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‘sent several rather expensive agents’ into the Italian possession of Libya, this had all been ‘without so far achieving much result’. Bowlby suggested trying to acquire information ‘from further afield, i.e. North and South America, where enormous Italian colonies exist’. Dansey agreed and said that in his capacity as Z he had ‘put up proposals about a year ago’ that ‘in anticipation of war, recruiting centres should be established in New York, Buenos Aires or Brazil’. Although ‘it will be expensive’, it was still ‘worth doing’. Beyond an unsuccessful attempt to enlist Italians in Canada, no co-ordinated large-scale effort to recruit Italian agents in the Americas was ever launched. But Dansey continued to promote the idea. In October 1942 he asked that the station in Rio de Janeiro should look for possible agents in the ‘large Italian colonies in South America’. New York, he lamented, ‘never seems able to find the right people’.

The demand for intelligence intensified further after Italy came into the war in June 1940. In August London told Swiss, Balkan, Eastern Mediterranean and Iberian stations that the Service ‘urgently’ required Italian economic and industrial intelligence. Nothing much seems to have resulted from this, although it was reported that some information was being obtained from French sources. Two months later a signal from Malta (where the MI5 Defence Security Officer was also head of the SIS station) suggested inserting agents into the Italian colony of Libya from French-ruled Tunisia. In the spring of 1940 an SIS officer, Major A. J. Morris, had been sent to Tunis to set up a sub-station in liaison with the French authorities, but they arrested him after the British shelled the Vichy French fleet at Oran on 3 July. Morris was taken to Casablanca where he was allowed to escape by an anti-Vichy policeman and he eventually got back to Malta in September. He thought that owing to ‘extreme anti-Italian sentiment throughout Tunisia and his [own] personal friendship with several officers it would be possible for him to obtain ?reliable information on local situation and on possibility restarting organisation for 32-land [Italy]’.

But the penetration of Italy proved to be extremely difficult. When Rex Howard asked in January 1941 what progress the Athens station had made in getting agents into southern Italy, a laconic unidentified official wrote across his minute ‘None’. Anxious for information on the ‘probable reinforcement of Albania and especially Libya by Italian forces’, the War Office enquired about SIS’s port-watching organisation in Italy. This had been run by the Vienna station before the war, but had broken up following the expulsion of the Service from Austria. Despite efforts from both Athens and Malta, SIS had not subsequently ‘succeeded in establishing any permanent watchers’. But even when the Vienna organisation had been working (and apart from the great difficulty of establishing reliable wireless communications) the information provided had been ‘far from complete’, especially since ‘troops naturally embark at night from guarded quays and sources cannot keep a 24 hour watch. No doubt’, added one jaundiced officer, the Admiralty ‘would like us to have established a network of agents at all ports, all equipped with W/T, and able to see in the dark, and have free access to all docks’.

Attempts to penetrate Libya had been no more successful. Bowlby noted Cairo’s failure to do so, though this was not ‘for the want of trying’. Early in 1940 six agents had been despatched ‘at considerable expense and risk, but they were never able to achieve very much owing to Italian vigilance and difficulties in getting them there and back and communications’. An agent, working from French-controlled Tunisia, had produced ‘a large and expensive Libyan Arab organisation’, but it had not had ‘time to get going properly before the French collapse’. Events on the ground from late 1940, however, changed the situation dramatically when an offensive launched on 9 December from Egypt into Libya met with spectacular