The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [341]
Menzies recalled Denham in May 1942 (though he did not leave until October), and replaced him with Colonel Leo Steveni, an Indian Army officer with family business connections in pre-revolutionary Russia. He had served with Military Intelligence in Russia at the end of the First World War and had been British military attaché in Meshed, north-east Iran, in the early 1930s. He had been taken on by SIS in 1939 and early in 1940 was posted to Section IVB, ‘to make a speciality of military information from the Far East’. Under continued pressure from the military authorities to produce intelligence and faced with a rapidly expanding and proactive SOE presence, whose can-do approach was welcomed by the hard-pressed soldiers and airmen in India, Steveni was put in an exceptionally difficult position. In order to protect SIS’s continued existence and autonomy in the region, in the short term he had paradoxically to dance to the military’s tune and respond to their demands for immediate operational information. As an Indian Army man himself, Steveni perhaps more readily appreciated their needs, but his approach upset the old intelligence hands in SIS. Green was particularly frustrated by the army’s ignorance of local conditions. He had worked in Burma for years, had ‘trained the original Burma Intelligence Corps’ and had brought local experts on to his staff, including former Burma Police intelligence officers. Green believed that the best approach was through the ‘back-door’, via Kunming in south-western China, from where he could re-establish contact with his existing, reliable agents, targeting them on the Japanese rear areas and then towards the battle zone. The army view was that they needed agents put directly across the front line. Steveni accepted this and, ‘under pressure from the D.M.I. – through 69000 [Steveni]’, Green was compelled ‘to attempt what the Army and the other “I” organisations had attempted and completely failed to do – to send in agents over the land frontier and through the fighting line. I know this frontier’, he continued, ‘and its problems probably better than any man and, had I been backed, we should by now [he was writing in August 1943] have been reaping ample results, instead of floundering to disaster in attempting the almost impossible.’
One network for which Green had held high hopes was run by Major Louis Cauvin, who, before the Japanese invasion, had been an immigration official at Padang Besar on the Malaya-Thailand border. Between October 1940 and September 1941, Cauvin had recruited a group of Sino-Thai agents to operate in Thailand. After he had to withdraw southwards in the face of the Japanese advance, Cauvin began work on a stay-behind organisation, recruiting mainly from among Malayan Communist Party members who, being familiar with clandestine work, were well suited to be agents. Towards the end of January 1942 Green signalled from Singapore that he had arranged for Cauvin ‘and one Chinese operator’ to ‘stay behind Japanese lines’ and ‘to operate communist intelligence service which now covers the whole peninsula’. The party grew to include three Royal Signals personnel, led by John Cross, who, equipped with a suitcase radio and a signal plan for contact with a control station in Singapore, Java or Burma, were to provide the base communications for Cauvin’s ‘all-asiatic intelligence unit’. After a meeting on 27 January in Singapore with the secretary-general of the Malayan Communist Party, Cauvin’s party (known as ISLD Station A) entered the jungle near Kota Tinggi in Johore, some twenty-odd miles from Singapore. Cauvin’s intention was to try to recontact some of his agents in Thailand.