• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2828 0

enthusiast was Air Chief Marshal Sir John Slessor, who promoted the notion of an SOE-type campaign of subversion, sabotage and propaganda against the USSR. At lunch with Menzies in January 1948, he raised the possibility of ‘psychological warfare and S.O.E. operations’, but was dismayed at the modest level of commitment which Menzies envisaged. While Slessor thought ‘something of the order of at least £10 million a year’ was ‘the minimum sort of scale to which our secret operations to win the cold war should be considered’, he was ‘alarmed to find that “C” was thinking in terms of £½ million’, which seemed to Slessor to be ‘derisorily inadequate’.12 While Menzies’s ‘inadequate’ conception of special operations spending may indicate a certain lack of enthusiasm for the whole idea, the Service did develop guidance on the subject. By early 1949 an ‘S.O. Handbook’ had been produced with detailed instructions, for example, on ‘Clandestine Air Operations’, primarily intended for use in the event of another war and clearly drawing on the experience of 1939-45. ‘General Instructions on S.O. Planning’ laid down broad guidelines, noting that all operations had to have Foreign Office sanction, and emphasising (among other things) that ‘the use of Emigré groups’ was ‘at present banned’, although ‘contact with selected individuals’ was ‘likely to be authorised in peace’.

If émigré groups were off-limits, then occasions when Soviet-bloc nationals came to the West might provide opportunities for exploiting. At a production conference in August 1947 Harry Carr ‘proposed an effort be made to contact and recruit satellite athletes attending next year’s Olympic Games in England’. Sinbad Sinclair was attracted by the idea and asked Controllers to explore ways ‘whereby stations might obtain the names of local entrants’. The Controller Production Research was given the job of trying ‘to unearth a suitable British intermediary in Olympic Games circles’. But, before approaching the British athletic authorities, it was decided ‘to sound M.I.5 on the scheme’. And there the matter stopped. MI5 were reported as ‘not hopeful’ and the scheme was abandoned.

The difficulty of cover for SIS representatives, which the Bland committee had pondered in 1944, continued to exercise the Service after 1945. One response (and a means to enhance security for SIS representatives overseas) was the development of what came to be known as ‘the doctrine of the UA’, or ‘Unofficial Assistant’ as a security cut-out. The main principle of this ‘was that a representative should never contact agents direct, but transmit his requirements to them and receive his reports from them through the medium of a carefully selected and trusted third person, generally a local (and if possible British) resident or business man’. When the matter was discussed at a production conference in November 1946, P.7, responsible for part of Northern Europe, said that in his area they had largely failed to find any suitable people for the task. ‘Most of the more important businessmen, who might have been suitable,’ he reported, ‘were either too busy to give the necessary time to the work,’ or, if prepared to work, ‘demanded unconditional assurances, which we could not give, that if their businesses were to suffer through their connection with us, we should be responsible for any financial losses they might incur’. John Teague thought the problem was not insurmountable, and that a representative could select ‘a small number of unofficial assistants who would develop and run, at his direction, “cells” of agents’. The ‘ideal Unofficial Assistant’, moreover, would be ‘a carefully selected, unobtrusive person, with an extensive knowledge of the country in which he was operating’. While it was felt that such ideal candidates might be hard to find, the conference confirmed that ‘it was undesirable that representatives should handle agents direct. Whenever possible, unofficial assistants and/or cutouts of a more passive character should be interspersed.’

Another problem for the postwar service was a basic