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SIS should be involved at all. Buyno was apparently aware of British clandestine activities in Poland and, if arrested (as was feared was about to happen), could throw suspicion on the whole mission. Terence Garvey, the Foreign Office liaison officer with SIS, noted that the Service had helped with Mikołajczyk because of his importance, and had accepted the risk that had the ‘operation been undertaken and failed your friends [SIS] would have thereby lost one of their best sources of information on Poland’. Regarding Buyno, it was ‘just conceivable that C’s people in Germany’ might be able to help, ‘but the German station, like the rest of C’s organisation, exists mainly to obtain intelligence. We cannot expect them at short notice to risk destroying their intelligence networks in Eastern Europe for the purpose of pulling minor Foreign Office chestnuts out of the fire.’ Sir William Hayter agreed: ‘C’s organisation exists to provide intelligence. Its use for other purposes can only be justified in very exceptional cases of major importance.’16 In the end, SIS, keen to test out an existing commercial escape line, did agree to help and Mrs Buyno and her son were safely conveyed to the United Kingdom by the end of the year.

SIS had some success against the German Communist Party (KPD), though not at the highest levels. A counter-intelligence review for 1947 asserted that ‘we can safely say that we know all we want to know about the organisation and methods and plans of the KPD up to Kreisleitung [district leadership] level’, but the policy-making levels were yet to be penetrated. One promising agent who began to produce in late 1947 was ‘Cook’, a former SOE woman agent who worked her way into left-wing circles in Hamburg and reported on them to both SIS and (under SIS control) the KPD, which was her target for long-term penetration. Regarded by SIS as a talented spy, though not a very good reporter, she died before fulfilling her potential. In the desperate circumstances of postwar Germany, SIS ensured her loyalty with food, ‘as under a regime of 1500 calories a day a tin of bully beef speaks with a loud voice. [She] knows on which side her 500 grammes of bread are buttered.’ But it was not just food or cigarettes or money (though all were important) that bought the loyalty of individual Germans. In the aftermath of the war a significant number were willing to become SIS agents for patriotic German motives, allying themselves with a country which had defeated Nazism. Once a new, democratic German state was established some of them fell away. There were also more personal reasons. One important agent’s wife was in a concentration camp at the end of the war. SIS found her, close to death, and reunited the pair, which the agent thereafter regarded as an unrepayable debt.

Towards the end of the 1940s SIS in Germany had over one hundred officers and two hundred secretaries, forming the largest overseas representation in any one territory. In February 1948 John Bruce Lockhart succeeded Gallienne as head of station and was simultaneously appointed Director of the newly formed Analysis Division of Int. Div., responsible for its agent-running operations. He thus took charge of all British covert human intelligence work in Germany, reporting directly to Menzies. This move significantly improved the co-ordination and quality control of the operations carried out by 120 case-officers. It also, in due course, offered the opportunity of recruiting the ablest Int. Div. personnel into SIS. Later, Bruce Lockhart reckoned that Germany was the ‘nursery of SIS’, and the place where, more than anywhere else, the Service first began to learn how to adjust to the transition from war through occupation to an uneasy peace and then to the Cold War. Among the new realities which had to be faced was the total dependence of both political and military customers on human intelligence, initially on Germany and then on the Soviet Union and its allies, in contrast to the rich wartime supply of signals intelligence, air reconnaissance and prisoner-of-war interrogation