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ignorance of Bletchley Park’s successes in breaking Enigma cyphers). Carr immediately raised the proposal with London, where it was considered by Menzies himself, who turned it down flat, on the grounds that he did not want a group of Finns (at this time officially enemy nationals) working on cryptographic matters in the United Kingdom. Under the code-name ‘Stella Polaris’, Hallamaa proceeded with the evacuation to Sweden all the same, and offered his records to the French, who gratefully accepted them. Biffy Dunderdale, in turn, learned of this from his French contacts and was able to arrange for SIS to get copies of the material. Thus the Service in the end obtained the material without having to make any embarrassing commitments. After the end of the war, the Swedes found Hallamaa (who had remained in Sweden) a bit of a hot potato, and, at the request of the French, Carr helped to have him smuggled out through Denmark and Germany to France where he went to ground under an assumed name.

Thanks from General Eisenhower to Menzies for the

Bletchley Park intelligence which saved ‘thousands of

British and American lives’.

On 12 September 1944, in Moscow, Finland signed an armistice with the Allies, following which, as a defeated enemy, it came under the oversight of an Allied Control Commission, led by Colonel General Andrei Zhdanov, the senior Soviet political officer on the Leningrad Front. This was the first of a series of similar postwar Allied military administrations in defeated enemy countries, within which (or alongside which) SIS would seek to operate. In Finland (as elsewhere) the leading position of the Soviets presented particular challenges for the Service, especially since the Foreign Office line at this stage was to avoid making any trouble with the Soviets, who were still, in name at least, allies. Top-secret Foreign Office instructions to the British members of the commission underlined this point. British officers were to establish ‘frank and friendly relations’ with their Soviet colleagues and refrain from contacts with Finns which were ‘likely to give offence to the Soviet authorities’, but they were also to note that while ‘our ultimate policy is to ensure a Free and independent Finland . . . it must always be remembered that Finland is a conquered country and will have to work her passage home’.3 The Helsinki station’s exile ended in March 1945 when Rex Bosley was posted to reopen it, operating initially under the control of Harry Carr in Stockholm. Bosley was a gifted intelligence officer (nicknamed ‘the Ferret’), whom Carr had recruited in Helsinki just before the war and who had been a most effective assistant thereafter. After Carr had been called home in May 1945, following a long postwar leave becoming Controller Northern Area with responsibility for all of Scandinavia in September, Bosley took full charge of the Helsinki station, based initially in the office of the British Political Representative, but in 1947 as Assistant Information Officer in the legation.

Relations with the Soviets affected the management of a liaison contact run by Carr’s Helsinki station-in-exile. This was ‘43931’, the former Estonian Director of Military Intelligence, Colonel Richard Maasing, a fierce anti-Communist who had been helped by the Germans to escape from Estonia in 1940, had done some work for the Abwehr and had then come to Sweden, where he offered his services, reporting on German military matters, both to SIS and to the Japanese military attaché in Stockholm, General Makoto Onodera. Maasing was regarded as a valuable contact, though after the German defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943 he began mainly to produce reports (which he supplied not only to the British and Japanese, but to the Swedes as well) on the Red Army as it swept westwards. An old intelligence hand, he had consistently refused to reveal his sub-sources to SIS. In 1942 he fiercely resisted a demand from London that he ‘come clean in the whole matter of his organisation’. Observing that obtaining information on German intentions was ‘most