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see an agent being trained and also be instructed in secret inks. He would need to read ‘Instructions to Representatives’ and ‘Notes for S.I.S. officers’, along with the instructions given to the current representative at Lagos. Howard himself would meet Greene for discussion ‘regarding S.I.S. Organisation at home and abroad. Relations with other Government Departments. Objectives, methods and the question of personal cover. Symbols for Departments and Sections. Post-boxes, cut-outs, agent doubles, [and] provocateurs.’ Greene would then see Frank Foley for instruction regarding the training of agents, and other officers for ‘discussion on censorship’, telephonic communications and security. Finally, Greene would be introduced to the Deputy Chief, Valentine Vivian. Beyond this specific SIS training, in order for the rather unmilitary Greene to maintain cover as an army officer, he was also sent to a general course for Intelligence Corps officers at Oriel College, Oxford, for the sole purpose ‘of being given the most elementary instruction in soldiering, so that he could wear battledress without embarrassment’.

However comprehensive and detailed individual programmes like this might be, it was clearly an inefficient way of providing training for a rapidly expanding Service. Among the signs of the new approach to training and tradecraft was a memorandum prepared by the Army Section in February 1942 on ‘S.I.S. Stations abroad: their operations and special tasks’. Compiled at Rex Howard’s request, this embodied general principles, ‘based on personal experience’. That the training arrangements were becoming much more systematic is illustrated by a ‘P.9 [Norwegian Section] Agents’ Training Sheet’ from 1943 which set out a list of twenty-one separate possible training requirements, including ‘Security’ (at the top), through various types of communications, ‘Principles S.I.S.’, ‘Arrest information’, ‘Pistol’, ‘Unarmed combat’, to ‘First Aid’, ‘Photography’ and ‘Parachute’. Against each of these were boxes for completion under four headings: ‘Whose responsibility’, ‘Training commenced’, ‘Training completed’ and ‘Remarks’.6

Commander Cohen’s new Training Section began in a modest way. The first officers’ course, run in the summer of 1943, had only three students, but there was a steady expansion. Ten officers attended the second course in September, and by this stage the section were helping overseas stations with training instructions and manuals. Individual officers could now be directed to specific programmes, as was Graham Greene’s fellow writer Malcolm Muggeridge, in August 1943. ‘P.11’, the head of the Africa Section, suggested that, ‘time permitting’, Muggeridge, home from Lourenço Marques and expected to return there (though in the end he did not), ‘should do a short refresher course with our Training Section to bring his ideas up-to-date. The “Tradecraft” lectures in particular should prove helpful.’ The Training Section was keen to expand its activities and when in April 1944 it responded to a request from Major Frederick Jempson of the Belgian Section to train an individual agent ‘in the best means of conveying documents through occupied territory’, especially ‘the best methods of sealing and packing films so that we could tell on arrival whether or not they had been tampered with en route’, it reflected on including the instruction on general training courses. In November 1944 Menzies told Sir Alexander Cadogan at the Foreign Office that the new training arrangements would help Service esprit de corps. In order to overcome problems of compartmentalisation arising from ‘an enforced separation of some of the Sections, solely due to housing difficulties’, he had ‘introduced a training system which gives numerous officers of the S.I.S. a wide insight into its various functions’. He was also currently ‘experimenting with a similar course for selected members of the female staff’.7

Communications were at the heart of SIS wartime operations. Gathering intelligence was difficult enough, but the whole exercise was vitiated if