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chief, Louis Rivet, and his air intelligence specialist, Georges Ronin, arrived. Menzies asked Orange to assure Rivet ‘that his arrival is really heartening news’. Evidently anxious to keep the French liaison exclusive to SIS, Valentine Vivian told Algiers that he was sending out Winterbotham, head of the Air Section at Broadway, to meet Ronin. ‘Try and persuade him and Rivet’, he continued, ‘to keep clear of S.O.E. and other newly formed intelligence services’ (perhaps a reference to OSS, which had also set up a station in Algiers). ‘We trust they will stick to old friends who are, as always, ready to help them in every direction.’ So anxious was Menzies to keep the French out of SOE’s clutches that in January 1943 he asked for Rivet to be given an oral, personal message informing him that since ‘our previous association’ (before the fall of France) ‘sabotage’ had been ‘divorced from me’. A senior officer of SOE was to visit North Africa shortly ‘and I would like you to know that they have nothing repeat nothing to do with S.R. [intelligence]. I forbid the use of my agents or organisation for this purpose as disaster would inevitably follow.’

Ronin, who asserted that the Deuxième Bureau still had ‘considerable possibilities’ in France and the Low Countries, suggested that they might establish a liaison station in London and, following Winterbotham’s visit to Algiers, Ronin and Paul Paillole came to London for ten days over Christmas 1942. Here they met most of the SIS high command. Paillole recalled Dansey as being ‘rather strange’ (‘un curieux personnage’), but added that Menzies, who spoke with an air of authority, treated Dansey with respect. The two Frenchmen also met de Gaulle’s intelligence chief, André Dewavrin, amicably enough it seems, and had some preliminary discussion about co-ordinating activities.15 Menzies’s ‘ultimate hope’ was ‘to get one combined bureau amalgamated with [the] fighting French’. He recognised, however, that ‘this will not be easily attained’, and indeed co-operation between the various French organisations remained highly conjectural for some time. In the meantime SIS had to work with Dewavrin’s BCRA (Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action) and Rivet’s set-up largely as separate entities. The assassination of Admiral Darlan by a maverick anti-Nazi French royalist on Christmas Eve 1942 simplified the political situation and during 1943 de Gaulle gradually gained the upper hand. Giraud faded from the picture, and by the winter of 1943 Rivet’s organisation had been merged into the Free French BCRA.

Italy

All through 1942 coverage of Italy proved a very hard nut to crack. An Italian Jew recruited in Tunisia by André Mounier was given wireless training in Malta and landed on the west coast of Sicily by submarine. When he began transmitting, ‘we discovered by the check question method [by which the operator could use a prearranged answer to show he was under duress] that he had come under enemy control’. Rather than break off contact, Dudley Clarke used him as part of his brilliantly successful deception operation before Operation Torch, sending the agent ‘questions and warnings’ which implied that Sicily was to be the target rather than North Africa. A second operation involved the landing by submarine of two Italian ex-prisoners-of-war on the coast near Livorno in Tuscany. They had claimed to have anti-Fascist friends and that they would be able to pose as soldiers on leave, for which they were provided with false documents. But, as their case-officer recalled, ‘they were a very happy go lucky pair and we never heard of them again’, rather confirming Cuthbert Bowlby’s prediction in January 1941 that recruiting agents from among captured Italian servicemen might ‘merely be treated as a beneficial repatriation scheme’.16

By the spring of 1943, when it was clear that the defeat of Axis forces in North Africa was only a matter of time (the capitulation came on 13 May), pressure to get agents into Italy stepped up sharply. On 18 April London instructed Algiers that ‘considering the grave