The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [349]
Broadway had to accept a scheme giving priority to SOE for the collection of immediate operational intelligence (though in the event, with the unexpected capitulation of Japan on 14 August 1945 following the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the wartime structure soon lapsed). Gibbs, however, in an otherwise amiable letter of 1 August to Garnons-Williams (whose only son had married Gibbs’s only daughter in July the previous year), effectively accused him of letting down the SIS side. ‘You have no real knowledge of our firm,’ he wrote, ‘and it is not possible that you should have, partly because there is [sic] never any opportunity for giving you any training, and partly because you are, of course, Dickie’s [Mountbatten’s] man, and he is not only completely S.O.E.-minded, but also, being a German, only has a military point of view.’ ‘For heaven’s sake,’ he added, ‘remember that the military point of view is the last thing that interests our firm.’ Garnons-Williams was quite unrepentant. Replying on 25 August, he conceded that ‘the firm’ was ‘not interested in war’, but argued the ‘inescapable fact’ that ‘in this theatre it was fully committed to military activities when I took over, admittedly without proper resources, and so had to be used in a military manner’. He claimed that he had ‘succeeded from the overall point of view, with the honest help of Bogey [Bowden-Smith] in detail and administration, in making it [SIS] function in this part of the world after beginning on an extremely bad wicket’. As for the ‘peace time setup’, that was ‘your affair’, and for the immediate future Garnons-Williams had secured Mountbatten’s approval ‘to exclude Bogey from coordination, only coming to me for transport. I have told Bogey not to put his operations into me at all. In fact,’ he concluded, ‘his Service is being put back into the obscurity from which it should never have been taken three years ago; that, I know, will make you feel happier.’
China
During 1944 a total of 566 operational reports were received from all SIS posts in China, most of which were passed on only to the local military authorities.13 Some 150 reports, however, were sent to London, of which 116 were graded ‘A’ or ‘B’. In January 1945 SIS reported to the United States General Albert C. Wedemeyer, recently appointed chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek, that the Service had forty-one staff in China, all men, including communications and support staff, distributed among ten stations, the largest of which were Kunming (nine), Nanping (nine) and Chungking (five). The Kunming station and its south-west China sub-posts operated into north-east Burma, French Indo-China and Thailand in support of British and United States/Chinese military operations in Burma, and had done so since at least 1942. Chungking, by contrast, was a liaison station within the British embassy, in touch with Chinese intelligence organisations and other government bodies, such as the Maritime Customs and the Salt Gabelle, from which SIS sought to recruit personnel. Of the forty-odd SIS representatives, twenty were agent-running case-officers (this information was not supplied to Wedemeyer) who between them, over the course of the war, controlled upwards of four hundred agents and contacts of all nationalities. SIS told Wedemeyer that the Service in China was ‘a non-operational organisation whose sole object it was to produce information for the benefit of