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By Root 2521 0

and necessary to make certain arrangements in advance, to be put into effect in an emergency, in order to preclude the complete collapse of our secret organisations and communications.’ Wireless sets designed to survive burial underground, ‘for eventual transportation to Finland and the Baltic States’, would be supplied and were intended to be used by ‘stay-behind agents in enemy occupied territory’. With engaging frankness the directive continued: ‘scepticism as to the potential success of such a scheme certainly exists in the light of previous experience; however, such plans should be pursued and agents for operating these W/T sets should be found with a view to being trained at a later stage’.

Throughout the late 1940s, the Soviet Union remained the main target for SIS in Sweden, as it was elsewhere. A new directive in November 1947 added the Swedish Communist Party to the list of targets, including the extent of Soviet control over it. The embargo against spying on Sweden was repeated, but in terms that suggested it was now derived from a more general SIS doctrine: ‘In principle you should not work against the country in which you are stationed, but you should report any information on it which comes your way.’ The instruction on liaison with the Swedes undoubtedly reflected that for any similar non-Communist states. The head of station in Stockholm was to ‘maintain and develop your close and friendly relations with the Swedish Intelligence and Security Services with the object of exploiting their intelligence work and of obtaining as much information through these channels as possible . . . while at the same time continuing to build up your own network independent of the Swedes’. Similarly, the archives of the Swedish postwar intelligence T-Office show that a high level of surveillance on British representatives was maintained, even as liaison contacts were being developed. 21 The quite precise directives issued to Stockholm, as to other stations, marked a new development in Service practice and the introduction of a management regime wherein Head Office issued clear intelligence objectives, closely related to general intelligence requirements and stated government policies. As a November 1947 directive made clear, there was a new emphasis, too, on the need to send officers, secretaries and (where appropriate) Unofficial Assistants and agents back to the United Kingdom for training ‘in accordance with the training programme now being drawn up’. While these instructions reflected the growing professionalism of the Service and a necessary explicit integration of its work with official British foreign policy aims, they also inevitably marked increasing bureaucratisation, as ‘targets’ and ‘programmes’ threatened perhaps to erode the buccaneering individuality of the tiny prewar Service.

Instructions issued to Leslie Mitchell, who became head of the Copenhagen station in July 1945, further reflected modern bureaucratic practice by asking him to prepare a three-year plan for the station showing both short- and long-term objectives. In a review of the station’s tasks in July 1948, Mitchell cautiously noted that ‘as far as our major target, the Soviet Union, is concerned, it would be more than optimistic to rate our chances at successful and resident penetration at all high’. Mitchell commented on various methods available for penetration of the USSR: commercial travellers - ‘a failure for secret intelligence’; members of Trade Delegations - ‘of limited interest’; Baltic refugees and deserters - ‘not productive and low-grade’. He maintained that the station’s ‘most successful line’ concerned merchant shipping, and claimed that ‘no Danish ship sails to Soviet ports without this station’s knowledge’. Yet for all Mitchell’s professionalism and clear organisational skills there was still some quite severe criticism in London about the station’s lack of political, military, counter-espionage and scientific product, further demonstrating the difficulties for even the best-run stations to acquire precious intelligence about the