The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [174]
Despite the lack of success in Spain itself, Sinclair was evidently getting good intelligence on Mussolini and his intentions concerning the conflict, for on 19 October 1937 he wrote a well-informed note for Sir Warren Fisher on the subject. ‘The main point of the present situation to my mind’, wrote Sinclair, ‘is that Mussolini has simply got to go on in Spain, and that as we are not in a position to go to War, it is far better to let him exhaust himself in Spain rather than he should “run amok” outside Spain.’ Sinclair argued that if ‘we are cautious’ Mussolini might ‘dish himself ’: ‘Taking the long view, time seems to be more on our side than his and nothing is to be gained by rushing matters.’ He thought that Germany might egg the Italians on to challenge Britain and France, but was itself likely to remain neutral and ‘profit by the occasion to achieve her aims as regards Austria and Czechoslovakia’. If there was some useful political intelligence, the same could not be said on the technical side. Also in October 1937, London told the two SIS stations in Paris that War Office requirements were not being met for technical data on new German and Russian weapons being used in Spain. Over the succeeding months Dunderdale recruited an agent who had contacts among Francoist interrogators of Russian International Brigade prisoners-of-war and provided photographs of a new quick-firing Soviet machine gun, as well as information about Soviet high-speed fighters and the arrival of a Soviet air brigade of bombers.
This was evidently not enough for the Air Ministry, who complained bitterly on 1 November 1938 that ‘after more than 2 years of civil war in Spain in which the latest equipment of the Italian Air Force (German, Russian and French also) has been employed’, they had ‘received practically nothing of concrete value from the technical and tactical points of view in the way of secret intelligence’. SIS had provided ‘virtually no information about guns, bombs, anti-aircraft, nor any statistics which would enable us to determine the relative advantages of the different types of weapon in use’. Air Intelligence ‘should have expected by now that we should have quite a museum of guns, bombs, fuses, shells and other technical equipment delivered to our armament research people through the efforts of S.I.S.’. It was conceded that ‘the organisation of secret intelligence work is no doubt difficult but the conditions for obtaining such information could hardly be easier than they are in a civil war in Spain where in both sides there must be very large numbers of traitors at large, and a very large proportion of them sorely in need of cash’.
Sinclair was appalled by this devastating critique. ‘Why has this not been drawn to my notice before?’ he asked, prompting an understandably defensive response from ‘IIa’ of the Air Section. Specific requests for technical equipment had apparently been made in July 1937 and July 1938, but without significant response, and telegrams reiterating the requirements had been ‘immediately despatched’ to the relevant stations. Representatives had been offered ‘an additional £500’ for ‘obtaining samples of technical equipment’. The official admitted that little information had been provided ‘on guns, bombs or anti-aircraft statistics during 1937/8 and only one fragment of bomb and no technical equipment whatsoever’ had been received ‘since the beginning of the Civil War in Spain’. He suggested rather lamely that part of the explanation lay in ‘the difficulty of contacting German XA [Air Force] personnel serving in nationalist Spain’, as they were ‘unapproachable by reason