spheres of influence. An SOE mission was established in Moscow under Colonel George Hill, an old Russian hand and longstanding anti-Bolshevik who had worked for SIS during the post-revolutionary period and rejoined the Service in Section D at the start of the war, subsequently transferring into SOE. In the face of the German push towards Moscow during the winter of 1941, all foreign missions were evacuated to Kuibyshev, a provincial city on the River Volga. Here Hill cheered up his colleagues by inventing ingenious vodka cocktails.8 While the NKVD were aware of Hill’s role, there was also an unavowed SIS representative in the party who began to develop contacts in the parallel Polish and Czechoslovak military missions for intelligence. The most productive of these was Colonel Leon Bortnowski, code-named ‘Perch’, who was the Polish intelligence service representative in the USSR from August 1941 until September 1942. Although Bortnowski was avowed to the NKVD he offered to pass on information to SIS from his own Polish network and released Polish prisoners-of-war. A shopping list was prepared in London, with the Air Section asking for information about Russian aircraft production and the transfer east of aircraft factories. The Naval Section wanted Bortnowski to ask the Russians ‘what warships, especially battleships, aircraft carriers and cruisers are building in Japan’ and if the Germans had ‘any gas, other than those known in last war’; the Economic Section were primarily interested in oil production and the ‘condition of the railway system’; and the Political Section requested information about morale, ‘with special reference to whether there is any serious or organised opposition to the Soviet regime’. Bortnowski was able to supply some economic material, but there were complaints at Broadway about its quantity and that he was unable to respond to supplementary enquiries. For one officer this merely illustrated ‘how unsatisfactory’ it was ‘to rely on Foreign representatives to get us our information’, as the source was both ‘in a delicate position’ and ‘not under our control’. ‘We, as an organisation,’ he continued, ‘should and must rely primarily on our own intelligence collecting weapons rather than those of our Allies, friends or neutrals.’
In December 1941, however, Bortnowski did supply what were described as ‘authentic Russian documents’, Soviet General Staff intelligence reports concerning Turkey, Afghanistan and India, which showed that the USSR was ‘very well informed about British activities in India and elsewhere’, and for which London sent a special message of thanks.9 In May 1942 the possibility was raised of using Polish agents to ‘find out something’ about the ‘policy and present activities’ of the Comintern. David Footman in Broadway appreciated that ‘our representative has, of course, to watch his own step very carefully in Soviet Russia, but the Poles might not have the same diffidence about making these enquiries’. Valentine Vivian saw merit in the proposal. ‘We should, I think, be wrong’, he wrote, ‘not to keep abreast of Comintern (a) Policy & (b) activities. The directives we have seen to the C.P.G.B., and the tactics now being employed, show that Communism may at the end or towards the end of the war be a force to reckon with.’ But, he added, ‘policy with regard to anything Russian’ is ‘delicate’. Frederick Winterbotham, now in the counter-espionage Section V, thought the whole proposal was ‘very undesirable’. ‘Our man in Kuibishev’ might pick up ‘scraps’, he argued, but this ‘would in no way compensate for the risk of the Soviet authorities discovering, or suspecting, what he was up to’. Faced with this opposition, Vivian dropped the notion.
In December 1942 it was proposed to send an avowed SIS officer to the Soviet Union to act as Hill’s assistant and work on the ‘exchange of information’ with the Soviets, though Broadway recognised that this would be a ‘difficult task’. All the Allies found the Soviets hard to deal with in this respect. Colonel Stanisław Gano, the Polish intelligence chief,