The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [187]
During the crisis the SIS station in Prague had been reporting on Czechoslovak military opinion. In early 1938 Harold Gibson, head of station since February 1934, had been given permission by London to establish liaison with the head of Czechoslovak Military Intelligence, Colonel František Moravec. This was primarily to help Gibson acquire information on German targets, and was quickly very rewarding. In March 1938 Gibson reported that the Czechoslovaks had supplied information on German military movements in Austria ‘more detailed and exhaustive than anything I could have hoped to obtain through independent agents’. The liaison developed so well that in the midst of the Munich Crisis one of Gibson’s Czechoslovak military contacts, while bitterly critical of France and its betrayal of an ally, assured Gibson that, whatever the politicians may have decided, it would not interfere with ‘our collaboration’.
Following the German occupation of the Sudetenland, the survival of the rump of Czechoslovakia as an independent state became increasingly uncertain. When Gibson’s assistant, Wilfrid Hindle, posted to Prague in February 1938, asked in January 1939 if he could bring his family out to join him, Rex Howard in London unhelpfully replied: ‘I am afraid I cannot possibly tell you how long you will stay in Prague because one does not know from one day to the next what is going to happen in Europe.’ He recommended, nevertheless, that Hindle stay in rented furnished accommodation, and ‘you should on no account consider the question of getting your furniture out . . . In the present state of Europe’, he concluded, ‘it is difficult to give any guarantee of anything.’ By the early spring of 1939 it was clear, however, that the Germans were preparing to occupy the rest of Czechoslovakia. In his memoirs, Moravec claims that his well-placed agent in the German General Staff, ‘A.54’, Paul Thümmel, provided advance warning of the invasion, which was scheduled for 15 March. With Gibson’s help, Moravec and ten of his most senior officers were flown to London in an SIS-chartered plane on 14 March.24 No explicit trace of this dramatic operation survives in the SIS archives, although on 14 March Gibson requested London to grant him use of an emergency reserve of $1,000 and £200, and reported the same day that he had taken custody of Moravec’s ‘most important intelligence archives’ in his office. The Germans indeed entered Prague on 15 March, and over the next two weeks, with deft use of King’s Messengers and diplomatic bags, Gibson managed to get the Czechoslovak intelligence archive safely to London, from where Moravec and his colleagues were able to run operations during the Second World War. On 30 March, Gibson and the remaining SIS station staff left for London.
The Munich Crisis stimulated a brief flurry of SIS activity in the Mediterranean. Towards the end of September 1938, Captain Russell of the Naval Section noted that the Service might ‘be called upon at any time now to report the locations of Italian warships’ and a range of stations in Southern Europe were instructed to have ‘tip and run’ agents ready to deploy at short notice. The stations were authorised to spend up to £500 on this without referring back to London. On 28 September Hamilton Stokes in Gibraltar was told to ‘open up the Malta station immediately’. Steps were taken, but on 4 October, after the Munich Agreement had been signed, the work was scaled back ‘in view of the present improvement in the international situation’. Even by late 1938 there was no blank cheque for any large-scale expansion of SIS operations. Some decision-makers, apparently, believed with Chamberlain (as he famously declared on his return from Munich) that the agreement had indeed provided ‘peace for our time’.
After Munich SIS continued to report on Hitler and his