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’ of XB work was the ‘arrest, and/ or prosecution and conviction’ by the US authorities of ‘seven key enemy agents’ and some twenty associates. The section naturally liaised closely with the FBI, and from October 1943 had been jointly investigating Communist activities, especially in South America. One longstanding interest of SIS in North America was ‘Indian activities’, and ‘an up to date card index’ of Indian nationalist and other suspects had been compiled, drawing principally on official United States sources. During ‘recent months’, however, there had been ‘a noticeable reluctance on the part of U.S. official and other circles to collaborate with information relating to British Indian nationals’. This was felt to be due ‘to the latent American dislike of the popular conception of British imperialist suppression of Indian nationalist aspirations’, rather than ‘any officially inspired policy’. This work, in any case, had been the responsibility of an individual officer who had returned to England, and the study of Indian activities was scheduled to cease at the end of June 1944.

William Stephenson’s 1945 Official History asserts that among BSC’s most significant achievements was the penetration of the Italian, French and Spanish embassy staffs in Washington, while, thanks to the amorous activities of agent ‘Cynthia’, both the French and Italian naval cyphers were obtained. The history also maintains that Cynthia was responsible for short-circuiting an Italian attempt to scuttle merchant ships interned in US ports. The SIS files contain nothing about any role Cynthia may have had against the Italians but there is some material to corroborate her part concerning the Vichy French. A report from Lisbon in October 1940 noted that Cynthia (Mrs Elizabeth Pack, an American married to a British diplomat, who had worked for SIS in Poland before the war) was ‘on a visit from Washington’. Lisbon raised the possibility of her again being useful to the Service, noting that she was ‘great friends’ with a strongly anglophile American naval intelligence officer. ‘He is aged about 40, unmarried; and she is undoubtedly rather attractive.’ The officer and some of his colleagues ‘were apparently anxious to be of use to England’ and had offered to give her information for the British authorities. London passed on the contact to Stephenson who was given permission in March 1941 to employ her at a salary of $250 per month ‘for a three months’ probationary period to cover diplomatic and inside foreign circles in 48-land capital’.

According to the BSC History, Cynthia began an affair with the Vichy press attaché, Charles Brousse, in the early summer of 1941 and subsequently provided copious amounts of information from the Washington embassy for SIS, so much so that Menzies complained about the volume of material, asking 48000 to be more selective and concentrate on United States-French relations and telegrams from the French naval attaché. In June 1942 he particularly requested information about a new cypher the ambassador and naval attaché were using. As narrated by the BSC History, Cynthia and Brousse masqueraded as lovers in order to spend nights in the embassy and organise it so that a locksmith could get access to the safe. New York reported that on the first attempt it took too long to open the safe, which was ascribed to Cynthia’s ‘nervousness’, and there was no time to make photostats of the code-books. The History relates that there was a second, successful attempt (and it includes two photographs of the Vichy cyphers), but there is no independent confirmation of this in the archives. 16

SIS in Latin America

The BSC Report for 1943-4 estimated that the annual total expenditure on all SIS’s Latin and South American stations came to something just short of £200,000 (£6,600,000 today). Demonstrating the huge expansion in activity across the hemisphere, this was well over ten times the budget allocated in 1939-40 for the whole region. In the spring of 1938 a local British resident, Captain Reginald ‘Rex’ Miller, had been appointed to