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By Root 2798 0

British minister in February 1949, was equally uncooperative, so much so that Brooks thought he wanted simply to close the station down altogether. SIS got caught in a tussle between the Bulgarian and British authorities to reduce the size of their missions in each other’s country. Brooks hazarded that Mason believed that if he was compelled to reduce his staff ‘he might as well get rid [of] our representative and not one of his own’. Brooks, in fact, stayed put in Sofia until the end of 1949, keeping the position warm for his successor. But the Bulgarians continued to put pressure on the mission generally, threatening to close down their wireless sets in August, intermittently harassing the staff and accusing the British, American and Yugoslav missions of being ‘nests of espionage’. Things got so bad that in November 1949 Brooks sought (and got) specific instructions from London in case he had to close down the station altogether. These specified the destruction of papers and the return of SIS cyphers ‘by confidential bag forthwith’. The gold reserve was to ‘be handed over to the Caretaker officer and a receipt obtained’; local currency was to be left with the mission (again having secured a receipt); and all other notes were to be returned to Head Office. Cameras and photographic equipment were also to go back to London, while secret-ink materials were to ‘be destroyed on the spot’.

Bearing in mind the manifest difficulties facing SIS representatives based in Iron Curtain countries, particular efforts were made to penetrate the Soviet bloc from neighbouring states. Yugoslavia was a special case. Marshal Tito, the Communist wartime resistance leader, had to defeat internal opposition from right-wing groups before establishing a stable government in 1948. After he broke away from the Soviet Union that summer, for a time the survival of his regime was in doubt. In July it was reported to SIS that Tito himself had approached the Swiss authorities about the possibility of seeking asylum there. The political situation in Yugoslavia stabilised and Tito survived to preside for another thirty years over an ultimately unsustainable ethnic federation, but SIS made little progress in the country during the 1940s. In 1947, using an agent under business cover, the Service acquired extremely detailed information about Yugoslav civil and military petroleum installations and reserves, but subsequent efforts to continue the flow of information by recruiting an employee of a Western oil company as an Unofficial Assistant came to nothing.

Greece, where from 1946 until victory in October 1949 the royalist government (backed by Britain and the USA) fought off a Communist guerrilla challenge, had a significant SIS presence in the postwar years. In May 1946 Broadway decided that there should be a main station at Athens (under Nigel Clive, who had had a distinguished SIS war record), with sub-stations at Salonika and Florina, both well placed in the north of the country for operations into the neighbouring Communist states. The local representatives were to concentrate on the penetration of Greece (particularly Communists), Albania, Yugoslavia and southern Bulgaria. Reflecting the close control which London kept over money matters, all expenditure on agents had to stay within already approved budget estimates, although the head of station was authorised ‘in the case of urgent necessity’ to spend up to £150 (equivalent to slightly over £4,000 today) ‘without previous reference to Head Office’.

The experience of SIS in Greece in the late 1940s illustrates the extent to which even the most carefully made plans were hostage to unexpected and unpredictable events. During the summer of 1948 an Unofficial Assistant (known as ‘025’) working in an Athens airline office was instructed to monitor Eastern bloc airline crews passing through the city with a view to recruitment as agents. In September he reported contact with a Czechoslovak pilot whom he had met previously while working in Paris shortly after the war, and London told him to investigate the