The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [175]
In April 1937 Sinclair had told Hamilton Stokes in Gibraltar that gathering intelligence on the Italian armed forces was ‘of the highest importance’. On 2 June he assured Hankey that, ‘in my opinion, Italy should occupy the position of Public Enemy No. 1, as far as this country is concerned’, and, fearing a crisis in Anglo-Italian relations (which did not in the end occur), London sent out questionnaires on Italian naval and military matters to the heads of station at Sofia, Brussels, Cairo, Rome, Athens, Vienna and Paris. For nearly three years, up to August 1938, a network targeting the Italian navy in Trieste and Genoa had operated quite successfully out of Austria, but after the Anschluss which united Germany and Austria in March 1938, arrests by the Gestapo broke up the organisation.
By the time Franco and the Nationalists had won the Spanish Civil War in the spring of 1939, there is little evidence that SIS had been able to produce very much of value in political or technical military information. At this stage, however, the Service’s chief focus had turned to Italy and Germany. In February 1937 Captain E. H. Russell, head of SIS’s Naval Section, told Sinclair that ‘for many years to come the Mediterranean will be one of the chief centres of activity during strained relations or war’. It was therefore ‘essential to obtain a resident agent both in Sardinia and Sicily . . . to report on naval concentrations and coast defences, air concentrations, aerodromes and military subjects’. On 10 March a circular went out to all the SIS stations in Europe and North Africa to find suitable candidates. Within a month Biffy Dunderdale in Paris believed he had discovered the very man, a French commercial traveller, already working as an agent for the French navy. Dunderdale said that his motivation to work for the British too was that ‘he believes our two countries should stand together whilst he is also desirous of adding to his income’. This agent’s brief relationship with SIS demonstrates some of the practical difficulties of expanding operations. Dunderdale paid him quite generously to visit the strategically important island of Pantellaria (a particular target, west of Malta between Sicily and Tunisia). When his report went to London, Winterbotham of the Air Section cast doubt on details of the Italian aircraft carrier Miragli, allegedly in the island harbour, while the Naval Section maintained more of an open mind. Although Rex Howard thought it ‘extremely doubtful’ that the agent had been to Pantellaria at all, the report was passed on to the Admiralty and Air Ministry for comment. Dunderdale began to get cold feet about employing a man who had been ‘doing this kind of work far too long under too many masters’, and claimed that ‘in normal circumstances I should never employ such an individual but in view of the present situation I thought I would give him a trial’. Even after the Admiralty and Air Ministry commented favourably on his intelligence (which suggests that in this case their critical faculties might have been blunter than those of SIS), the risk of running an existing French agent seems to have been too great for Dunderdale, who appears to have dropped him shortly thereafter.
Anglo-French liaison
The fact that SIS stations operated in France from the mid-1920s onwards reflects the importance of liaison with the French security and intelligence authorities. At the start, Biffy Dunderdale’s station focused mostly on the Soviet target, using (among others) some White Russian contacts first established in postwar Istanbul. Dunderdale was very protective of these men, a number of whom supplied information from within the Soviet Union, though a proportion of this could hardly be described as espionage. In 1934 he described one Paris-based émigré, who had been employed by SIS for seven years, as being particularly useful in obtaining official handbooks from the Russian Military Publishing Office, in which he had ‘a friend to whom he frequently sent presents’.