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difficult, dangerous and thankless work’, he claimed that he and his men were working for a cause and would continue to do so whether SIS needed the results or not. In late 1944 Onodera’s cables to Tokyo (which Bletchley Park were reading) showed that Maasing was more forthcoming about his sources to Onodera than to SIS, prompting renewed concerns about his reliability. Besides, the Foreign Office had banned direct work against the Soviets, and as their importance to the Allied cause grew, London became increasingly nervous about the risk of them finding out that SIS was associating with such an anti-Soviet character. Head Office therefore instructed that Maasing be given an ultimatum to reveal his sub-sources or the relationship be terminated. He again refused and was paid off. Carr later discovered that one of the officers in Head Office who had strongly advocated the ultimatum was Kim Philby, who would presumably have passed on to his Soviet masters whatever Maasing revealed about his sources (whom Carr believed included Communist Party members still in the Soviet Union).

In the later stages of the war the various SIS groups in Sweden handled an increasing amount of counter-espionage work. Peter Falk, the Section V representative posted to Stockholm in April 1943, had quickly established liaison with Norwegian and Polish opposite numbers, as well as the Swedish security police. He also took over from the SOE station two agents with access to the German legation. One of these was a German woman refugee who worked for the German legation’s Press Section. Although her access to material of real intelligence interest was limited, her presence within the legation enabled her to report on German personalities and their coming and going, thus providing valuable background and targeting information. She received daily news briefings from Berlin and visited Germany and Finland for Falk. She was never paid, but was given British nationality in 1945 and resettled in the United Kingdom. In April 1944 another specialist Section V officer was posted to Stockholm to concentrate on liaison work with the Danes. Towards the very end of the war, counter-espionage work began to loom larger, as SIS sought to encourage the Scandinavian countries, when hostilities ceased, to round up those of their nationals who had worked as agents for the Germans, or were pro-Nazi. The information which emerged from the Krämer case added to Falk’s knowledge of suspects in Sweden and set the basis for increased counter-espionage exchanges with the Swedes, who became more inclined to co-operate as the Allied victory became more certain.4

The Bari station

In August 1944 Cuthbert Bowlby, who had been designated H/Med since October 1943, began to consider long-term strategy in the Mediterranean theatre and press London for guidance about this. Reflecting the changed focus of military operations, he proposed concentrating the regional SIS effort in Italy and Istanbul, and running down the Middle East headquarters in Cairo. Arguing that Austria should be the main base for SIS activities throughout south-east Europe after the war, he raised the possibility of working into the Soviet sphere from there, as well as from Italy and Bulgaria. Although he stressed that such operations would not be ‘palatable’ to the Soviets, he thought that they ‘could be undertaken without their knowledge, provided that it is skilfully and methodically thought out’. London considered such planning to be premature. Although he had raised the matter generally with Bowlby the previous September, Menzies now preferred ‘to await the experience which we may gain from our first contacts with the 95-landers [Soviets] in our joint missions in the 91-land [Balkan] countries’. Reflecting the unusual consequences of fighting a war alongside a past and potentially future enemy, Marshall-Cornwall realistically thought it unlikely that ‘any of our present personnel’ in the Mediterranean could be used in renewed operations against the Soviet Union. But, as he observed to John Bruce Lockhart (who