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of German dockyards was satisfactory for peacetime requirements, but he lamented the fact that he did not have either an officer or a rating serving in the fleet, or a person who could mix freely with naval officers. Admiral Limpenny, head of the Economic Section VI, reported ‘excellent’ information on naval construction, but less good for aircraft. Over the last eighteen months ‘very little’ had been received ‘in regard to production figures and numbers of hands employed in individual factories’. There was a ‘serious lack of information’ on ‘Land Armaments’, and the only information he had ‘on manufacture and outputs of German gun factories’ came from the Anglo-French-Belgian BOX organisation. Finally, Woollcombe offered his opinion on the political intelligence he received. While de Ropp was the most prolific source, he had a fair number of other, occasional agents, including some journalists working in Germany, and stressed the need ‘to increase our supply of first class agents who can provide real authoritative information on German high policy, especially so that we should not be so dependent on de Ropp, who may at any time come under the eye of the Gestapo and drop out of the picture’.

Gestapo attention made life very difficult for the Vienna station, which continued to operate after the Anschluss. The Passport Control Office, too, was overwhelmed with work issuing visas for Jews desperate to leave the country. The head of station and PCO, Tommy Kendrick, reported early in August 1938 that his staff were ‘so overwrought that they will burst into tears at the slightest provocation’. He apologised to Sinclair that his SIS reports were ‘somewhat scrappy and badly collated’ because of the pressure of Passport Control work. Meanwhile a number of Kendrick’s agents were picked up by the Gestapo, who arrested Kendrick himself on 17 August when he was actually on his way to England for a holiday. He was interrogated for three days before being released and ordered to leave the country, after which all intelligence work ceased. As soon as he had been arrested, an assistant and two female secretaries, ‘who did all the secret work, were packed off to London’ and Kenneth Benton, who had been working in the station for almost a year, ‘burned everything secret’. As the office had no official protection (although attached to a consulate-general the Passport Control staff did not have diplomatic status), Benton ‘was afraid that the Gestapo might just come in and search the whole office, so everything that could be burned was destroyed’.17 This was just as well, and on 19 August Menzies reassured the Foreign Office (who were naturally worried about the possible diplomatic fall-out) that there was ‘not the slightest likelihood of any compromising material being found in the shape of documentary evidence’.

Like Vienna, the Passport Control Office in Berlin was swamped by applications from Jews trying to escape the Reich. Frank Foley’s significant work in helping many thousands of Jews to get British visas was carried out as part of his duties as Passport Control Officer rather than as SIS head of station.18 Foley had a particularly difficult balance to strike between his differing responsibilities. He had developed ‘a long standing and officially established liaison’ with the German police ‘for the exchange of information about Communism’. This had survived the establishment of the Nazi regime. In October 1937 Foley’s relations with the Gestapo’s ‘Communist expert’ were described as ‘cordial’. By this stage, however, his refusal (on Sinclair’s express orders) ‘to satisfy the Gestapo lust for information on the subject of anti-Nazi Germans in England on the false grounds that they are Communists’ had alienated other senior Gestapo officials. Unfortunately, there are practically no relevant surviving SIS files, which might have thrown light on the inevitable trade-off which Foley had to make between his Passport Control and intelligence duties, let alone any covert methods by which he may have assisted individual Jewish families, or the