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and valuable, markedly increased the problems of security. As with other Allied countries, SIS operated in Belgium in co-operation with the government-in-exile in London, though here, too, there were difficulties arising from internal rivalries and the fact that the Belgian King and part of the Cabinet remained in Belgium. While the Belgian Sûreté de l’État developed a close liaison with SIS, the military Deuxième Bureau was more interested in sabotage and resistance, if not also (as some claimed) plotting to re-establish the King with a crypto-Fascist regime. During 1942 additional trained wireless operators were infiltrated and the supply of intelligence improved. In April the Air Ministry noted that reports from Belgium during February and March ‘had added very considerably to the picture of the German night fighter organisations’, while in June (echoing the achievements of La Dame Blanche a quarter of a century before) the War Office commented on the ‘accurate, comprehensive railway information’ being regularly provided by SIS sources which ‘very frequently provides important confirmation of troop movements reported by other agents’.13

France

The main SIS concern in France was Biffy Dunderdale’s 45000 network and his very close relationship with the French Deuxième Bureau, and subsequently with the Cinquième Bureau, formed at the outbreak of war to oversee clandestine intelligence work. Dunderdale was SIS’s chief link with the Bureau head, Colonel Louis Rivet, and with Colonel Gustave Bertrand, who ran the French cryptanalytical branch. Although he had recruited agents to gather German military intelligence, Dunderdale was unable to keep them going in the chaotic weeks following the outbreak of hostilities. There were, he wrote, ‘insurmountable difficulties in travelling across frontiers and even in France itself ’, due to the ‘very severe control and complete disorganisation of civilian traffic’. Over the winter he came to depend almost entirely on information from Rivet’s organisation. Following the rapid German advance into France after 10 May 1940 Dunderdale and his staff had to withdraw from Paris. On 10 June he found himself near Orleans, quartered next to the largest ammunition dump in France, and cheerfully reported to Menzies the observation of the French colonel in command that if the dump went up it would result in an ‘instantaneous and painless death’. But the French were beaten and Menzies called the SIS team home.

Partly due to French sensitivities, stay-behind preparations in France were continually frustrated until May 1940, by which time it was too late to achieve anything meaningful. At the last minute the head of Dunderdale’s Special Communication Unit managed to organise a wireless link with Bertrand, which in the immediate aftermath of the capitulation was the only direct SIS contact with France. A further difficulty lay in the fact that the majority of SIS’s French contacts were with men who continued to serve under the Vichy regime which, after the surrender to the Germans in June 1940, survived as a quasi-independent government responsible for a large part of southern and south-eastern France. The Vichyists were vehemently opposed to the Free French General de Gaulle, while in their turn the Free Frenchmen (who inevitably constituted a highly promising source of potential agents) heartily despised Vichy and all its works. Faced with this conundrum, and under immense pressure from the government and service ministries to get intelligence out of France, Menzies deputed Dunderdale to head Section A.4 and continue to foster contacts with Bertrand and his Vichy colleagues, while Commander Kenneth Cohen, who had been in Paris as part of Dansey’s Z Organisation, was made head of Section A.5 and deployed to work with the Free French. Although in the anxious summer days of 1940 this division of responsibility may have seemed to Menzies to be the only option, the potential for competition, disagreement and friction was very great, and was heightened by the fact that, while Cohen was responsible to