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joined the Service in March 1939 and had served briefly in Berlin and Zagreb, before being posted to Bari to work on Yugoslavia and Central Europe. This included ‘Germany south of River Main, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Austria’, though the penetration of Germany was carefully described only as ‘an ultimate objective’. Within six months, Bowlby, by now himself installed at Naples, reported that Millar (along with Ashford-Russell) had ‘produced excellent results’ and ‘merited several bouquets from our local customers’. Yugoslavia was another of those places where SIS had to work with Communists. The domestic resistance movement was dominated by two mutually opposed groups: the Partisans, led by Josep Broz, ‘Tito’, the prewar leader of the Yugoslav Communist Party; and the virulently anti-Communist Četniks, under the royalist General Draža Mihailović. Although at the start the two groups had to some extent co-operated, and Mihailović had been backed by the Allies, signals intelligence and reports from SOE missions in Yugoslavia gradually revealed that the Četniks were increasingly collaborating with Axis forces against the shared Communist foe. Churchill became convinced that the leftist Partisans were much more likely to draw German troops away from the west and in February 1944, therefore, the government resolved to withdraw backing for Mihailović and support only Tito.5

In SIS, which seriously began to target Yugoslavia only after the Italian surrender, differences remained about whom to support among the resistance. For some, old anti-Bolshevik habits died hard. In April 1944, following a visit to Bari, Bowlby worried that Millar and his staff were ‘far too Tito-conscious’. He complained that ‘pictures of Tito cover the walls’ of Millar’s office and he asked London to send out large photographs of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, ‘to be hung in some prominent place’ in the office. This, he felt, ‘should have the desired effect of intimating to 35,600 [Millar] that there are limits to local partisanship’. Bruce Lockhart appreciated Bowlby’s point about Tito, whom he considered was certainly a ‘tool of the Russians’. He argued, nevertheless, that Millar was right ‘in putting all his money on Tito’ as this was ‘undoubtedly his best chance of obtaining good military information’. So it was, and most of the intelligence which SIS acquired about Yugoslavia came from overt SIS and SOE liaison with the Partisans. As Bruce Lockhart noted in May 1945, although it was ‘not an SIS problem in the precise sense of the word’, the Yugoslav intelligence which Millar produced was nevertheless ‘consistently on a very high level’ and ‘at one period YM [the army] and YA [the air force] were almost entirely dependent on the intelligence produced by 35600 [Millar] for their planning’.

Worries about left-wing politics affected individual SIS officers as well, including one of the men in Millar’s section, Kenneth Syers, who had been recruited into the Service in late 1942. Educated at King’s College, Cambridge, he had been a journalist before the war, then a British Council lecturer in Yugoslavia from 1939 to 1941, and spoke fluent Serbo-Croat. In August 1943 he was dropped into Yugoslavia as an officer-agent, was brought out in November 1943 and served in Bari before spending another spell in Yugoslavia from May to September 1944, after which he was posted home to Section I (Foreign Office liaison) in Head Office. He had first come to the notice of David Footman (head of Section I) in the latter part of 1943 ‘when he sent us a series of reports on the political aspects of the Partisan movement’, the quality of which was, in Footman’s experience of political reporting, ‘quite unique’. ‘They were endorsed by [Fitzroy] Maclean,’ the British representative with Tito, and made ‘a considerable impression on the Foreign Office including the strong pro-Mihailovist element then there’. His reports, in both quantity and quality, had been ‘of greater value than perhaps those of any other officer in our Mediterranean station’. But, on his posting to