The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [219]
Recruitment
The war put tremendous pressure on SIS’s hitherto rather haphazard recruitment system. There was a very busy buyers’ market in which SIS had to compete with the armed services, SOE, GC&CS, governments-in-exile and various other analogous bodies, such as the Ministry of Economic Warfare, for the inevitably limited pool of suitable personnel. SIS was also under pressure to take on increased numbers of foreign nationals, many of whom had escaped occupied Europe and were mustard keen to get back and do their bit. But the security stakes were as high as ever and the Service had to be vigilant against enemy efforts to place their people within its ranks. When recruiting officers or agents, the usual procedure was for the name to be sent to MI5 for checking against their register of suspect persons. This was a negative vetting process, and the reply ‘No trace’ was generally regarded as sufficient. From the summer of 1940, however, when SIS began intensively to recruit from among those who had fled the Continent, Claude Dansey worried that there should be a more thorough investigation, if only because ‘every agent, no matter what his nationality and feelings, may be possessed of some information of importance to the enemy . . . A negative reply from M.I.5’, he instructed, ‘must not absolve officers from enquiring into the past and family history of all candidates under examination.’ From the following spring, a systematic look out for potential agents was kept at MI5’s Royal Victoria Patriotic Schools London Reception Centre in Wandsworth where aliens entering the United Kingdom were sent for processing. In April and May 1941 SIS’s spotter there reported that he had recruited twenty-eight agents and passed on five further names for special operations. The supply of candidates varied, however. In April he did not recommend anyone for A.3 (the Belgian Section), ‘as no Belgians were interesting, and very few arrived in the U.K.’.
SIS cast its net far and wide for recruits. In January 1941, for example, the New York station reported that a Frenchman about to be repatriated to France expected to return to employment with a shipping company at Le Havre where he ‘would be able to spy on their business to Paris, Marseilles, Toulon etc’. He also recommended a steward on the French transatlantic liner Normandie who was ‘extremely intelligent [with] unquestioned patriotism and hostile to present [French] regime’ and would ‘be able to travel about France on steamship company’s business which should afford him excellent cover’. The same month the Cairo station reported that a French engineer about to return home ‘felt unable to work as an agent in France for family reasons (and fear)’, but had recommended his brother-in-law, who ran a cheese factory in Lorraine. A Czech law student, who had been studying in France but had escaped, was interviewed in Bermuda in June 1942 and ‘gave the names of several of his student friends who are reliable de Gaullists . . . anxious to work for the Allies in France’. He stated that ‘many of the Czechs frequent a cafe at 59 rue de la Republique in Marseilles and that the Germans plant agents there who pretend to be loyal Czechs, thus catching several of them’. Some ‘notes on the recruiting of agents for France’ which London sent to New York in December 1943 illustrate the kinds of people SIS wished to employ, though the specification was a counsel of perfection. Agents, it affirmed, should be courageous, observant,