The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [252]
Travelling on to Tehran (it took six days because of snow on the road), Shelley began planning for a full SIS station in Iran, which could, among other things, improve coverage of the Soviet Union. This was something the existing Baghdad-run SIS agents in Iran (mostly British businessmen) were reluctant to do. ‘Men of this kind,’ remarked Shelley, ‘while prepared to take reasonable risks, will not risk their businesses, which are their means of livelihood, by doing anything which might get them into trouble with the [Iranian] Government, and they consequently will not undertake the active role of running agents across the frontier into 95-land [the USSR].’ With the Indian Intelligence Bureau already working on Russia from a base in Meshed, Shelley recommended that SIS should operate from Tehran and Tabriz in the north of the country. He also spoke to local French and Polish intelligence officers, discovering that the latter were not only already getting agents across the frontier into the Soviet Union but also developing networks within Afghanistan. Although unable to meet any Czechoslovaks, he reported that in Iran they appeared ‘to offer a very fruitful recruiting ground for agents’.9
Menzies’s original idea had been that while Shelley would be attached to army headquarters in the Middle East, he should co-ordinate the supply of intelligence to the air force as well. But this arrangement came up against inter-service rivalries and the RAF objected to him being integrated with the army. Menzies then decided to appoint a more senior officer, Sir David Petrie, to be General Manager for the Middle East stations, with direct access to the regional commanders of all three armed services. The sixty-year-old Petrie was a very experienced intelligence hand. Born in Aberdeen in Scotland, he became a career policeman in India before the First World War, ran intelligence agents in East Asia, headed the Indian Intelligence Bureau for seven years between the wars, and in 1937-9 both assisted in the reorganisation of the Palestine police and reported for SIS on intelligence requirements relating to British East Africa. From May 1940 Petrie and Shelley (who served as his staff officer until moving on to SOE in September) became the Inter-Services Liaison Department (ISLD), with Petrie being put in overall charge of SIS across the region, including Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Ethiopia and East Africa. His organisation was responsible for obtaining and distributing locally all kinds of information from Greece, the Balkans, Italy and enemy-occupied North Africa. Agents themselves were run by individual stations (including those from Greece and Yugoslavia which after the German conquest of the Balkans operated primarily from Egypt), though they were kept physically separate from ISLD and each other.
Targeting Italy
In March 1940, Frederick Winterbotham complained that the intelligence position regarding Italy was ‘lamentable’. ‘I cannot believe’, he wrote, ‘that Italian Air Force Officers in Budapest, Italian engineers and merchants in Belgrade and Sofia are all unapproachable. This is the side from which we need to penetrate since the French use their own opportunities to the utmost.’ By early May the situation had not improved. Cuthbert Bowlby conceded that it ‘has become abundantly clear in the last week or so that the Armed Forces are not satisfied with the amount of information they are getting on Italy’. While the Belgrade, Athens and Malta stations had been ‘endeavouring under pressure from headquarters to remedy this deficiency in Italy and Sicily’, and Cairo had