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one of acquiring and keeping agents. At a conference in October 1947 the Director of Production raised the matter of ‘incentives to agents, whether financial or of another nature’. He observed ‘that whilst during war time many agents worked for the organisation for patriotic motives, now in peacetime this motive had, to a large extent, disappeared, although the dangers incurred by agents, particularly in “iron curtain” countries, had not decreased’. He said it was ‘arguable’ that the ‘zeal of agents’ might be increased by offering them more money, ‘e.g. persuading an agent to go for three months to difficult and hostile territory on the promise of payment of say £1000 down’ (equivalent to about £28,000 in modern prices), but he felt that ‘incentives of a non-financial nature’ might be more attractive. These might include such things as naturalisation as British citizens, or the arranging of education in England of an agent’s children, or ‘trade benefits’, by which a British company might take on an agent as its representative in the country concerned.

At subsequent conferences further suggestions were made, including payment in ‘gold, diamonds or dollars’, rather than the local currency, and whether life assurance policies could be provided for which the Service would pay the premiums. In this case, although there were ‘considerable technical difficulties’, Finance Branch thought that there was ‘a possibility of making [the] necessary arrangements’. Clearly if agents were simply prepared to work for money, that would be the easiest solution. But it was not always so. In October 1946 Harry Carr, the Controller Northern Area, reported on an actual case which had cropped up on his patch involving a Finnish subject resident in Sweden who was a potential agent. The Finn had ‘made it clear that he was prepared to work for the British but on the sole condition that if, at any time, by reason of his activities, threats were made to him that he would be deported to Finland and handed over either to the Finns or Russians’, SIS would ‘promise either to give him a visa for entry into the U.K. or to ensure that sufficient assistance was given to him to enable him to escape repatriation to Finland’. This man ‘had made it clear moreover that money as a reward for his services would not be considered as an inducement’. But Sinclair believed that the Service was unable to make any hard and fast guarantees of this sort. ‘We could not go much further’, he said, ‘than to inform agents that subject to us being satisfied of their good faith and zeal on our behalf, we would take every possible step to prevent them falling into the hands of the Russians,’ but ‘each case would have to be examined on its own merits’.

Germany

SIS’s postwar existence in Germany began in June 1945 with a top-secret paper by the intelligence chief in Field Marshal Montgomery’s British 21st Army Group, Brigadier ‘Bill’ Williams, on ‘Clandestine intelligence within the British zone’. Williams laid down that SIS’s No. 2 Intelligence (Unit), now renamed No. 5 Civil Control Unit, and the various Special Counter-Intelligence Units, combined as No. 7 Civil Control Unit, were both authorised to run agents in the British Zone of Occupation in Germany. No. 5 CCU was ‘responsible for obtaining long term political, economic and military intelligence by clandestine means’. Happily for SIS, and marking the change from war to peacetime functions, Williams instructed that the unit would ‘not receive demands for specific intelligence’. No. 7 CCU’s task was ‘the running of penetration agents’ for counter-intelligence purposes. P.6, the German section in Broadway, decided to use some of their existing agents, mainly recruited from among German prisoners-of-war, ‘to lay the foundations of our post-war organisation in Germany’. Only those ‘who have either already proved their worth in the field or whose loyalty, in view of their background and present status, is unquestionable’ would be selected.

This proved to be over-optimistic. The quality of the agents, their origins, background