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By Root 2628 0

Green thought it ‘a brave but foolhardy enterprise as he had to travel 300 miles through Japanese-occupied Malaya, where there were no Europeans left, before he even reached the Siamese border’. ‘He has not been heard of since,’ added Green. In fact, ISLD Station A spent the next three years in Malaya under the protection of Communist guerrillas, until the survivors of the party were exfiltrated by submarine in May 1945. But their radio communications proved unreliable and, despite meticulous signals watches, they were unable to establish regular contact with any SIS signals units. Java and Burma were too swiftly overrun by the Japanese, and the frequencies Cross had been allotted were judged in 1945 to have been quite wrong for the distances that actually had to be attempted.7

While unable to transmit intelligence, the group were able to receive it, and they assembled English-language propaganda which was distributed clandestinely by the Malayan Communist Party in the ‘Emancipation News’ and the ‘Victory Herald’. Like all jungle dwellers, ISLD Station A had to live off the land, moving camp some thirty times to evade the Japanese occupying troops and subsisting on scanty rations. Cross noted that at one point in April 1944 daily meals consisted of wood potato flour and two small fish per man. The health of the whole party suffered, and Cauvin’s condition declined rapidly up to his suicide in July 1944. At the end, there was not a lot to show for the party’s efforts, which in any case were more special operations than intelligence. All Cross could find to say in his postwar report was that they had kept themselves ‘intact as a unit’, used their ‘technical resources to spread the news of Allied fighting progress’ and given the anti-Japanese forces as much advice as they had been ‘willing to take in their resistance activities’. Thus they had ‘at least been something of a nuisance to the Japs’.

In November 1942 Steveni reported to London that ISLD had thirteen current and projected operations in hand, though only one had been completed successfully, a preliminary reconnaissance of the Akyab area on the Bay of Bengal near the India-Burma frontier over ten days in late October by two agents put in and picked up by sea. GHQ India were recorded as having been ‘very pleased’ with the information. Of the other operations, one had failed because of inadequate support (damage to a radio set badly packed by the RAF and their failure to drop a spare), while another had been delayed by the naval officer-in-charge at Chittagong failing to follow instructions. A third operation had had to be postponed ‘owing to inadvertent arrest of our agents by Police on way to their destination’. This was the result of poor co-ordination. Green claimed that although he had made arrangements ‘with the Corps Intelligence and Bengal Intelligence’, his agents had been ‘arrested and beaten by the British officer of the Security Police’. On a second attempt to cross through the battle lines, the two men were ‘attached to a party who were taking a Burman fifth columnist to be publicly executed in a border village’. But the escort allowed the prisoner ‘to escape into enemy territory’. There was, remarked Green, ‘little wonder that the agents, upon whom we had spent so much time and money’, and who assumed that they could now be identified, ‘refused to carry on with the work’.

Green had contacts across the political spectrum. Apart from his links with the Malayan Communists, through the Special Branch in Singapore he had established a relationship with George Yeh, local representative of the Nationalist Chinese Kuomintang’s intelligence service. Green admired the professionalism of the Chinese, noting particularly that their ‘bumping off organisation was efficient’. Yeh supplied him with twenty potential agents who were taken to India and ‘carefully trained for specific work in parts of Malaya, Siam and Indo-China’. To Green’s intense irritation, however, Steveni insisted on deploying them on an ill-planned operation to collect information along the Malayan