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and France brokered a widely supported, though largely ineffectual, Non-Intervention Agreement in August 1936, Germany and Italy (especially the latter) provided men and matériel for the Nationalists; and the Soviet Union intervened on the Republican side, which was also boosted by volunteers from many countries in the International Brigades. SIS’s existing, if rather haphazard, monitoring of Communist activity in Spain meant that the Service was initially better equipped to report on Soviet involvement, though some of this was frustratingly imprecise. In April 1936 a report from a Moroccan-based agent (communicating through Gibraltar) stated that in March an unnamed Soviet ship had landed ‘two large boxes containing rifles and small arms at Algeciras’. The report added that at about the same time the Soviets had provided ‘a few million pounds’ to Communist organisations in Spain. The Political Section in Broadway thought the whole thing ‘of little value’ as the agent did not ‘appear to have checked up his information’. SIS, however, as it informed French Deuxième Bureau colleagues in April, had ‘not the slightest doubt that the Communist International, through its centre in Paris, is financing and controlling overt and subterranean activities in Spain’. French opinions were solicited on the matter, since ‘the establishment of a Soviet regime in the Iberian Peninsula is hardly a happening which anyone can view with equanimity for military, political or economic reasons’.2

SIS was less well positioned to get information on the Nationalist side, but after a fiercely anti-Communist Englishman, Major Hugh Pollard, assisted the Nationalists in July 1936 by flying Franco from the Canary Islands to Morocco, allowing the general to kick-start the armed challenge to the Republic, the Service thought that he might be able to help. Pollard, sporting editor of the magazine Country Life, was a fervent, Fascist-sympathising Catholic with a colourful past, including time as a ‘police adviser’ in Dublin Castle during the Anglo-Irish War of 1919-21.3 In November 1936 Frederick Winterbotham, head of the Air Section, approached Pollard and asked him if he would be prepared to go to Spain and personally put a long series of questions to Franco about his military plans, the external aid he was receiving and how he intended to use his air force. But Pollard asked for too much in return - a diplomatic passport, ‘pay and allowances on the full scale’ and expenses to cover the cost of his horses - he planned to do some hunting while in Spain - and the scheme did not proceed (though during the war Pollard later served in SOE).

The following spring, by which time the Nationalists had been making advances in the north of the country, the Directorate of Military Intelligence (responding to a complaint passed on by the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Maurice Hankey that there was not enough ‘red-hot information from Spain’) noted on 9 March that, owing to the ‘sudden outbreak’ of the war, SIS had ‘unavoidably been somewhat slow in developing their organisation’ in the country. Sinclair was well aware of the problem, though he observed that it was a matter which ‘cannot be done on the spur of the moment’. David Footman of the Political Section remarked on the ‘violent spy hysteria on both sides’ and defined the ideal as ‘agents who can talk freely to the men at the top’. He proposed various possibilities, including liaison with the French through Dunderdale, placing someone at the headquarters of General Eoin O’Duffy (who commanded a ramshackle collection of Irish Fascist Blueshirts), and getting an agent into an ambulance or relief organisation on either side. By the end of March some progress had been made. Dunderdale found a man to report on the flow of foreign volunteers into Spain, and Leonard Hamilton Stokes, a sailor who had first been employed by the Service in the Balkans, began developing some sources from Gibraltar in the south. Aware that the government side was better covered, Sinclair ordered a special effort ‘regarding General Franco’s position,