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and out of the country. Lisbon was also a main base for the transatlantic Ship Observers Scheme, run by William Stephenson in New York during 1941, whereby ‘observers’ were planted among the crews of neutral ships with the job of reporting on any suspicious matters. Through a combination of signals intelligence and Section V information, by 1942 Jarvis was well on his way to achieving almost complete coverage of enemy intelligence operations in Portugal, including the German Waterfront Organisation set up to obtain shipping information from Allied seamen in Lisbon. A dossier of its illegal activities was prepared which the ambassador submitted to President Salazar, with the result that the organisation was suppressed. Despite these local successes, London was not satisfied with the overall quality of the Lisbon station’s work. ‘Cut out ruthlessly redundant Economic and C.E. [counter-espionage] stuff, and concentrate on essential, viz. Armed Forces and Italy,’ Menzies instructed Johns in April 1942. The following month Claude Dansey told him that the most important requirement was the development of an organisation ‘for watching over North-West ports in 23-land [Spain]’. The British ambassador, moreover, thought that Johns was too closely involved with anti-Salazar groups, and (according to Dansey) had described some of his political reports as ‘rubbish’, so it was decided to move him, and he was replaced in December 1942.26

Some of SIS’s Iberian work was linked to that of MI9, a Directorate of Military Intelligence section formed in December 1939 to provide an organisation to facilitate the escape of British personnel from prisoner-of-war camps and to develop techniques to assist servicemen to evade capture if stranded behind enemy lines. The military disasters of the spring and summer of 1940 resulted in the capture of thousands of British troops, while others sought sanctuary by crossing the frontier into neutral Switzerland or Spain. Members of Allied aircrew shot down over enemy territory added to their number. Embryonic escape lines soon began to establish themselves in the enemy-occupied Netherlands, Belgium and northern France and similar, if less dangerous, activities began in the Vichy-controlled southern zone. The work was among the earliest forms of resistance to occupation and relied heavily on the zeal of the population and a few intrepid British servicemen, such as Seaforth Highlander subaltern Ian Garrow, who declined to escape across the Pyrenees in order to set up a sound and effective network in France.

Inevitably word of these activities reached SIS. An authoritative work on the subject states that Menzies met with the head of MI9 on 6 August 1940 and ‘offered to set up an escape line to run from Marseilles into Spain’.27 Unfortunately no record of the meeting has survived in Menzies’s (somewhat sparsely maintained) appointments diary, but there is no question that SIS took a keen and early interest in the lines that had begun to stretch from the Low Countries through the occupied and unoccupied zones of France and across the frontier into neutral Spain, and along which intelligence as well as people could travel. Claude Dansey managed the SIS side. He maintained his customary caustic view of operations and frequently gave the impression that his engagement was as much to deny any other government department the opportunity to meddle on the Continent as it was to rescue British personnel. He employed a small group of army officers on MI9’s books, such as J. M. (Jimmy) Langley and Airey Neave (later to become a Conservative MP and be murdered by Irish terrorists), who possessed first-hand experience of escape and handled the organisation’s affairs in London with skill and sensitivity. Other SIS/MI9 officers, such as Donald Darling and Michael Creswell, were employed in Spain, Portugal and Gibraltar to oversee the end of the lines.

MI9 attracted a remarkable collection of characters. The range extended from the outstanding bravery of men and women such as the Belgians Albert-Marie Guérisse (‘Pat O’Leary