The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [346]
Before leaving for India, on 23 December 1943 Garnons-Williams went to see Menzies, who outlined to him the instructions he was giving to Bowden-Smith. They provided for ‘centralised direction and decentralised execution’ of SIS operations in the theatre. Bowden-Smith was given a directive which made plain the need for him to serve the interests of the Supreme Allied Commander, though it conferred the right to refer to London if the demands made appeared ‘inimical to S.I.S. interests or policy’. Yet it was clear who would be in effective control. All policy and intelligence requirements were to come through Garnons-Williams. Moreover, while Bowden-Smith was to be ‘in complete charge of the administration’ of his stations and staff, should he ‘wish to dismiss any officer’ he had to ‘obtain the concurrence’ of Garnons-Williams. And if Garnons-Williams wished to dismiss an officer, Bowden-Smith had to ‘carry out his wishes’ unless they were ‘entirely contrary’ to his views, in which case the matter should be referred to Menzies. Reflecting the extent to which Menzies himself remained directly involved in the management of the Service, he instructed Bowden-Smith to ‘keep me frequently informed through P.14 [the Far Eastern Section in Broadway] of the progress of the organisation entrusted to you’; nevertheless, ‘on matters of first importance you will correspond with me direct’.
Garnons-Williams afterwards maintained that he had taken on ‘a supposedly impossible task in October 1943’. When he reached India in January 1944 he found that ‘ISLD [SIS] and Force 136 [SOE] stank in every ones’ nostrils’ and he faced a ‘constant struggle to overcome the ill feeling between the Fighting and Clandestine Services and the internecine suspicions between the Clandestine Services themselves’. By the end of the war, however, he claimed that ‘the battle in Burma as far as Rangoon redounded to the credit of the Clandestine Services which were used and controlled as a whole’. Writing to the Controller Far East in Broadway on 25 August 1945, he said that ‘those senior high Intelligence officers who had experience of the Libyan and N. African campaigns’ had ‘stated that the Clandestine Intelligence in Burma was far in excess of that supplied to Alexander and Montgomery. I had Slim [commander of the Allied Fourteenth Army] in my War Room yesterday,’ he continued, ‘with Keith Park [the air force commander] and Mountbatten, and they were more than complimentary.’ Whether Garnons-Williams’s self-reported success was quite as outstanding as he claimed, his P Division certainly made a difference and markedly improved the co-ordination of SIS, SOE and OSS during the last eighteen months of the war.
There was also a surge in operations from the spring of 1944.11 In Operation ‘Bittern I’ an agent and wireless operator reported from the northern Shan States between May and September 1944, attracting praise from Mountbatten’s United States deputy, General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stillwell, for their coverage of Japanese troop and supply movements. In February 1944 (Operation ‘Blow’) four agents were parachuted in to cover the Japanese airfields in the Katha district, 150 miles north of Mandalay. They spent nine months behind enemy lines and produced seventy-four reports (twenty-one graded ‘A’ and fifty-three ‘B’), earning an MC for the Burmese officer who led the team. Operation ‘Bulge’ involved a five-agent team under a British officer who had been a planter in Burma before the war. They were dropped into the Maymo/Mandalay area, where the officer was well known, on 29 November 1944 to report on Japanese troop and supply movements. The leader of the group