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endeavouring to get one member (at least) of the local British community ‘to take on a job connected with placing bombs in German ships and possibly tearing up railway lines’. With the conventional diplomat’s suspicion of clandestine work, Rendel wrote that it filled him ‘with misgiving to feel that irresponsible agents of this kind may be wandering about here without my knowledge doing things which may completely undermine the political position which we are so laboriously struggling to build up’. During the First World War Rendel had served in Athens and his ‘recollections of the deplorable activities of such people as Compton Mackenzie in Greece during the last war only tend to increase my uneasiness’.3

Despite Grand’s own optimistic claims for the achievements of Section D (which he made during the Hankey inquiry), neither it nor its successor SOE actually did very much to disrupt German strategic supply lines in 1939-40. But, despite the worsening political climate following the fall of France, when it hardly seemed as if Britain could avoid defeat, SIS managed to build up some intelligence assets in south-east Europe, a number of which even survived German domination of the whole region after the middle of 1941. One paradoxical consequence for SIS of German success was the encouragement of close relationships with the intelligence services of defeated allies, such as Czechoslovakia, Poland and France. In Hungary, thanks in part to Harold Gibson’s close liaison with the Czechoslovak intelligence chief František Moravec, SIS inherited some intelligence assets. In June 1940 the Bucharest station was given permission to engage a contact formerly working for French intelligence. This man, who proved to be an excellent stay-behind agent, worked continuously until his arrest in February 1944 and was backed up in 1943-4 with Polish radio operators. He ran a very productive network (code-named ‘Nannygoat’), which by 1943 included French, Greek, Swiss and Romanian nationals, Catholic priests, businessmen, oil company workers, a police inspector and a source in the Romanian General Staff. One contemporary recorded that he ‘started his wartime work with the disadvantage of having the appearance of a typical stage spy’. He had ‘a slight stoop and a generally sinister appearance’ and ‘could have played the part of a spy in any theatre without further make-up’. But ‘he had all the attributes of a successful head agent in real life. He was brave, resourceful and possessed of an extremely strong security sense.’ Arguing for the award of a military decoration, Menzies told the Foreign Office that he was ‘regarded by the War Office as one of our best and most reliable sources’. Another colleague noted the ‘high importance of a British decoration to a foreigner, which he will be able to show at the end of the war, or perhaps before that if he is forced to leave enemy territory’.4

In Belgrade, efforts in 1940 to exploit Yugoslav sources for information about Austria and Czechoslovakia produced negligible results, but in the spring of 1941 both SIS and SOE (the two organisations here working closely together) mobilised their political and military contacts in the country behind the coup of 27 March 1941 which deposed the pro-Axis Regent, Prince Paul, in favour of a pro-Allied regime. As elsewhere, too, SIS’s secure radio communications were used to transmit appeals for help from beleaguered local forces. At the beginning of March, for example, Archie Gibson sent a plea from General Stojanović, the Assistant War Minister and an ‘old acquaintance’, for British arms, without which ‘they had no possibility of offering effective resistance to any German attack’. The coup was a tremendous British propaganda success, though unfortunately short-lived as it also precipitated the German invasion of both Yugoslavia and Greece. But SIS was able to give a little warning to Belgrade. At 10.20 a.m. on 5 April 1941, drawing on signals intelligence (though disguising it as a human source), Menzies sent a message to Gibson: ‘Inform Yugoslav General Staff