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executed United States airmen. He was also interrogated in connection with the execution of British prisoners at Gross Rosen in Silesia. In March 1948 the War Crimes Group shelved the case for lack of evidence and ‘provisionally released him for special employment under an “I” agency here [SIS] who, however, have specially requested that the case against him should not be dropped’.5 In order to facilitate Kopkow’s future use, SIS faked his death. A cover story was invented that he had died while interned in the United Kingdom, a death certificate was issued to that effect and a false identity was created for him as ‘Peter Cordes’. He lived under this name for a while, but later appended his real name to the alias and settled openly in West Germany.

At the beginning, along with the final subjugation of Germany, followed by Allied military administration in separate British, American, French and Soviet Occupation Zones, ‘denazification’ and eventual post-war reconstruction, there was also a wide public assumption - an optimistic emotional hope as much as any rationally derived belief - held with varying intensity, that the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union would survive in some shape or form. In SIS, with its historic professional suspicion of Communism, there was less confidence in Moscow’s bona fides, but the Service was not unaffected by the prevailing mood. Allowing Harold Gibson, a prewar Passport Control Officer and from his time in Istanbul undoubtedly blown to the Soviets as an SIS officer, to go into Bulgaria in September 1944, for example, makes sense only in the context of assumptions about a continuing alliance of some sort. But the hard-nosed Soviet refusal in Bulgaria to accommodate British and American intelligence officers, even as part of an Allied Military Mission, provided a rapid corrective to any expectations of postwar co-operation. For some time after the war had ended, however, the Foreign Office, not perhaps from starry-eyed expectations about friendly relations with Moscow but for sound diplomatic reasons, continued to enforce the formal prohibition on direct SIS work against the Soviet target first imposed during the war. But this did not at all mean that SIS ceased to target Communist and Soviet expansionism in general - far from it. As it became clear that there was no realistic prospect of any Nazi revival, and especially as the Soviet Union tightened its grip on Eastern Europe, much of the Service’s work became focused on Communism and Communist-related affairs.

The re-emergence of a kind of renewed ‘Great Game’ between Britain (as part of the Western Alliance) and Russia, with a priority on the gathering of long-term political intelligence, took SIS back to familiar territory and for many in the Service it was a welcome move away from the incessant wartime demands for immediate, short-term operational information. By the late 1940s, however, the situation had changed markedly. The Iron Curtain now divided the Moscow-dominated bloc of countries in Eastern Europe from the West. During 1948 the Communist seizure of power in Czechoslovakia in February and the Berlin Blockade from June demonstrated a hardening of Soviet control in the East, and the Communist conquest of China the following year confirmed the global extent of the challenge. For SIS the position in respect of intelligence-collection in these territories to a certain extent reflected that in Europe following the German victories of 1940. Such intelligence sources as there had been were mostly swept away, the overt collection of information was gravely impaired, and the demands on SIS escalated to include the most trivial details of everyday life in these obsessively well-protected countries. The very success of British intelligence during the war, moreover, with the matchless signals intelligence and the development of productive agent networks in occupied Europe, left some customer departments, notably the armed forces, with quite unrealistic expectations of what SIS could be expected to provide in these new circumstances. On