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in fact, Austria, which had been integrated into the Reich since 1938. One involved the recruitment of Austrian and Italian prisoners-of-war in North Africa and their repatriation by means of an existing escape route through Spanish Morocco, Spain and France. Another suggested recruiting agents among partisans in northern Croatia and smuggling them into Lower Styria. Two-man agent/wireless-operator teams would be dropped in blind to establish ‘advanced bases’ (one was proposed to be in ‘the Brenner Pass area’; another on the Slovene-Austrian border) to which agents would report. Nothing came of this ambitious scheme, and in February 1944 Bruce Lockhart, while conceding that his section (‘44200’) dedicated to penetrating Germany was under-performing, noted the real difficulties with which it was faced. There was a shortage of air support; blind-dropping agents was ‘useless’; some of the proposed agents were unsuitable. One, indeed, could ‘not possibly pass as Italian due to Prussian accent’. Bruce Lockhart thought that better results might be obtained by infiltrating foreign labourers and specialists. One of his colleagues complained about the poor quality of the Austrians he had been given. ‘The supply of even half-way suitable types is strictly limited,’ he observed, and, even if he sent some off, he doubted if he would ‘ever hear from them again’. ‘Leaving aside all wishful thinking’, and drawing a striking parallel, he argued that SIS was ‘in much the same position, even at this stage of the war, as the 12-land [German] service when they are looking for 22-landers [Britons] to work for them in 22-land’. SIS of course got ‘plenty of rats that leave the sinking ship, and we shall get more, but precious few are prepared to go back to gnaw another hole in her bottom’. Not much was achieved until the spring of 1944 when two largely self-contained sections were set up. The first, for the penetration of northern Italy, was under Major Brian Ashford-Russell and the second, for Yugoslavia and Central Europe, under Major James Millar.

The Balkans

During the Second half of the war SIS in several places dealt directly (and productively) with Communists. Across the Balkans both SIS and SOE found themselves working against Axis forces with Communist resistance and partisan groups. But the Western Allies were also supporting and mobilising centrist and right-wing elements in occupied Europe, and as victory began to seem increasingly likely, tensions also began to emerge between domestic political groups, looking to winning not only the war but also the peace that would follow. Furthermore, as Soviet armies began to roll back the Germans and move towards Eastern Europe, concerns were raised, both in London and by the men on the spot, as to the political consequences of this advance, in both the short and the long term.

Greece was a case in point, where resistance coalesced into two main groups: the rightist National Democratic Hellenic League, EDES, broadly aligned with the Greek government-in-exile, and the Communist-backed National Liberation Front, EAM, with its military wing, ELAS, the National Popular Liberation Army. British engagement with these groupings, at least in 1942-3, depended less on any perceived political leanings than on their efficiency in fighting the enemy. Responding in August 1942 to Greek complaints about the ‘British Secret Services’ (which included both SIS and SOE) consorting with elements ‘hostile to the King and the Government’, for example, SIS recognised that it was ‘only natural’ that SOE’s ‘operations are connected with subversive elements’. If ‘they are using Communists, which we have every reason to believe is correct, they have chosen these men because they are more active against the Axis than the other elements in the country’. At this stage SIS’s main Greek operation was based in Smyrna, where Lieutenant Commander Rees was running boats into Greece, supporting escape lines, but not producing much intelligence from the Greek mainland. All through 1942 there were concerns about the lack of information.