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’ and raised the possibility of Ecclesiastic targeting another Abwehr officer, Rudolf Baumann, whom they suspected might be organising German sabotage activities in France. She rose to the challenge. On 9 January 1945 Ustinov reported that she was ‘continuing to work on him . . . in the direction of softening his belief in victory’, but ‘even two prolonged kissing bouts at his flat, one of which lasted 35 minutes, have not had the desired effect’. Although Baumann does not seem to have succumbed to Ecclesiastic’s charms, Koschnik remained infatuated. By mid-April, with Germany on the verge of final defeat, while he had lost all interest in Ecclesiastic’s ‘foodstuff’, ‘his interest in source as a woman remains as great as ever’. As Fullard’s office was closing down at the end of April, Ecclesiastic’s position was about to alter. But the Lisbon station congratulated themselves on a successful operation. ‘A year’s activity’, they reported, had ‘passed without major upheavals and setbacks. Source, not unlike the nymph Arethusa, emerges clear and unpolluted (from the intelligence point of view) for new tasks in other spheres.’ The first of these, they thought, might be to ‘follow and report on the twilight of the TLW [Technische/ Luftwaffe] god in Lisbon’.15

17

Asia and the end of the war

SIS was not as successful in the Far East as it was in the West. This partly stemmed from the fact that between the wars it had been even more starved of resources there than elsewhere. But the intelligence challenge was also much greater. Though this was never completely so, indigenous peoples in enemy-occupied territory across Asia were in general less likely to help the Allied cause than was the case in Europe. Differences of race and ethnicity meant that there were in any case fewer potential officers or agents who could melt into the background. The sometimes uneasy Allied relationship with both the Nationalist Chinese and the Americans posed further problems from time to time, and the apparent successes of SOE in the Far East tended to eclipse the less dramatic work of SIS. But the Service did have achievements out East, especially in Burma from 1944 onwards, ship-watching along the south Chinese coast and in anti-Japanese work elsewhere in the region, though much of the latter information came from liaison sources.

The Japanese onslaught

As in Europe, SIS’s experience in the Far East in the early war years was one of retreat, and following the Japanese onslaught which began on 7 December 1941 with the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hong Kong fell on Christmas Day and Singapore on 15 February 1942. SIS and other British personnel in Peking and Shanghai were interned by the Japanese. Frank Hill, Harry Steptoe and other staff were eventually repatriated in the autumn of 1942. Alex Summers, who got his last radio signal out of Hong Kong on 26 December 1941, was imprisoned with many others of the British community in the Stanley Camp for the rest of the war. His security was evidently better than that of some SIS colleagues. While he managed to maintain his cover as simply a local businessman, he reported afterwards that during his captivity the Japanese ‘made several inquiries as to the whereabouts of 28002 [Charles Drage]’. Godfrey Denham and his colleagues left Singapore in early January 1942. ‘There was a wholesale burning of some of our records,’ he reported from India at the end of March, ‘but 28,002 successfully managed to get away practically all of his most important records which I may mention here have proved of great value since our advent in India.’

Understandably enough, the catastrophic defeats of 1941-2 were followed by a period of recrimination and backbiting in which SIS got its share of the blame. While the Service’s intelligence from Japan itself had clearly been pretty poor, there is some evidence of accurate reporting on forward Japanese dispositions in the latter half of 1941. Responding in March 1942 to criticisms levelled by the Australian General Gordon Bennett of poor British intelligence,1 SIS asserted