened, as Britain started to rearm in the face of mounting international challenges. The occupation of Manchuria by an aggressive, expansionist Japan in 1931 challenged British interests in the Far East. In the 1930s, too, the Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini began to pursue an increasingly assertive foreign policy, seeking to establish a new Roman empire across the Mediterranean and in Africa. With a modern, powerful navy under construction, Italian ambitions threatened Britain’s vital imperial communications and trade across the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Adolf Hitler’s ascent to power in Germany in 1933 was accompanied by heightened German aspirations, as his militaristic Nazi government set about righting the wrongs (as they saw it) of the punitive Versailles peace settlement. Germany’s militarism unsettled and alarmed its neighbours, especially the newly independent, post-1919 states of Czechoslovakia and Poland in Central Europe.

Crises in the 1930s

From the start the new Nazi government in Germany began persecuting Jews and implementing increasingly restrictive and draconian policies which were to culminate in the Final Solution. Anti-Semitism, indeed, was rife throughout interwar Europe and had stimulated a growing stream of refugees to Palestine, where Zionists endeavoured to establish a Jewish National Home. In Palestine, which the British ruled as a League of Nations Mandate under the Versailles treaty, the growing numbers of Jewish settlers helped to destabilise an already difficult communal situation and contributed to the outbreak of an Arab rebellion against the Jews and the British which lasted from April to October 1936, and erupted again from November 1937 to November 1938. Backed by the RAF, who took the leading role in