The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [245]
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From Budapest to Baghdad
The ‘nightmare scenario’ for British strategic policy-makers in the 1930s posed by the potential simultaneous challenge of three great powers - Germany, Italy and Japan - affected and perplexed SIS just as much as any of the armed services, and although Sir Hugh Sinclair had striven to sharpen up the Service with this threat in mind, there was neither the political will in Whitehall nor the money available for him to do very much at all. Inevitably - and rightly - the main focus was on Germany, but this meant that intelligence operations in the Mediterranean, the Middle East (where in any case it was hoped that Britain’s ally France could help out) and further afield in Asia were comparatively neglected, at least until the situation was brutally transformed by the German conquests in Northern and Western Europe, the entry of Italy into the war in June 1940 and that of Japan in December 1941.
South-east Europe
The rapidly escalating demands placed on SIS during 1939 and 1940 stretched the Service’s resources almost to breaking point and it is clear that in seeking to maintain (if not also extend) its coverage in south-east Europe the Service was pushed to find qualified officers for the region. The stations in Austria and Czechoslovakia had been closed down (and the SIS representatives’ cover blown) following the Nazi advance into both countries in 1938 and 1939. In February 1938 Wilfrid Hindle, a former journalist with no intelligence experience, had been sent out on probation to reinforce the Prague station. Three months later Harold Gibson, his boss in Prague, despite having noted that Hindle was handicapped by a lack of German-language skills, recommended him ‘for permanent employment’, while advising that he would need ‘further instruction before being given an independent post’. Nevertheless, having been forced out of Prague, in April 1939 Hindle was appointed Passport Control Officer and head of station in Budapest, where the former incumbent had been sacked for incompetence. In September 1939 he was joined by another officer with a slightly chequered intelligence career, who had briefly been employed by SIS as Assistant PCO in Riga in 1929-30. He had evidently not made a success of this and the Service offered him no further work. In 1939, however, he reappeared and, judged suitable ‘for subordinate employment in this organisation’, had been re-employed to help out with Passport Control in Berlin. Assisting Hindle in the Budapest office were six secretarial staff and a wireless operator. The station had twenty-one agents on a retainer (others were ‘paid by results’), of whom in the autumn of 1939 two were funded by the Ministry of Economic Warfare.
There were smaller stations in Bucharest, Belgrade and Sofia. The representative in Bucharest was Harold Gibson’s brother Archie, who had journalist cover as a correspondent for The Times. In the late summer of 1939 he had one secretary, a wireless operator and fourteen main agents, most of whom were still only on trial. In Belgrade, a former colonial policemen, was head of station. He had been hired in November 1936 to assist in Berlin, and transferred to Yugoslavia by September 1939. Late that year, to help build up intelligence on German and Italian troop movements, a sub-station was opened in Zagreb which (among other things) was a convenient location to debrief agents from inside Italy. Much the largest operation in