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coast. In the absence of any well-established (let alone productive) networks of agents across Japanese-occupied territory, potentially the most valuable approach for SIS was to forge a close liaison with the Chinese. But this was difficult to achieve in a region where not only was there a range of Allied agencies, British and American, all trying to do the same thing, but also there were at least five rival Nationalist Chinese intelligence organisations. SIS’s local contact with one Chinese intelligence service in Singapore was small beer compared to the much more valuable liaison which SOE had with the Nationalists in China itself. Based in the Nationalist capital Chungking (Chongqing), the SOE representative Findlay Andrew’s main Chinese contact was General Wang Ping-shen, a close colleague of the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. SOE partly financed the Resources Investigation Institute (RII), a sub-section of Wang’s propaganda and intelligence organisation, the Institute for International Studies. London complained to Delhi in March 1943 that they had ‘no knowledge of S.O.E. activities in China other than Findlay Andrew’s connection with Wong [sic] who runs R.I.I.’. But they knew that while the RII ran some special operations, it also collected ‘much intelligence which we get from S.O.E.’, and about which government departments commented ‘very favourably’. At present the information was ‘political and economic with some military identifications concerning Japan and Japanese occupied China’, but SOE planned to expand the organisation ‘to include other types of information’.8

A possible additional source of information was Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communists. Although the Communists and Nationalists had formed an uneasy common front against the Japanese in 1937, internecine hostilities had resumed from early 1941 and any British contacts with the Communists had to proceed with considerable discretion. In mid-July 1942 Gordon Harmon in Chungking reported that he had been visited by the private secretary of General Zhou Enlai, the ‘political head of the Chinese Communist Party’, who gave ‘evidence of a really genuine desire to co-operate against the Japanese’. The Communist emissary handed over a report which, although ascribed to human sources, was clearly derived from signals intelligence. It described a major reorganisation of Japanese intelligence in China and was an intercept of a message from the Japanese embassy accredited to the puppet regime in Nanking to the Japanese consulate-general in Hankow (Hankou). Harmon wisely noted that he had to be ‘extremely careful in contacts with this organisation’. In London, Section V thought the source ‘seems very promising’. Alastair Denniston of GC&CS confirmed that part of the message had been received in Bletchley Park but not the rest, and while the Admiralty had ‘no means of checking the truth’ of the report, they thought it ‘very likely’ and were ‘prepared to believe it’. Although Chungking reported in August a further contact promising ‘a considerable amount of information’ and a personal message from Zhou Enlai that he ‘wished to collaborate closely in Anti-Japanese effort’, the source appears to have dried up shortly thereafter. An attempt the following year to extend coverage in China and possibly develop contacts with the Communists was neatly thwarted by the Nationalists. SIS proposed to send Frank Hill, the former head of station at Peking to open a new post in Sian (Xi’an), 350 miles north-west of Chungking and a centre of Communist activity. Taking a necessarily circuitous route because of the war situation, Hill was allowed by the Nationalists to travel only as far as Chengtu (Chengdu), actually further from Sian than Chungking. London reckoned that Hill had queered his pitch with the Kuomintang by having already made indiscreet contacts with Communists in Chungking, and so they wanted him safely out of harm’s way. In the event Hill’s health deteriorated and he was withdrawn in October 1943.

Although SIS was ostensibly working alongside allies, China proved to