The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [347]
Some operations were not successful. ‘Bracket’, the landing of two Burmese agents (‘65538’ and ‘65539’) on Ramree island, off the west coast of Burma, in December 1943 came to grief when the agents concerned, on their way back and not far from the Indian border, spent a convivial evening with a party of Japanese soldiers, during which one of the agents boasted of his (prewar) visits to India. No comment was made at the time but the next morning a Japanese officer asked to see the two men. When their belongings were searched 65538 was found to have hidden some current Indian rupees in a handkerchief tied around his thigh. ‘Without further ado the Japanese officer smashed a large stick which he was carrying, down on to 65538’s head which knocked him unconscious.’ The officer then kicked the unfortunate man again in the head and had him shot dead. Had the officer paused for reflection and interrogated 65538, the other agent might also have perished, but he managed to escape and make his way back to Calcutta.
The administrative problems raised by having to mount and maintain operations by land, air and sea over such great distances could be solved only by an armed-services approach to logistics. To a considerable extent, logistics, climate and terrain determined the shape of operations, which became more military in concept and numbers. It may have been an inability to adjust to a quickened operational tempo and a vastly increased scale of activity that prevented Green and Drage from being as successful in India as they had been before. The traditional single agent gave way to operations involving groups of agents, usually with some military experience (particularly in Burma), operating from a jungle base and, in this respect, not unlike SOE. Training, too, required military and naval skills, the latter provided at Camp Z in Ceylon, for example, for Operation ‘Mullet’, which aimed to land agents for an observation post on an island off the west coast of Malaya in February 1944. But the venture was a catalogue of disasters. Setting off from the British naval base at Trincomalee by submarine, the eight-strong party had originally planned to seize a junk off the Malay coast to take them to their destination, but no suitable junk was found and the first attempt was abandoned. A second attempt was cancelled twenty minutes before zero hour when the submarine concerned was ordered away on patrol. The landing eventually took place on 23 February, in four folboats (collapsible canvas boats) with stores for six days. ‘Our landing was compromised from the start as we ran into fishing craft 50 yards from our landing place.’ It was decided to abort the mission, but the submarine ‘observed no signal from us and [dived] at 0527 hrs. and we were left paddling about in enemy waters in broad daylight’. That evening, ‘after 2½ hrs. rowing, with one Folboat nearly full of water [and] all torches unserviceable’, they at last made contact with the submarine, were taken back to Ceylon and the operation cancelled. During the operational post-mortem the inadequate condition of the folboats caused much heart-searching, since they had been rigorously inspected before leaving SIS stores in Calcutta (a thousand miles from Trincomalee) and again before loading aboard the submarine. After investigation, it was established that during the delays between the various attempts to launch the operation, the boats had been used by officers of the submarine depot ship for harbour parties with personnel from the Women’s Royal Naval Service, a contingency which had not, evidently, been taken into account in the operation’s planning.
Despite Garnons-Williams’s best efforts, the inevitable tensions and problems of co-ordination between SIS and SOE surfaced from time to time. This was exacerbated by the fact