The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [327]
Bruce Lockhart’s No. 1 Intelligence Unit was one of the SIS successes of the war. From later 1943, following the Italian capitulation, it had a sub-section liaising with the Italian Military Intelligence service, SIM, which had particularly good right-wing and Italian army sources. Another sub-section, which was kept completely separate, developed contacts among Italian opposition groups, including the Communists. Bruce Lockhart brought over from North Africa a leading party activist – with the appropriate cover-name ‘Rosso’ – to ‘establish the Communist Party in Southern Italy’, gave him wireless sets and got him to organise his comrades in the north ‘to transmit military intelligence to us’. Bruce Lockhart, moreover, personally fetched Rosso’s wife and child ‘from a hovel in Tunis’ and brought them to Italy, for which, he recalled some years later, ‘I suffered an orgy of osculation not only by the wife but by [Rosso] – a very unpleasant memory.’ The networks in northern Italy, which proved to be an extremely fruitful source of valuable information, were run by Brian Ashford-Russell, an ex-Commando who had been badly wounded and taken prisoner in North Africa. Having lost the use of his left hand, and being left-handed, he had managed to get himself repatriated under the Geneva Convention as unfit for further military service. He made a tremendous success of his task. Reporting on him in mid-1944, Bowlby described his performance as ‘astounding’. ‘As far as I can remember,’ he wrote to Menzies, ‘during my 6 years in your organisation, nothing very much has ever been produced from Italy, which makes the results achieved all the more meritorious. Somehow he has made Italians enthusiastic about this kind of work which is no mean achievement.’ Bruce Lockhart reported in August that he ran his section ‘like clockwork’, was ‘very loyal’, and ‘once given instructions, no matter how much he disagrees with them, he carries the instructions out to the letter’. Here Bruce Lockhart dryly added that he had ‘found this a somewhat rarer virtue in [SIS] than in the Army’. Ashford-Russell, however, was not perfect. Bowlby described him as ‘a man of extreme (there is no other word) personal ambition which prompts him to aspire to quicker promotion than is the normal practice in this organisation’. But he was also ‘extremely able’. Bowlby and Bruce Lockhart, therefore, had ‘ignored the former, except to tell 32300 [Ashford-Russell] not to be a B.F. [bloody fool], and concentrate on the latter, our main objective being to obtain information which might assist in defeating the Axis’. In this, he concluded, ‘our efforts have been fully rewarded’. Menzies shared Bowlby’s concern about Ashford-Russell’s personal ambitions. ‘Past experience’, he wrote, had demonstrated that ‘conceit’ was ‘a dangerous trait for those engaged in our particular trade’ and (perhaps with Venlo in mind) he could ‘call to mind several disasters from this characteristic, which generally means that the individual despises his opponents, with dire consequences’.
But London continued to worry about ‘liaison’ with ‘Communists, Socialists and Patriots’. Bruce Lockhart explained that the reason why SIS had to ‘remain on friendly terms’ with the Communists in the liberated area was ‘partly in order to obtain recruits’, but ‘far more to obtain access to their organisations North of the [enemy] line’, adding that it was ‘fair to say that 80% of the information coming from North Italy is obtained from Communist, Socialist and Patriotic organisations’ and it was ‘doubtful whether without their help we could even have got our network started’. Lest the station should be suspected of having gone off the rails politically, in July 1944 he reassured Bowlby he was satisfied that ‘in