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said that while he had ‘supplied the Russians with a fair amount’, he had ‘received nothing in return except questionnaires of a very childish nature’, and Hatton-Hall, head of the Army Section at Broadway, regretfully observed that it was ‘hopeless to expect the Russians to reciprocate. We must be prepared to get nothing back.’ Lieutenant Cecil Barclay, a twenty-eight-year-old sailor who had been hired by SIS in 1938 to assist in Section X (the telephone-tapping department), and had subsequently stayed on at Head Office, was posted to Moscow in June 1943. Over the next two years he acted as the conduit for signals intelligence material, and, as had been expected, most of the traffic was one-way. In November 1944, however, he was given some captured German code-books, of which one (‘Schlüsselanleitung zum Rufzeichenschlüssel’ – ‘key instruction to call-sign key’) provoked great excitement at Bletchley Park. It would, declared the Director, Commander Edward Travis (Denniston’s successor), ‘mean that one of the biggest difficulties of the moment will be solved. In other words, Barclay has got a catch.’

On 13 October 1943, Vivian told Peter Loxley that ‘about six months ago’ he had obtained Menzies’s approval to establish a small unit (Section IX) to concentrate on the ‘illegal’ or underground aspects of the Communist movement in foreign countries, and to handle cases of Communist or Soviet penetration and espionage. An MI5 officer, J. C. Curry, had been seconded to the section and SIS now wanted to adopt ‘a cautious, forward policy’ of tackling this target, including the exchange of information with allies. Recognising ‘the extreme delicacy of the matter’, Vivian assured Loxley that ‘few have been made aware of the nature’ of this work. Sir Orme Sargent (Deputy Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office) was immediately enthusiastic: ‘I quite agree to the proposal . . . in fact, I am surprised that this branch of our intelligence services should have been allowed to fall into desuetude.’ Sargent was keen to know how far Communist organisations operating in the Balkans had taken root among the population, ‘and how far they are being supported by Moscow’. Loxley therefore quickly told Vivian that the Foreign Office had no objection to SIS developing Section IX’s work, ‘provided that discretion is observed, and provided that you do not do anything in the U.S.S.R. itself (despite Soviet espionage in this country)’.10

As Soviet forces moved towards Berlin in April 1945, Barclay suggested that the ‘time had come’ to start on counter-espionage within Germany, and asked Broadway if there were ‘any special addresses in Berlin which interest you and what do you want from them’? He could also pass to the Soviets lists of names of the more important German intelligence officers ‘suspected of remaining in Berlin’, or (and here he reflected prevailing concerns that the Nazis would seek to preserve some clandestine organisation after their defeat) staying ‘elsewhere in east to work underground’. London replied with a list of eighteen intelligence service addresses in the Berlin area, along with nineteen ‘Mil. Amt’ names, including that of the organisation’s head, Walter Schellenberg. (The Militärisches Amt had been created in June 1944 when Himmler’s SD had swallowed up the Army Intelligence Abwehr.) There were also nine officers’ names specifically from Amt VI (the overseas branch of the SD), including ‘Obersturmbannführer Eichmann’. While London had ‘no definite evidence of a stay-behind network being set up in territory occupied by the Russians’, they added seven names of officers ‘known to have been employed in intelligence work against Russia’. Barclay’s raising of the issue and Broadway’s ready supply of names and addresses were a product of that brief period at the end of the war when it was believed that Anglo-Soviet intelligence co-operation (such as it was) would continue, if only in the pursuit of Nazism.

That this might not be the case should already have been apparent from experience in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, where the