The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [411]
In China, SIS had few assets of its own, and was for the most part dependent on the nationalist Chinese Kuomintang for intelligence. In late 1946 a senior Kuomintang intelligence officer educated in Japan and a former SOE contact proposed to the Nanking station an elaborate scheme to establish a bogus press agency in Shanghai which would collect information on Soviet activity, using White Russians (and some Japanese) previously employed by the Japanese against the same target. While there was some initial enthusiasm for the idea (which involved paying a salary to the contact), the situation very soon became confused partly because of what Nanking called the ‘unrealistic rate of exchange and China’s chaotic economy’. London, moreover, had no faith in the contact, whom they described as ‘an adventurer out to feather his own nest, a bluffer and not too good even at that game’, and the scheme was dropped. Ironically, while the information on Soviet activity that the agent provided was unreliable, his analysis in early 1947 of where the Kuomintang stood in relation to the Communists was entirely sound, though it went unremarked in London, perhaps because by then it was unremarkable. The Kuomintang, he asserted, ‘today find themselves in a parlous condition’. They were ‘losing both territory and influence’. There was ‘no doubting’ that ‘at the conclusion of the war the Kuomintang were militarily far superior to the communists’, but they had ‘succeeded in dissipating much of this advantage’ and it was ‘open to question’ if they were ‘now any stronger than their foes’.
It was, nevertheless, to be nine months before SIS started seriously to make plans in the face of Communist conquests in China. In March 1948 London cabled Singapore to instruct the Tientsin station to ‘make immediate plans for stay-behind organisations with necessary communications in areas likely to be over-run by Communists particularly Peking Tientsin area and South Manchuria’. But there were problems getting anyone to take part in a stay-behind scheme. The head of the Tientsin station assumed that local British firms would remain after the takeover, but found them reluctant to co-operate, displaying a ‘regrettable attitude’ with ‘a mixture of complacency, optimism and fatalism’. There was a more fundamental problem (reflecting the new postwar conditions) in that ‘virtually no Chinese - one may perhaps say literally none - could be trusted to work honestly for us for as much as twenty-four hours once our backs were turned unless we had some powerful hold over them’. This was ‘an indisputable fact’ and the reason for it was obvious. ‘It is quite irrelevant’, declared the Tientsin representative realistically, ‘to say that a considerable number of reliable Chinese were available during the war against Japan. The Japanese were foreign enemies. The communists are neither foreign nor, in the eyes of the vast majority of Chinese, enemies.’ It was, in any case, far too late to do anything. Although wireless sets for stay-behind teams reached Hong Kong in October, Communist advances in north China meant that they got no further. Under Communist rule, moreover, life became increasingly difficult and restricted for regular diplomats and SIS alike. At the end of March 1949, reviewing ‘the situation in Tientsin since the Liberation’, the head of station’s assistant noted how the new regime had instructed that, apart from other limitations, all cable communications had now to ‘be en clair and accompanied by a Chinese text’. The station at Urumchi, whose primary objective in February 1948 had been the ‘penetration of Russian Central Asia’, and whose station chief was a former medical missionary who planned to combine Bible-running with intelligence-gathering, was equally