of cohesion was at last brought to the role of intelligence and clandestine operations in the region. During the autumn of 1943, as he was assembling his new headquarters at Kandy in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Menzies took the opportunity to replace Steveni, who had not been a great success in what was admittedly a tough assignment. In August 1943 Brigadier Beddington, the Deputy Director/Army, whose geographical responsibilities included Asia, sounded out Gerald Wilkinson for the job, but he was not attracted by ‘an area where our organization is so ineffective, the obstacles so difficult and the future requirements so great’.9 The following month, however, Beddington found a candidate in classic SIS fashion. At his club he met a cavalryman, Brigadier Philip Bowden-Smith - ‘Bogey’ – ‘whom I had known for years’ and who was ‘looking very depressed and worried. He told me [wrote Beddington in his memoirs] that he had just been told that he was considered too old [he was fifty-two] to take his Tank Brigade on Active Service, and that he was soon going to be out of a job.’ Beddington raised the possibility of his becoming ‘our head man in India’ and brought Bogey to see Menzies, ‘and it was agreed that if he came satisfactorily through two months strenuous training (for it was work he had never done before) he would be appointed’. He also had to be vetted by MI5 (demonstrating that the recruitment process at this stage did not entirely depend on the old-boy network). Having passed his training, he arrived in India in February 1944, where, according to Beddington, he ‘proved a great success’.10 A personnel report in 1945 (another innovation marking the steady professionalisation of the Service) was positive, albeit a little more measured. It gave him a ‘satisfactory’ grading as ‘Head of S.I.S. in F.E. [Far East]’. Overall, he had ‘done his utmost under very difficult circumstances and did not spare himself in any way. Covering a gigantic area, he travelled by air continuously under conditions of sometimes great hardship and has gained the genuine affection and respect of all his officers.’
Another improvement was Mountbatten’s appointment of a ‘bluff and hearty’ sailor, Captain G. A. Garnons-Williams, to head the P, or Priorities, Division, with the task of co-ordinating all clandestine activities within the Command, including SIS, SOE, OSS and ‘political warfare’. With experience in Combined Operations (he had been involved, under Mountbatten, in setting up the Commandos in 1940), Garnons-Williams was well qualified for the job. Although he had no specific intelligence background, he became an SIS officer and on 22 November 1943 drew up a ‘doctrine’ for Bowden-Smith which revealed considerable understanding of SIS’s own perception of its role. The doctrine emphasised the extent to which Bowden-Smith (unlike Steveni) needed to keep SIS at a distance from the military command structure. ‘We are an independent organisation . . . only concerned with obtaining illicit information which we collect from sources with whom the services are not in touch. We are’, he wrote, ‘only collectors and distributors, not collators.’ SIS’s work did ‘not over-lap with that of other Intelligence organisations, and as far as possible we must avoid becoming involved with Service “I” organisations.’ Furthermore, ‘it must be remembered that we work for many Government Departments’ and therefore could not ‘always guarantee to tackle any particular task at short notice, for our existing agents may be otherwise employed or unsuitable’. Evidently reflecting on the existing situation in India, Garnons-Williams thought it ‘of the utmost importance that all quarrels, jealousies and backbitings with other services cease forthwith’. Other services had also been informed of this and he had ‘been given powers by the Supreme Commander, S. E. Asia [Mountbatten], of dismissal against any Officer who so offends’. Finally he stressed the continued autonomy of SIS in the region. ‘Although clandestine services in S.E. Asia are co-ordinated it does not mean that the services