The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [279]
In 1940 two additional stations were established. One was at Chungking (Chongqing) where, with cover as the press attaché at the British embassy, Walter Gordon Harmon’s primary (and difficult) role was liaison with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese intelligence service. Harmon was an Englishman who had been born and bred in China, and had been employed in the Salt Gabelle, the body which administered the Chinese salt tax. The other station was at Manila, where Gerald Wilkinson, a British businessman based in the Philippines whose father had worked with Menzies during the First World War, was appointed SIS representative with responsibility (as Menzies told the Foreign Office) ‘mainly to find out certain information which the Ministry of Economic Warfare require’. Wilkinson, in fact, had been working under Hong Kong since 1936, briefed not only to cover the Philippines’ defences but also to work on the penetration of Japan. In October 1939 he had reported a contact who might be able to secure ‘a Japanese or Japanese-speaking Philippine ready to go to Japan and stay at some naval station with [the] object of gathering naval information’, but nothing appears to have resulted from this. In the meantime Wilkinson developed a close relationship with the American military authorities in the Philippines, which was later to prove very beneficial for Anglo-American liaison.
Apart from concentrating on Japan and Japanese targets in China, the SIS stations in the Far East were also asked for information about the USSR. Reflecting concerns arising from the Nazi-Soviet Pact, late in December 1939 Broadway announced that ‘the penetration of Vladivostock is now of high importance not only for Russian information but as a possible German base’. It instructed the Far Eastern stations to ‘telegraph what prospects you see of getting suitable sources for obtaining the above information in the near future’. Only two of the stations appear to have responded positively. Singapore signalled that a ‘local Russian’ had volunteered to work for them, and asked the Shanghai station if visas for Vladivostok were obtainable and what steamship sailings there were to the Russian port. After Shanghai replied to both questions in the negative the potential agent rejected the mission as not being ‘a practicable proposition’. The response from Hong Kong was initially more hopeful as the SIS representative there was currently ‘negotiating for purchase of up to date plans of Vladivostock’. Although the source (a White Russian) was ‘an utter blackguard’, he had ‘always delivered the goods hitherto’. A ‘report on Vladivostock Harbours’ was indeed delivered in September 1940, but a later note (which described the Russian as both a ‘chronic alcoholic’ and ‘totally unreliable’) said that it ‘proved of little value’.
One of the problems for SIS in the region was that the very longevity of its representatives, coupled with the general gossipy lack of security that pervaded official and expatriate circles in the Far East and a near-fatal tendency to underestimate the enemy, meant that the identities of SIS representatives were widely known and their efforts to step up operations in 1939-40 readily compromised. One officer at Broadway, who had served in the Tokyo embassy in 1940, ruefully reflected afterwards that the Japanese police had been able to give him ‘a fairly detailed outline of our S.I.S. work in China’. The activities of Steptoe and Hill, he added, were ‘known to most European residents in the Far East, for so-called Embassy cover does not mean a great deal unless a man does some definite Embassy job in addition to S.I.S. work’. By 1939 the