be an extremely hostile intelligence environment. Gordon Harmon was confirmed in October 1942 ‘as representative of S.I.S. working in free China, vis-à-vis the British ambassador and Central Government authorities in Chungking’. But he did not himself run any agents and came under increasing criticism in London. In December 1943 P.14 on the China desk in Broadway thought Harmon had been unwarrantedly puffed up into ‘the position of THE Chinese expert-a kind of Pope of China whose infallibility must not be questioned’. Yet ‘he has never supplied any S.I.S. intelligence, only hand-outs from the Chinese Officials - in fact, any rubbish that they wished to palm off on us’. Claude Dansey, he asserted, had ‘picturesquely described this as “drainpipe stuff”’. An analysis of all 119 reports of Far Eastern material circulated from January to October 1943 revealed that the biggest suppliers of information were first, SOE (thirty-four reports), and, second, United States diplomatic sources (twenty-one), which, while useful as ‘background material’, was ‘not, in the main, S.I.S. information, but . . . information acquired by members of the American diplomatic and consular services in the ordinary course of their functions, and quite open and above board, as it were’. The next largest was nine reports provided by ‘43931’, the Estonian Colonel Maasing, whose information came from the Japanese military attaché in Stockholm, General Onodera. Harmon himself had only directly produced seven reports, of which ‘two at least’ were dismissed merely as ‘expressions of opinion – competent views, but not true S.I.S. information’. Despite pressure to remove Harmon, Menzies preferred to ‘wait awhile’. Harmon had the backing of Steveni in Delhi (to whom Menzies had delegated the regional direction of the Service) and stayed on in Chungking for another year. With Hill having broken down in the autumn of 1943, Menzies, perhaps as the least worst option, decided to stick with Harmon, who was recognised as ‘a difficult and touchy person to handle but one whose standing with the Chinese is such that his potentialities are enormous’.
The problems of co-ordination within India and, above all, of providing intelligence for the armed services generally, led to the growth in Delhi of an Inter-Services Liaison Department, rather along the lines of the ISLD in Cairo, and roughly mirroring the functions of SIS headquarters in London, though it was more weighted to circulation and liaison than the production of intelligence. Its structure was military and, no doubt, so too was its ethos. Green was not impressed and thought that in Delhi money was being ‘squandered upon extravagant buildings and overpaid staffs. Bigger, better and more ostentatious appears to be the slogan.’ Under Steveni the two stations in Calcutta retained their separate identities. Early in 1943 both Green and Drage were replaced, the former by Colonel Reginald Heath, who took over responsibility for the collection of intelligence on Burma, Malaya, Thailand and French Indo-China, the latter by an officer who was given charge of ‘Japanese occupied areas of China and the Japanese Empire’. Heath, who had been mobilised in Malaya as a local volunteer naval reservist before being recruited to be Green’s assistant by SIS in late 1940, had worked for the Anglo-Swiss Nestlé milk products company before the war, spoke Malay and had a ‘good knowledge of business shipping’ in the region. The other officer, who came from a famous family of wine merchants and had briefly worked in the Azores for the War Office special operations section MIR (later subsumed within SOE), had been working as Drage’s assistant since June 1941.
SIS in Mountbatten’s Command
Changes in the overall Allied command in the theatre affected SIS further. In August 1943 Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, King George VI’s glamorous, charismatic and politically astute cousin, was appointed Supreme Allied Commander, South-East Asia. Mountbatten brought a distinct sense of dynamism and urgency to the command and under him a significant degree