The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [272]
In May 1940 Miller reported that a ship-watching service had been established on the Argentine coast of Patagonia, but with a long coastline, a very scattered population and only eleven sub-agents the task was one of ‘considerable difficulty’. Miller had to depend mainly on ‘a few isolated Englishmen working farms on or near the coast’ and it was ‘not a practical matter to draft strange agents into these areas of few inhabitants. Hundreds would be required to assure any certainty of results.’ He raised ‘the possibility of equipping ocean going fishing craft for this purpose’. The following month a sub-agent reviewed the position in Chile, with similar challenges of a long coastline and scattered population. In the province of Aysen, eight hundred miles south of Santiago, moreover, there was ‘a large proportion of German settlers’ and the previous summer ‘a party of Germans supposed to be a scientific expedition’ had ‘explored the province’ and, ‘no doubt, mapped the country very thoroughly’. This work, noted the report ominously, was not ‘on behalf of the Chilean Government’. As the establishment of a shore organisation was ‘a physical impossibility’, Miller suggested the alternatives of keeping watch by sea or air.
In London this was interpreted as a firm proposal for coast-watching from the air. Reflecting that the cost ‘of such a service would be very considerable’, SIS asked the Admiralty’s opinion ‘as to its desirability and value’. Meanwhile Miller proposed an ad hoc arrangement by placing an agent on a local oil company plane engaged in survey work. This was enthusiastically welcomed by the Admiralty in August 1940, ‘as there is a raider somewhere in these parts now and it might be hiding in some uninhabited inlet in Patagonia’. But the arrangement was only a stop-gap and in December the Admiralty issued an explicit instruction to SIS to make searches by aircraft ‘of the coast lines of East South America, including Southern Brazil, Argentine and the Terra del Fuego – both Argentine and Chilean’. This was easier said than done. Herbert Taylor, head of the American section in Broadway, sounded out an oil company executive who estimated that, apart from any local political problems which the scheme might encounter, it would cost £10,000 to set up and run in the first year. In January 1941 Taylor noted that ‘the problem is obviously bristling with difficulties’, but since the Admiralty were ‘most anxious for something to be done’, he thought ‘we must explore every possibility before saying we are unable to help’.
Miller in Montevideo came up with a solution which involved buying a plane for the local manager of an English-owned sheep farm in the southern Argentine. For the rest of the Patagonian coast he believed that commercial pilots flying in the area ‘could be persuaded to act as observers for monthly retaining fee’ and to cover the Chilean coast funding could be provided for a local British ranch owner ‘nominally [to] purchase an amphibian aeroplane for his own use’. Miller estimated that, ‘excluding cost of aircraft’, it would only cost £2,500 per annum. Having secured Foreign Office and Admiralty approval, the purchase of a plane was agreed in March 1941. The business, however, dragged on for some time. It was argued that getting a plane from the USA would be ‘far quicker’ than using British channels. ‘If the Air Ministry is brought into it,’ minuted one official, ‘and then M.A.P. [Ministry of Aircraft Production], it would seem that we will just about be getting approval for the purchase by the time the war is due to end.’ After a plane had been ordered (from the USA), but not delivered, some local British supporters offered