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reports. Another was the initial disagreement between the main London customers, the Foreign Office and the Chiefs of Staff, about the Soviet Union: was it still an ally or was it the next enemy? Then, once the answer to this question had become clearer, there was the increasing realisation by SIS of the immense difficulty of penetrating a highly alert and paranoid Communist state at anything more than the most pedestrian level. This, above all, was to lead SIS into some disastrous operations (especially those involving émigré groups) which were to cast a shadow over its experience of the next decade.

Central Europe and the Balkans

For SIS Austria presented a similar challenge to Germany: a defeated enemy country divided up into Allied Occupation Zones, where the initial task of watching for any possible Nazi revival swiftly changed into one of monitoring and, if possible, penetrating the Soviet Communist target. Initially, as in Germany, SIS worked within a military Control Commission, but as the military structures were run down the problem of long-term cover emerged. The head of station in Vienna, George Young, a wartime recruit with degrees in modern languages from St Andrews and economics from Yale, worried in August 1946 that his staff of over twenty officers and secretaries would be too large for satisfactory embassy cover. Besides, most of the present representatives were already blown to many people in the British military administration, to most of his American opposite numbers and (this was, after all, Harry Lime’s Vienna) to ‘a great number of more or less shady individuals who have connexions of one kind or another with wartime intelligence bodies and who have after demobilisation or repatriation taken up their peace-time activity here’. Musing on the problem of cover in general, Young observed that ‘the moment one starts to collect intelligence one is blown to somebody and it is only a matter of time before a Security Service catches up on one. The problem’, he thought, ‘always appears to me not how to keep from being blown but how to keep persona grata with the local authorities and ensure that in our shadier operations we are several jumps ahead of [a] hostile Security Service. Maintaining cover is a battle of wits not a defensive action.’

In February 1947 Menzies got the Foreign Office to make a special case for Vienna to accommodate a larger SIS presence than usual. ‘In view of the probable sterility of the stations in countries further east,’ argued Menzies, ‘we should do all we could to help them in countries where they can operate with comparative ease and safety.’ SIS proposed to station five officers, six women secretaries and ‘2 British handymen or drivers’ at Vienna. Hayter agreed and told the British mission in Vienna that since conditions in Austria were ‘more favourable’ for SIS’s work ‘than elsewhere in Eastern Europe and we should like to do what we can to provide them with a base from which they can work eastward in comparative safety’, he hoped that the existing Austrian Statistics Unit could be absorbed into the diplomatic mission. This was agreed, but in 1947-8 SIS activities in Austria were disrupted by fears of Soviet penetration. Officers from London (including the Controller Eastern Area, who was responsible for Germany, Austria and Switzerland) came out to investigate security and concluded that the main problem was lax attitudes among the Field Security Section, responsible for the safety of the British occupation forces, but who liaised closely with the SIS Civil Control Unit and ran a number of agents themselves.

Late in 1947 the Vienna station became aware of an Austrian former SS officer who as a black marketeer regularly travelled in and out of the Soviet Occupation Zone. Over a period of several months he had also helped three Russian soldiers to defect: a lieutenant and two non-commissioned officers. After interrogating him, SIS decided that he was working purely from right-wing political motives. He was ‘still a fairly convinced Nazi’ who thought that ‘Germany would lead