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By Root 2714 0

than a small trickle of smoke from the vent holes at the base of the safe. Then, as combustion got under way, the volume of smoke increased, soon to be replaced by long, roaring tongues of flame.’ Some spectators said afterwards that they felt the safe was ‘on the point of explosion’ and they noted that ‘so great was the force of gas issuing from the jets that the safe was lifted some inches off the ground’. The writer was unable to confirm this ‘as by that time he had retired to a place of safety behind the building’. A usable safe producing a less violent combustion process was developed, in which ‘hardly any flame emerged from the vent holes, although large quantities of smoke made the immediate area uninhabitable’. But the research and development section were able to celebrate a job well done and the production of a satisfactory incendiary safe in which nine pounds of paper could be ‘completely destroyed in just under 2 minutes’.

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Deployment and operations in Europe

Even before the Second World War had ended SIS began to wind down its massive wartime structure, both in Europe and across the world. During 1945 this process went on in parallel with postwar operational planning and the deployment of resources to meet the anticipated challenges of peacetime. Initially, much effort was put into meeting the possibility of a continuing, if residual, Nazi threat, but before very long this was decisively supplanted by a renewed Soviet threat, which was to preoccupy the Service for many years to come. By June 1946 the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee had concluded that the Soviet Union should be ‘the first charge on our intelligence resources’ in terms of its war-making capacity and warlike intentions. And, although Attlee and Bevin had initially wanted to cut SIS down, by late 1947 the Foreign Office Russia Committee’s representations and Bevin’s own experience of the Soviets’ behaviour had finally convinced the Foreign Secretary that there was no longer cause for optimism that friendly relations could be maintained in the face of their anti-Western and expansionist campaigns.1

Finishing wartime business

Dismantling SIS’s worldwide wartime network took some time. Paying off agents was not just a monetary matter. Delicate decisions, for example, had to be made involving recommendations for awards and decorations. There were security considerations, too. Former agents had to be trusted, or paid (or a combination of the two), not to publish their memoirs or tell tales in the pub, especially in parts of the world, such as Eastern Europe, where there was a significant continuing intelligence effort. Widows and orphans also had to be taken care of. Winding up the Jove network, which had operated around Lyons in France, provides a typical example. A total of just over a million francs (about £5,000, or £161,000 in current value) was paid to the network’s forty agents, with the majority receiving between ten and twenty thousand francs each, the equivalent of three months’ stipend. In January 1945 the Paris station had sought approval to pay 60,000 francs (£300) each to the families of nine Jove agents shot by the Germans. Approving this, London instructed that ‘apart from normal individual receipts, you should obtain from Jove [a] written statement stating this sum is in full settlement of all British financial liabilities’, adding that ‘you may of course add British appreciation of the work he and his friends have done, which will be further expressed in due course as your recommendations for awards are put through’.

The resistance hero ‘Tommy’ Yeo-Thomas’s menu from a dinner for British and French colleagues celebrated at Prunier’s restaurant in Paris, 4 December 1945. Among the signatories are Stewart Menzies and Claude Dansey.

In March 1945 the Controller Western Europe raised the matter of awards for three Frenchwomen who had worked with the Sussex teams: ‘Jeanette Gauthier’, and two Resistance helpers: Andrée Goubillon and Marguerite Kiel. Gauthier, who was described as ‘unquestionably the heroine of the Sussex