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‘imperial policing’ through the Middle East, SIS had established a station in Jerusalem in 1933. The representative had cover as Military Liaison Officer in Air Headquarters, and the air force paid the greater part of the station’s expenses. Major John Shelley, a fluent Arabic-speaker who had been a Military Intelligence officer in Shanghai, was the first head of station, but was not a great success and was replaced early in 1936 by ex-Indian Army Major John Teague, who by 1939 had two assistants. One tiny indicator of the Service’s refocusing on Germany in the mid-1930s occurs in the records relating to an officer, talent-spotted by Shelley in 1934. He was interviewed by Rex Howard, who judged him ‘to be of a superior type & eminently suitable’ for appointment in the Middle East. Having been approved for employment in the Service, but waiting for a vacancy to occur, the candidate wrote to Howard arguing that he could increase his usefulness ‘by learning another language’. What would be the most suitable one for him to learn? Having consulted Shelley on the matter, Howard noted: ‘German suggested.’

Palestine became an increasingly heavy commitment for the army and RAF as internecine strife intensified and the Arab revolt simmered on. In the later 1930s troubles in Palestine kept some twenty thousand British troops pinned down ‘in peace-keeping operations which showed no sign of ever coming to an end’.1 Although the work of the Jerusalem station had originally been intended to cover the Arab Middle East generally, under Teague it tended to concentrate on Palestine and the help that neighbouring countries were giving to the rebellion. Teague himself recalled that political intelligence from Iraq ‘was only generally second grade’, though information was ‘quite good about the clandestine support that the Iraq Government was giving to the Mufti of Jerusalem, as the spear head of the Palestine revolt’. Syria and Lebanon, he thought, were ‘not too bad’, but ‘Persia [Iran] remained naked and unashamed’. Another task was monitoring illegal Jewish immigration, as the Mandate authorities had placed a limit on Jewish settlement in the country. Drawing on SIS’s resources in Turkey and the Balkans, Teague reported that SIS tracked the departure of ships from Black Sea countries and their movement through the Dardanelles. ‘The fact’, he added (embodying a shrewd participant’s observation about the acquisition and use of intelligence), ‘that the British could do nothing to prevent these derelict hulks from reaching the shores of Palestine did not make the information in itself less excellent.’

The Ethiopian Crisis of 1935-6 epitomised Mussolini’s new imperialistic foreign policy. Seeking to expand its African possessions, which already included Libya, Eritrea and Italian Somaliland, Italy invaded Ethiopia in October 1935 and in seven months had conquered the country. As with Japan in Manchuria, the aggressor power simply ignored international protests, a lesson not lost on Hitler later in the decade. During the crisis the perennial problem of SIS finance was illustrated by work in Malta. As tension rose in the autumn of 1935 Biffy Dunderdale was put in charge of a new organisation to develop intelligence operations from the island and co-ordinate it with the armed service authorities there. One early venture was a disinformation scheme whereby SIS set about circulating a rumour among Italian agents and ‘unreliable’ Maltese that a special installation with ‘shattering interference apparatus’ to bring down aircraft was being erected on the RAF station at Kalafrana in the south-east of the island. But Malta had hardly got started before operations were checked. ‘Until further funds are forthcoming,’ instructed Sinclair on 25 October, ‘no more commitments of any sort are to be entered into in connection with the Mediterranean situation.’

Another crisis bringing work for SIS was the Spanish Civil War, which broke out in July 1936 between the left-wing Republican government and Nationalist forces led by General Francisco Franco. Although Britain