The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [410]
In the late 1940s Israel remained ‘a high priority target’ about which SIS reckoned in November 1948 the British government was ‘likely to maintain a lively interest for some time to come’. In September a production conference in Broadway had been told that ‘coverage of Israel was negligible’ and in December the head of station was instructed to remain at Amman with a nucleus around which a new station in Jerusalem (which SIS envisaged would be the base for its effort against Israel) could be built. By October the following year Britain’s relations with Israel had sufficiently normalised for SIS’s Middle East Controllerate (the new name for the Eastern Mediterranean Controllerate) to propose that an officer in Tel Aviv would serve purely for liaison - which would ‘undoubtedly be difficult and tricky’ - with the Israeli authorities, hoping to use ‘their assistance in recruiting and running agents into the USSR or the Balkans’. Meanwhile, the ‘penetration of Israel itself ’ could be co-ordinated from Jerusalem. The Controller in London, John Teague, cautiously agreed that an overt liaison officer could ‘in due course’ be posted to Israel, though he also raised in this specific instance a general problem with any serious liaison. He felt that while the Service stood to gain ‘a good deal of useful information’ about the USSR and the Eastern bloc generally, ‘we could be sure that the Israelis would extract the maximum returns and, unless our representative was very cunning, get to know too much about our own organisation and exploit it’. Writing in November 1949, Teague had doubts about the proposal to target Israel from Jerusalem, which had been partitioned between the new state and the rump of Palestine, amalgamated into Jordan following the Arab-Israeli war of 1948-9. There was, he noted, ‘a large and strongly-held military barrier’ running through the city, ‘which it is a major operation to surmount’, and it made running operations there quite unfeasible. Once, however, Jerusalem was ‘no longer divided by this physical barrier, we should immediately establish an officer . . . there with the idea of making it our principal office for work into Israel’. Even the veteran Teague, with a quarter of a century’s experience of the region, cannot have anticipated how long it might take before the city would be united.
The Far East
In August 1945 SIS was left with a sprawling deployment in India and China, generally geared to supporting the military needs of Mountbatten’s strategy for the war against Japan. Indeed, for all that it regarded itself as independent, it had in effect become an intelligence-gathering tool in the hands of G. A. Garnons-Williams’s P Division at the headquarters of South-East Asia Command. SIS’s stations had been positioned more to support the military campaign in Burma and the recovery of Malaya than to gather the longer-term intelligence required to support a re-established British presence in the region. With the prospect of Indian independence (which came in August 1947), SIS moved its regional headquarters, the Inter-Services Liaison Department, from Delhi to Singapore, where Donald Prater became Far East Controller, with a staff of eight officers and seventeen secretaries. In September 1947 Dick Ellis, the Chief Controller Pacific in London, reviewed the state of SIS in the Far East before embarking on a tour of the area. In China there were stations at Hong Kong, Tientsin (Tianjin), Shanghai, Nanking and Urumchi (in the north-west); outside China there were stations at Tokyo, Batavia (Jakarta) and Hanoi, and plans for stations in Bangkok, Rangoon,