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sets to the Clarence network. Developed by Gambier-Parry’s Section VIII boffins, this new device allowed agents to speak directly to an aircraft flying near by. Since it dispensed with the need for Morse code, it was easier for inexperienced operators to use, and because they did not require lengthy call-sign procedures, transmissions were more difficult to locate by direction-finding.9 The Ascension sets were used with some success in Belgium and elsewhere, but the system was not very useful for long messages which still had to be smuggled out by courier across long and precarious land routes. One officer in Broadway complained in January 1943 that, although they were receiving a large number of reports from Belgian sources, the information contained in them ‘has been so old that they have become valueless’. During the last week of December 1942, the Military Section had sent eighty reports to the War Office, the contents of which revealed an average time lag of three and three-quarter months. An officer asked if anything could be done to speed up delivery, but Hubert Hatton-Hall, head of the section, commented: ‘I imagine that we are very lucky to get this stuff at all & that there is little chance now of speeding up.’ In May 1943 Jempson told Dansey that all his courier lines with Belgium had broken down following arrests at collecting and forwarding centres in Paris, Lyons and Toulouse. Jempson therefore asked Demarque if he could open a northern route through Sweden. Eventually he found someone and sent an Ascension message to London that one of his agents would call on the British military attaché in Stockholm: ‘He will give the name Buelemans and will say: “Aucun chemin de fleurs ne conduit a la gloire.”’10 The contact appears to have been made but in the end little intelligence came through Sweden.

SIS’s problematic relations with the Dutch began to improve in 1942 after Bill Cordeaux took charge of operations to the Low Countries and Captain D. O. ‘Charles’ Seymour took over as head of the Dutch section. One of the section’s problems concerned the employment of Dutch nationals, whom the government-in-exile wanted to keep for themselves in specifically Dutch formations. To get round this difficulty, Seymour proposed in September 1942 to look for men with British passports, but who were, ‘to all intents and purposes, purely Dutch’, and he asked the service liaison sections in Broadway to ‘do all in your power to trace every likely individual’. The first trained agent of SIS’s new Dutch set-up left for the Netherlands in March 1943. Because it was (rightly) thought that the existing British clandestine networks in the country were compromised, ‘Hendrick’ parachuted in blind, ‘with no organisation to receive him and even without strong hope that his identity cards and other documents were correctly forged’. Cordeaux described him as a strong Calvinist, who was ‘utterly fearless and regarded his task as a mission from God’. He encountered great difficulties from the start, when his Ascension radio-telephony set failed to work. He managed, nevertheless, to build up a network involving some three hundred members, which by the end of 1943 ‘was providing a steady and useful, if not very prolific series of reports’. Hendrick’s attempts to return to England vividly illustrate that it was as difficult to get agents out of occupied Europe as it was to get them in. One scheme involved seizing an air-sea rescue motor boat in Scheveningen harbour, but the engine refused to start and Hendrick escaped only after a lengthy shooting-match. On a second occasion he got as far as the Pyrenees, when a snowstorm forced his party back from the Spanish frontier. Hendrick was arrested shortly afterwards and spent the winter of 1944-5 in prison subjected to intermittent bouts of violent interrogation before he was liberated by advancing Allied forces in the spring of 1945.

France

In August 1943 Menzies learned that the French Committee of National Liberation in Algiers, which had formalised the joint leadership of Giraud and de Gaulle