The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [243]
Hoare’s ambivalence about SIS, on the one hand anxious that covert activities be limited as much as possible so as not to upset relations with the host country, and on the other supportive in some areas (especially counter-espionage) and quick to exploit the capabilities of officers on the ground, reflected a common ambassadorial attitude towards intelligence matters. Late in 1941 there was a row involving Menzies, Hoare, the Foreign Office and Hamilton Stokes over Menzies’s (and apparently Hoare’s) desire to boost the Passport Control staff in Spain to monitor suspect individuals travelling from Europe across the Atlantic. But when Hamilton Stokes injudiciously revealed London’s exasperation with Hoare over his refusal to contemplate embassy cover for extra SIS staff, the ambassador bluntly declared that ‘after the episodes of [the PCO in September 1940], Claire and Clarke I have ceased to have any faith in SIS London’. In January 1942 Hoare, asserting that ‘various S.I.S. agents’ had ‘apparently become dupes of the Germans in the war of nerves’ and were merely peddling ‘sensations’, suggested to Alexander Cadogan that he should look through recent SIS reports ‘and thus check their usefulness’. The Foreign Office view, however, was that intelligence reports from Spain had ‘been particularly good lately, and not in the least alarmist’. Peter Loxley (Cadogan’s private secretary) thought that Hoare was simply ‘running a hunt against the S.I.S. these days’ and that his ‘present strictures’ were ‘quite unjustified’. Cadogan firmly told the ambassador that over the past month SIS reports had in general been ‘balanced and accurate’.24
Later that year SIS had a striking success when (through agent networks and signals intelligence) it helped finally to neutralise Germany’s infrared surveillance system (code-named ‘Bodden’) aimed at detecting Allied shipping passing through the Straits of Gibraltar. Intelligence about Bodden obtained by SIS and the Admiralty was used by Hoare from May 1942 onwards to embarrass Franco into ordering the abandonment of the whole undertaking, which was being carried on by the Axis in Spain and Spanish Morocco. By December 1942 Menzies could happily tell Peter Loxley at the Foreign Office that he had learned from ‘most secret sources’ (signals intelligence) that Hoare’s protest of 20 October had ‘had a very healthy effect in Spain’, leading to the dismantling of Bodden.25
The intelligence challenge in Portugal was similar to that in Spain, though at the beginning the work was bedevilled by staffing problems. As in Spain, SIS objectives included monitoring German fifth-column activities, establishing a stay-behind network in case of a German invasion and penetrating occupied France, though an additional priority was Italy. Yet when, an ex-banker and MI5 officer, was sent out in June 1940 to assist the existing one-man SIS operation, he spent his first three months complaining (albeit with some justification) about the poor level of security in Lisbon, so much so that Menzies eventually lost patience with him. ‘The war is at [a] stage’, he wrote in September, ‘at which risks must be taken and the question of being compromised [must] take a back seat.’ This seems to have had some effect and in November he reported that he had established a line of agents in northern Portugal whereby people, letters or parcels could be smuggled over the Spanish frontier in either direction. In February 1941 a Section V officer, Ralph Jarvis, was sent out to take over as Passport Control Officer and build up the counter-espionage side. Jarvis and his newly appointed assistant, whose health was poor, did not get on, and the assistant was replaced by Philip Johns in June 1941.
Between 1940 and 1942, while the SIS team in Portugal failed to obtain any significant intelligence from Italy, it did manage to build up a reasonable coverage of shipping movements in