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that SOE’s stock-in-trade of special operations and support for indigenous resistance groups was more readily appreciated by the military men in South-East Asia Command than SIS’s purer intelligence work. As a result SOE had become the predominant British clandestine agency in the region, in terms of both operations and intelligence. Officers at Fourteenth Army headquarters, moreover, had also come to admire OSS’s more integrated operations and intelligence structure, so much so that in January 1945 Slim’s chief of staff, General George Walsh, proposed amalgamating SIS and SOE and subordinating them to the OSS, which he regarded as an altogether more effective covert organisation. This was a non-starter, but Garnons-Williams still had to work out some acceptable arrangement.

As in Europe, there was the underlying issue of what sort of intelligence was required. In the spring of 1945 Garnons-Williams wrote to Bowden-Smith and his opposite number, Colin Mackenzie, who headed SOE’s India mission, seeking to establish priorities between long-range intelligence on political, economic and social targets and more immediate operational intelligence. Fighting SIS’s corner (which as an SIS officer himself was quite understandable), and with the end of the war in mind, he observed that SOE’s involvement in intelligence-gathering should not be taken as a precedent. He thought it ‘important that we preserve a long range view in which the British Secret Intelligence Service shall (a) carry out its proper function and (b) have an eye to the future’. The ‘greatest danger in the past’, he asserted, had been ‘interference’ with SIS ‘by the Military and other Organisations’, and, with Mountbatten’s support, he was currently endeavouring ‘to undo the harm which has been done in the last two or three years’. While Bowden-Smith and Mackenzie both responded by stressing the valuable intelligence contribution of their agencies, it was clear that SOE was by far the more productive, and Garnons-Williams laid down that current operational intelligence work should be handed over to SOE (or OSS), so that SIS could concentrate on the future. In comparison to the large SOE organisation, he stressed that, ‘by long-range standards’, the ‘small Service of S.I.S.’ was ‘infinitely the most important’. Garnons-Williams also argued that ‘no single member of I.S.L.D. in this Theatre will be of the slightest use after the war because he is completely and absolutely “blown” already and the organisation will have to be built anew’. A further factor was signals intelligence which ‘fortunately’, he said, was ‘unknown to all except 5 officers!’ in South-East Asia Command. But nothing should be done to jeopardise the agency – SIS – which controlled it. ‘I would myself ’, added Garnons-Williams, ‘rather see the whole of agents work, except for political, social and economical intelligence, handed out to Force 136, Z Force or OSS and leave ISLD to its true role.’12

Working relations between SIS and SOE on the ground (as was the case in other theatres) appear to have been markedly better than the more institutionalised relations at higher levels, especially in London. Just as Garnons-Williams was endeavouring to iron out inter-agency coordination, local SIS-SOE relations were damaged by a visit in May 1945 from London of Colonel George Taylor of SOE’s Director of Far East Group and Commander J. P. Gibbs, recently appointed SIS Controller Far East. So unhelpful was their attitude that Mountbatten himself was moved on 23 May to write a joint letter of complaint to Menzies and the head of SOE, Colin Gubbins. ‘Much as I liked both Taylor and Gibbs, and enjoyed their visit from a personal point of view,’ he wrote, ‘I am sorry to have to tell you both that your two representatives . . . have not helped me in the prosecution of the war.’ Indeed, until their visits, Mountbatten claimed, SOE and SIS had been ‘collaborating in a far more friendly and get-together spirit’. He fully backed Garnons-Williams’s proposals for giving operational intelligence the first priority. ‘No one