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By Root 2585 0

of the French party, André Mounier, a thirty-eight-year-old lawyer who had been working in Tunis at the start of the war, returned with radio equipment before the end of January and developed a network which reported continuously for the next five months, transmitting 232 messages to Malta between 9 January and 28 June.10 On 25 February they provided the first report of German troops disembarking at Tripoli and just under a month later made ‘a most valuable identification’ of German tanks. As SIS reported afterwards, this was their first appearance ‘on African soil and was to delay our conquest of Tripoli by nearly two years’. Early in March a coast-watcher was installed at Kelibia on the east side of the Cap Bon peninsula to monitor the movements of Italian convoys, and on 5 April Malta reported that an Italian ship ‘had been torpedoed as a result of an agent’s information’. In order to provide cover in Tunis a small company, the Société d’Étude et des Pêcheries, was floated, and a scheme established whereby money could be transmitted through a local resident.

At the end of June 1941, the Mounier network, having become involved with SOE activities, was compromised following an unsuccessful SOE attempt to sabotage a French tanker at La Goulette. Although Mounier and two associates were safely extracted, another dozen colleagues were arrested and the property of the Société d’Étude et des Pêcheries seized. Reflecting afterwards, the setback was blamed on ‘entanglement’ with SOE and a general lack of security, including ‘too much independent action by young enthusiastic agents in Tunis’. Over the next few months agents were reinserted from Malta by submarine, motor boat and air. SIS managed to acquire in England two ex-Norwegian German-made Heinkel He-115 seaplanes for Service operations. Morris recalled that they had ‘very great difficulties’ with the local RAF commander ‘over the maintenance and camouflage of these aircraft’, and that ‘the greatest danger was from the trigger-happy R.A.F. fighter pilots during our practices’. They were used operationally, but on 22 September one of the Heinkels, carrying Mounier himself, ‘a born leader and . . . one of our most valuable men’, was lost en route to Tunisia. Meeting agents at the other end was also very difficult. One foreign diplomat in Tunis who was helping SIS observed that the use of cars was extremely strictly controlled, and there was ‘absolutely no possibility of having a car waiting for a man anywhere outside the centre of Tunis. Anywhere else it would be such an object of curiosity that the addition of a brass band would not render it any more remarkable.’

The same month, however, ‘Dick Jones’, who was to lead the most successful of the wartime Tunisian groups, was recruited in Cairo and brought to Malta by Morris. Under his ‘conditions of service’, Jones was to be paid seventy-five Egyptian pounds per month (about £2,500 in modern values), of which E£60 was to be paid directly to his wife. ‘In the event of your mission being successful and that you return in person’, he was to be paid E£1,000 (equivalent to £34,000), and ‘in the event of your death owing to enemy action whether due to being shot as an agent or whether due to any other enemy action’, his wife was to receive E£3,000. If he were reported missing, or definitely taken prisoner by the enemy, his wife’s allowance of E£60 was to be continued for six months, and if he had ‘not returned by that time a gratuity of E£1,000 . . . will be paid to your wife’. While the money must surely have been a factor, Jones also appears to have been impelled by idealistic motives, which he described in a letter to his wife, apparently written before he was infiltrated into Tunisia. His case-officer in Malta thought this was of such interest that he forwarded a copy to London. ‘The letter,’ he wrote, ‘although somewhat flamboyant, tends to show why he [Jones] is doing the work on which he is now employed.’ ‘All my previous undertakings of this nature have been fun,’ wrote Jones, ‘undertaken from a love of adventure . . . This