The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [184]
Foley, like other Passport Control staff, got caught up in SIS’s campaign to get them diplomatic status, so much so that in March 1939 Sinclair was prepared to dissemble on his part. After the ambassador in Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, refused to allow this, Sinclair hoped that he might change his mind if he was ‘given a guarantee’ that Foley was ‘not engaged in S.I.S. activity’. Sinclair therefore proposed to assure both the Foreign Office and the ambassador that this was the case on the rather specious grounds that Foley was ‘not employing German nationals’ and was ‘only obtaining political information through British nationals’ which was ‘no more than the Embassy itself ’ was doing.19 In fact Foley had certainly in the past employed ‘German nationals’ for espionage purposes, and, if not precisely so doing at the time of Sinclair’s signal, he certainly had assistants for whom Germans worked.
The impact of SIS intelligence and the use to which it was put by the government are difficult to assess as very few SIS reports, let alone commentary on them, have survived in either closed or open archives. Much of the most secret material was routinely destroyed after it had been read (and potentially summarised in other briefing papers). There are sporadic references to ‘secret intelligence’, but they are sometimes so general as to prevent any assessment of SIS’s specific part (if any) in its production.
In September 1938, for example, Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, returned from holiday to find that Gladwyn Jebb had left him a ‘stack of telegrams & papers, which I started reading. There’s certainly enough in the Secret Reports to make one’s hair stand on end. But I never swallow all these things, and I am presented with a selection.’20 Since Jebb, as Cadogan’s private secretary, was the link-man between the Foreign Office and SIS, it is highly probable that among that ‘stack of telegrams & papers’ was SIS-generated material. But how much of it there was and what effect it had, beyond Cadogan’s scepticism, is impossible to judge. That SIS reports reached the highest levels, however, is demonstrated by the fortunate survival of one such report, written by Woollcombe, and retained by him, apparently for understandable, if rather touching, emotions of pride. His paper reviewed the political campaign in Germany for the return of overseas colonies lost under the Versailles treaty, and noted that ‘one large compact area’, probably in West Africa, was thought to be the most desirable objective. In the margin, in Neville Chamberlain’s handwriting, indicating his agreement with Woollcombe’s assessment, is ‘What did I say.’21
From Munich to war
The need for good intelligence on high-level German policy-making was amply demonstrated during the Munich Crisis in the autumn of 1938 when it seemed as if war might break out in the face of Hitler’s territorial ambitions in Central Europe. After Germany and Austria had been united in the Anschluss of March 1938, Hitler turned his attention to Czechoslovakia. A quarter of the country’s twelve million population were ethnic Germans, concentrated in the Sudetenland in the west, along the borders of the now enlarged Germany. Nazi policy was to unite these Germans into the Fatherland, which would effectively destroy the Czechoslovak state. In May there was a ‘war scare’, and the British government issued a warning against a German attack. ‘There is no doubt whatever in my mind’, Sinclair told Sir Warren Fisher on 27 May, ‘that the Germans intended to try and slip in to Czechoslovakia during the last weekend, but owing to our having found out what they were up to, such an uproar arose that they have now put off their scheme for the present.’ But he added that