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such as SIS should be prevented from operating anywhere it wished at any time regardless of official restrictions: ‘What, they say, is the use of being a secret organisation if you are tied by the same rules which govern open activities?’ Here Bowlby was voicing a common attitude about SIS (and similar agencies), but one which dangerously confused operational matters with policy considerations. With the former, secret operations might well not be bound ‘by the same rules’ which governed ‘open activities’. But the latter was entirely different. Menzies, who claimed to Bowlby that he was ‘just as disappointed’ by the turn of events, carefully observed: ‘You must realise . . . that at no time, and especially not in war time, can our functions be carried out with a total disregard of Government policy.’ In this particular case, moreover, there could have been ‘very little prospect of any penetration’ remaining unknown to the Soviets. The Foreign Office feared that the entry of intelligence personnel into an area which could properly be described as within ‘the zone of military operations of our allies’ might have been resented ‘as bitterly as we should resent the unannounced arrival of 95-land [Russian] personnel in, let us say, 13-land [Belgium]’. In the event, moreover, the Foreign Office’s apprehensions had been justified by events, and the suggestion that the Soviets had welcomed the Americans and were surprised by the British failure to appear on the scene was ‘now shown to be wholly at variance’ with the official view taken in Moscow.

Iberia

SIS in both Spain and Portugal played a central role in the hugely effective double-agent operations which played such a major part in the successful deception of the enemy, over for example the Torch landings in North Africa in November 1942, the invasion of Sicily in July 1943 and Operation Overlord in June 1944. While the running of double agents was in practice a joint SIS-MI5 responsibility (through the XX Committee), MI5 took primary charge of those operating in the United Kingdom, and SIS of those in foreign countries. During 1944, for example, some 113 double agents were operating under Section V’s control. One of the most successful of all wartime double agents, the Spaniard Juan Pujol, code-named ‘Garbo’, was first handled by an SIS Section V officer, Ralph Jarvis, in Portugal after a tip-off from an American diplomat. Pujol had been taken on to spy in Britain by the Germans in Madrid, but he had only got as far as Lisbon, from where he supplied a series of fictitious reports, which he told Jarvis he collated from British guidebooks, maps and newspapers. SIS brought Pujol to England in April 1942, following which he was run by MI5, and became the Germans’ apparently most successful agent, with a network of twenty-seven sub-agents across the country. Up to March 1943, when he acquired a wireless, all his reports were conveyed by secret writing in letters notionally carried by an airline employee working on the London-Lisbon run, but actually organised entirely by SIS, as was the transmission of his German case-officer’s replies.12

A particularly good example of a double-cross operation run almost entirely by SIS was that of agent ‘Ecclesiastic’, a glamorous twenty-two-year-old Central European woman living in Lisbon. Having worked for a while for the Polish intelligence service targeting Italian diplomats, by June 1944 (when she was taken on by SIS) she was the mistress of an Abwehr officer, Franz Koschnik. Perhaps reflecting the stage of the war, along with a ‘certain amount of patriotism’ and ‘financial reasons’, among the motives ascribed to her by the Lisbon station was: ‘wants to keep her head above water by working for allies’. Having concluded that there were ‘obvious possibilities in this lady’, SIS intended at first simply to achieve ‘penetration of Abwehr’, but within a week the possibility was raised of her passing ‘foodstuff’ – deception information – to the Germans, since another double agent, ‘Artist’, had reported that Koschnik was ‘short of material’.