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He also supplied ‘reports on Russian naval matters based on personal knowledge, press & casual sources’, as well as obtaining ‘newspapers prohibited for exportation’. Another of Dunderdale’s old Istanbul contacts worked in a Soviet army office in Tiflis and sent information about military movements and some technical material on weapons and equipment to Paris enclosed in local newspapers. There was also a network in south Russia based round a railway official, whose reports on railway traffic in the ‘central Asian Military District’ Menzies described in November 1930 as ‘very valuable’. Eighteen months later, however, this agent and his group were dropped for being too costly.

The French authorities were aware of at least some of Dunderdale’s activities, and there had been direct co-operation, for example, in debriefing the Soviet defector Boris Bajanov in 1928. During the 1930s, moreover, it is clear that the French not only condoned Dunderdale’s work but also collaborated with SIS in targeting Germany.4 In November 1933, based partly on information evidently provided by official French sources, Menzies circulated a detailed review of the state of French intelligence. As in Britain, money was an issue and Menzies observed that the French equivalent of SIS (the Service de Renseignements) had recently been obliged to reduce some operations due to budget cuts. He noted the close relations between the French and Polish Secret Services and that the French were obtaining valuable results on Italy from a network based in Algiers. Several French agents had been placed in Germany, but they were ‘definitely forbidden to send in any reports at present’, as they were intended solely for use in time of war. Menzies also thought it worth remarking that the French were employing a number of ‘high class female agents’.

From the mid-1930s Dunderdale forged increasingly close relations with French colleagues. Lieutenant Paul Paillole of the counter-espionage Service de Centralisation des Renseignements met him in 1937, and afterwards recalled that he was a most agreeable and charming colleague (‘un camarade séduisant, d’une elegance raffinée’) whose efforts to foster friendly relations were greatly appreciated on the French side. By the late 1930s both sides were sharing information about the Abwehr (Military Intelligence) and the Sicherheitsdienst (the Schutzstaffel (SS) security service), as well as the methods and propaganda of the Nazi regime generally.5 On a visit to Colonel Rivet, head of the Service de Renseignements, in October 1937, Menzies (described by the French as the ‘Chief ’ of the British Intelligence Service) said that he was interested in three broad topics: German military information; Italian activities in the Mediterranean generally, as well as specific details of Italian and German military equipment being used in the Spanish Civil War; and political opinion in France, especially about possible Anglo-French action regarding Spain. Menzies admitted to the French that there were many shortcomings in his intelligence on the German army, but that he was much better informed about Italian matters and military developments in Spain. Reflecting on German ambitions in Central Europe, he predicted that German forces might occupy Austria within three weeks (it was in fact five months before this happened), and Germany would certainly put similar pressure on Czechoslovakia. He thought that neither French nor British public opinion would favour going to war over Czechoslovakia. The British, he insisted, were not ready for military action, nor would they be for some time. In his view, therefore, the only option for the moment was to wait. The French considered that this unusually frank political opinion was ‘certainly a personal opinion’, but not a ‘negligible’ one, bearing in mind the significant role they assumed Menzies played in the British War Office.6

In July 1938, through Rivet, Menzies arranged a meeting with French intelligence officers for Major Richard Stevens, head of station-designate at The Hague.7 Stevens subsequently