The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [350]
The station in Nanping, upstream of Foochow (Fuzhou) in Fukien (Fujian) province, and another smaller station originally at Wenchow (Wenzhou), south-east of Shanghai, had a coast-watching function among others, and were probably the source of the intelligence on shipping in Amoy. Other stations ran agents who visited Japanese-occupied territory and in their turn recruited resident agents. Why did these people become agents? The head of the Kweilin (Guilin) station, a former policeman who with Chinese Communist help had escaped from Japanese interment in Hong Kong in 1942, offered some thoughts in December 1943. ‘What constitutes a promising agent’, he wrote, ‘is about as explainable as “horse-sense”’, but there were a few who would ‘work under a feeling of patriotism or loyalty to the British cause’. But the majority were ‘out for pecuniary gain, and of these only a rare few will be satisfactory in a strict business sense’. He hazarded that ‘perhaps the best field for the general raw material of agents’ was ‘to be found in the young lower middle class of country bred Chinese adult’, who showed ‘a fairly shrewd sense of proportion in regard to expenditure’ and had ‘an inherent knack of adapting themselves to the changing circumstances of war. Their minds are receptive to ideas,’ he concluded, ‘although initially they are chronically unobservant.’
The intelligence provided by SIS on local Japanese activity in China can never have been more than useful, rather than essential. Shipping was another matter, as Allied attacks on shipping affected Japanese forces across South-East Asia as far afield as Singapore, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, all targets for Allied reoccupation. By mid-1944 coast-watching - the observation, identification and reporting of enemy shipping - had become a major requirement for some SIS stations in China, and Calcutta was seeking suitably qualified personnel to support it. Not only did officers need to have appropriate language qualifications, ‘they must, if possible, have had sea-going experience and be able to instruct on naval matters’. SIS told General Wedemeyer in January 1945 that the output from all the Service’s Chinese stations amounted to some seventy intelligence reports a month. While ‘a large proportion of these reports’ were ‘of background or static information’, he calculated that during the forty-one days between 1 December 1944 and 10 January 1945, ‘21 operational sightings of enemy shipping off the China coast were passed to American air and naval liaison officers for operational action’. Information also came from the ports in south China. In May 1944 a sub-source working as a coolie in the Hong Kong naval dockyard reported on the completion of a vessel in the shipyard, as well as giving some details about dockyard staff. Reflecting the difficulties in getting information out, this report was not circulated until November 1944. Coast-watching was not confined to the shore. SIS acquired a junk in Foochow and equipped it with a wireless set. It made its first voyage in December 1944 crewed by members of the Nanping station. A month’s costs for the junk, including repairs and the crew’s pay, came to 71,500 Chinese dollars, about £120 at the going black-market rate (and approximately £4,000 at current values).
The end of the war found SIS’s China stations generally well informed about Japanese activity in China, including the operations of Japanese political warfare units under the generic term ‘kikan’. As late as June 1945 the Wenchow station was still reporting on the ‘Ume’ (plum) Kikan, the Japanese organisation controlling puppet military bodies in Chekiang (Zhejiang) province. SIS reported on suspected Japanese agents in Hong Kong, such as an unidentified woman who made weekly journeys on a military train to Canton,