The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [271]
Beyond the gathering of political and economic intelligence, the wartime work of SIS’s South American stations was of three main types. First was naval intelligence, involving, as London instructed Panama in September 1939, ‘penetration of Mexico to watch German activities especially supplies to raiders and submarines’, or as Miller put it in a report on Uruguay in February 1940, ‘investigating the activities of the German Legation and their possible relationship to maritime alarms, excursions, movements, etc.’. The second included monitoring and attempting to penetrate the sizeable local Axis communities, identifying enemy intelligence agents and assessing threats to Allied political and economic interests. Third was a range of other covert activities, sometimes special operations alongside SOE personnel who were run out of Stephenson’s BSC office in New York. Of these, naval intelligence, at least in the first half of the war, absorbed the greatest amount of time and money. Some matters were excluded from the Service’s purview, presumably not having been raised by customer departments. In 1943, for example, London queried a proposal to engage a Peruvian agent involved in the drug business on the grounds that ‘we are not (repeat not) particularly interested in the manufacture and export of cocaine’.
Miller’s SIS work naturally intensified after the outbreak of war. On 25 September the Foreign Office were informed that he had deployed agents to gather intelligence for the Ministry of Economic Warfare. By October he was complaining that some of his agents were overworked, and at the beginning of December he asked for a full-time assistant to run SIS work in Brazil. In December the naval attaché in Buenos Aires worried about Miller’s health breaking down under the strain of overwork. This was especially important as the majority of the attaché’s information ‘on enemy movements’ came from sources under Miller’s control. ‘That part of his organisation that deals with enemy activities within his countries’, claimed the attaché, ‘provides material of the greatest use, the ultimate effect of which it may be hard to exaggerate.’ The Admiralty view seems to have been decisive and Miller got his assistant. At the beginning of 1940 Miller, with two secretaries in his office, secured permission to spend up to £160 a month on a network of a head agent and eight under-agents to target Nazi organisations in Uruguay. Five months on he raised the problem of underfunding in Chile, where he was faced with an ‘exceedingly efficient and co-ordinated German penetration’. Here his SIS organisation of ‘some eight to ten members’, costing £150 a month, could not ‘do more than cramp the enemy’s style’. In November 1940 Menzies approved a proposal from Miller for an officer to run operations in Chile, Peru and Bolivia, and in February 1941 Major Henry Higman (who had briefly been Passport Control Officer in Madrid and had been working in Head Office) was appointed as ‘76000’ to head an independent station at Santiago.
Admiralty concerns about the region were underpinned by the Battle of the River Plate, when British warships forced the German pocket-battleship Admiral Graf Spee to take refuge in Uruguayan territorial waters, where it was scuttled on 17 December 1939. Although this was a rare early success in the war, the mere presence of the German ship in the South Atlantic sharpened fears that other enemy warships, including submarines and disguised armed merchant-raiders, sheltering and even reprovisioning in remote parts of the South American coast, could operate in the area, threatening