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By Root 2620 0

‘sometimes accompanied by other women, usually young’, whom the source believed were ‘being trained for espionage purposes by the Japanese in Canton’. They also reported on the location and personnel of Japanese intelligence organisations in Peking and Canton. But while the SIS stations in China had done much to meet their wartime task, they were not similarly well informed on Communism, the forte of the prewar SIS China stations. In January 1945 General Wedemeyer had told representatives of British and United States clandestine organisations operating in China that they were not to interest themselves in ‘matters which pertain to the internal affairs of China, i.e. they were not to have anything to do with the Communist question, etc.’. The Japanese as a common enemy had formed the only basis upon which the presence and activity of Allied secret services in China were tolerated in wartime. Peace was to be another matter.

18

Postwar planning

As the war drew to a close SIS, like everyone else, began to think about the postwar situation. In this respect the Foreign Office were quicker off the mark than most, commissioning a review of postwar intelligence needs and organisation in 1943-4 which was strikingly to lay the basis for the future development of SIS.

The Bland Report

During 1943 a number of people began to think about the future of the intelligence machine. In March, Duff Cooper (then head of the Security Executive) suggested to Churchill that a committee be set up to consider the matter, and proposed that there should be a unified Secret Service combining MI5, SIS and SOE into three branches: Information, Security and Operations. Churchill was not so keen. ‘Every Department which has waxed during the war’, he wrote, ‘is now considering how it can quarter its officials on the public indefinitely when peace returns. The less we encourage these illusions the better.’ Churchill was against a committee being set up, but suggested that monthly meetings between the heads of the three organisations (which Desmond Morton could attend on his behalf) might enable ‘causes of friction’ to be ‘smoothed away and common action promoted’.1

Like previous suggestions for the formal co-ordination of secret agencies (for example the 1940-1 Secret Service Committee, or the Joint Planning Staff proposals of May 1942, which had proposed ‘unified control’ of SIS and SOE),2 this proposal came to nothing. A Secret Service Committee meeting was held on 9 April 1943 at which ‘it was pointed out that on matters of common concern liaison between the [secret] Services was already extremely close’. There were monthly meetings, for example, between SOE and the Foreign Office, at which Menzies was present, and ‘S.I.S. and the Security Service had their own extremely close liaison’. It was bluntly agreed that Churchill should be told ‘that monthly meetings of the Secret Services were not considered necessary’ and that meetings could be arranged ‘as occasion required’. Co-ordination, thus, continued on an ad hoc basis, but the problem of intelligence organisation generally remained in the air. When Geoffrey Vickers at the Ministry of Economic Warfare suggested in May 1943 that after the war a special department should be set up to collate economic intelligence, Denis Capel-Dunn, secretary of the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee, counselled caution. ‘Among the many lessons I have learned during the past 2½ years,’ he wrote, ‘one has been how unsatisfactory it is for small, or indeed large, independent organisations to grow up with indeterminate responsibility, e.g. S.O.E., the Security Executive, with all its ramifications.’ The ‘future of economic intelligence’, he continued, ‘cannot possibly be considered apart from the future of the intelligence organisation as a whole’.3

At about the same time that Vickers’s idea was being discussed, Peter Loxley was also contemplating the matter. The thirty-eight-year-old Loxley was an extremely well-regarded official, ‘quite the most promising of the younger men at the Foreign Office’, who was killed