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as a diplomatic courier, therefore, Smith travelled weekly to Sweden to meet agents. One of his contacts, a former Russian diplomat long resident in Denmark, tried to continue reporting through the United States legation in Copenhagen, but the Americans refused to pass the information on. Meanwhile, when it became apparent that the Russians were about to occupy the Baltic states, London decided to close down the Tallinn station and relocate some of the staff to Helsinki, from where they continued to run some Baltic agents. The fall of France brought an unexpected bonus for Carr in the shape of George Alexeev, head of the French secret service in Finland, who offered his whole agent network if SIS would provide the funding, an offer which London gratefully accepted. In September 1940 another Estonian contact, agent ‘Outcast’, who had been an important source on Soviet matters, turned up in Helsinki. Outcast, a Russian émigré formerly living in Berlin, had escaped from Tallinn with German help, but at the price of agreeing to work for the Abwehr Russian section. In Helsinki he told SIS that he would in future be visiting Finland regularly, and offered to work for the Service against the Germans. He appears to have been a valuable source, providing political, military and economic reports from within the Reich. In November 1940 he reported from his Abwehr control that ‘German command [was] preparing (June) campaign against U.S.S.R. which would begin Spring 1941 possibly earlier.’ In his signal to Head Office Carr added that such a startling indiscretion by an Abwehr officer to his agent seemed ‘incredible’, warning that ‘possibly [the] statement [had been] made for propaganda purposes’. London evidently agreed, since no further hard evidence remains in the archives of what would otherwise have been a unique intelligence coup.

After the German invasion of Russia in June 1941, SIS’s position in Finland became increasingly precarious. During June and July Carr managed to get all his staff out to Sweden, and made arrangements for maintaining contacts after he too had to leave. While some of the agents were able to travel to Sweden themselves and others could use secret couriers, Carr also set up a link through the United States legation (which remained in Helsinki until the summer of 1944). After Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Finland in August 1941, the USA became the ‘protecting power’ (looking after British interests) and a British representative remained in the United States mission. Carr arranged for him to receive material from Alexeev (the Frenchman, who continued to work in Finland until the autumn of 1944). There was also intelligence from a Baltic network, run by a senior Estonian officer also working for the Swedes, Germans and Japanese. He left packages for Alexeev to pick up at a ‘dead letter box’ in a Helsinki public lavatory. Contact with Outcast, however, was lost when his handler (another Russian émigré) was arrested in August 1941. But Carr had wisely set up a drill for fall-back contact in Stockholm which Outcast duly implemented, though not until May 1942.

Until shortly before the war Oslo had been a sub-station of Stockholm, but over the summer of 1939 an independent station under Lieutenant Commander J. B. Newill was established. In September Frank Foley, the longstanding SIS man in Berlin, was posted to Oslo with general responsibilities for Scandinavia as a whole, evidently on the assumption that he would be able to meet former contacts permitted to travel outside Germany, and also be well situated to recruit neutral residents who could visit the Reich. In the event not much was achieved beyond Foley putting GC&CS in touch with Norwegian cryptographers who had succeeded in breaking some German diplomatic codes and were working on German and Russian naval and military cyphers.

Following the German invasion, the Norwegian military high command withdrew from Oslo north towards Lillehammer. Foley and his staff went with them and provided secure wireless communications through which the Norwegian