The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [402]
The potential agent also offered information on Communists. He had, he said, an acquaintance in the French Interior Ministry with a source in the French Communist Party, who was being blackmailed by the police into handing over copies of ‘secret reports and minutes’. The acquaintance, he added, occasionally told him ‘the gist of these reports’. Having been hooked, the quarry now, ironically, started to force the pace and, fearing that things were beginning to move too quickly, SIS began to back-pedal. In mid-1948 the Paris station recommended that the agent should be told there was no intention ‘of pursuing at the present stage his scheme of working up a “network”’, nor did SIS want to develop the French Communist Party source, whom the Paris station had ‘strong reasons’ to suppose was ‘bogus’ and copies of whose reports were, in any case, already being received through service attaché channels. Nevertheless, as the source appeared to be ‘sincere in his desire to help us, it would be unwise to discourage him’, and they suggested that he should in the meantime be ‘supplied with innocuous questions’ about Communist penetration of the international organisation. London felt that the outlook was now ‘rather disappointing on the whole, particularly if this high grade potential source can only be fed with innocuous questions’. There were, however, renewed concerns that the source was already working for French intelligence, and there the matter appears to have rested, as there is no indication in the records that he ever developed further as an agent.20
Scandinavia
Work in postwar Scandinavia was inevitably dominated by the Soviet Union and a widespread sense that the region was part of the front line in the Cold War. This was especially so in Finland, where fears of a Soviet-supported coup, backed by Communist members of the government, periodically agitated Finnish politics in the 1940s. Rex Bosley, head of the Helsinki station from March 1945, had to tiptoe very gingerly indeed through the complexities of Finnish postwar life. He cultivated a wide range of Finnish contacts - ‘several hundred’ according to Bosley at the end of 1949 - many inherited from Harry Carr’s long service in the country as well as from other prewar relationships. There was certainly no shortage of potential agents; the problem was more one of selecting, targeting and running them, without the Soviets (who kept a very close eye on British contacts with Finns) becoming aware. Some approaches from within Finnish armed service circles seeking British support for right-wing political intervention had to be treated with great caution. Bosley also tended to gravitate towards conservative political contacts, though he ranged as widely as he could. In January 1948 he told Carr (who had become Controller Northern Area in Broadway) that ‘very few matters of any importance in this country escape our knowledge’. Furthermore, ‘from time to time we do manage to glean certain items of interest from the Soviet Union despite the ban on any efforts in this direction’. On the other hand, the station had not succeeded in penetrating either the Finnish Communist Party or the Soviet strategic enclave at Porkkala, on the coast south-west of Helsinki and, even by mid-1949, barring lucky breaks, they regarded the acquisition of political, naval or military intelligence from inside the Soviet Union as beyond them. In Sweden the postwar SIS station was directed to concentrate first on the Soviet Union, followed by Germany. The third target was Poland and subsidiary targets were Finland, Denmark and Norway. ‘On no account’, instructed London, ‘are you to conduct any espionage against Sweden.’ During 1946 directions were added about preparing for a possible third world war. ‘Although it is assumed that the United Kingdom will be free of a major war during the next ten years,’ Broadway (no doubt with the experience of the Second World War in mind) pointed out that ‘international crises may develop with great suddenness. Hence, it is advisable