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the revolt, but the Baghdad representative reported that the intelligence ‘unfortunately arrived too late to be used owing to the removal of our transmitting sets’. British forces quashed the rising, but The Times enquired if the Foreign Office had been taken by surprise and ‘What was our Intelligence Service doing?’14 Within SIS it appeared that the Eastern Department in the Foreign Office had failed to pass on all of its reports, so much so that a set of extracts from the weekly political summaries was assembled showing that the Baghdad station had been warning of the specific possibility of a coup from the beginning of the year.

During 1941 the issue of using Anglo-Iranian (formerly Anglo-Persian) Oil Company (AIOC) employees for intelligence work surfaced after the head of the Baghdad station, set up a local network without going through the proper channels established by SIS with the AIOC head office in London. In March 1941 Bowlby observed that the station was using several individuals who had ‘not had the official sanction of their Company to carry out our work, although the Manager out there knows of their activities which he allows but does not like’. The local manager’s attitude was ‘understandable in view of the extremely delicate relations existing between the Company and the Iranian Government’. Vivian was not at all happy that Baghdad had ‘consciously side-stepped’ the existing ‘perfectly good & close liaison’ (by which the Service had agreed not to use company employees except through the head office) and he felt that the Service could not expect AIOC ‘to be very much impressed by our good faith’. Nor were they, and after a meeting in London at which an AIOC representative ‘made it quite clear that the repercussions resulting from the Iranians having any cause for complaint against the Company would be disastrous, not only to the Company but also to the conduct of the war’, the Service had to agree to terminate ‘the employment of any employees of the Company’. In May Vivian and Malcolm Woollcombe, however, had a meeting with AIOC, who reassured them that they were still ‘quite prepared to volunteer to 82000 any information of real inside importance, which may happen to come to their knowledge’.

The SIS station at Tehran for which Shelley had laid the foundations at the beginning of 1940 began operating in April. The first full-time representative, whose instructions were to concentrate on the Caucasus and South Russia, stayed barely a year, by which time little progress had been made in penetrating the Soviet Union. In April 1940 London asked Tehran to look into the possibilities of using as agents smugglers working across the Soviet-Iranian frontier. Evidently nothing resulted, for in January 1941 the Army Section at Head Office noted that the Soviet Central Asian Military District was ‘a veritable “black spot” to us as 83000 [Tehran] has so far failed to obtain a single item of military information from this area’. It was hoped, however, that matters might improve as an additional officer had been sent out at the end of 1940 specifically to concentrate on Soviet military information. Before Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 and it came into the war on the Allied side, very real fears that Russia might fight on the Axis side sharpened the need for intelligence about both its intentions and its capabilities. While noting that there had been a recent ‘very satisfactory improvement in our U.S.S.R. O. of B. [order of battle] etc. information’, in February 1941 the Director of Military Intelligence urged SIS ‘to establish without delay further trans-frontier contacts particularly in Moscow, the Caucasus, Central Asia and Eastern Siberia’. ‘I think DMI is right,’ noted Hubert Hatton-Hall. ‘We may well be fighting USSR in another year.’

The head of station in Tehran was replaced ‘temporarily’ by Wilfrid Hindle (the former head of station in Budapest), who stayed until the end of 1942. After the German invasion of Russia SIS operations against the Soviet Union were suspended, but there was much