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By Root 2472 0

some quarters an officer, posted to Hong Kong with the new designation China Area Co-ordinator, was authorised ‘to pay what we must’ to keep the scheme going. Salvage began well. A plethora of reports, mostly of detailed Communist troop dispositions, were well received by customers. The War Office was ‘definitely in favour of continuing this information. Several reports have received “A” crits,’ cabled London in May 1949. A Chinese-manned tactical radio network was allegedly set up (at SIS expense) linking Hong Kong with posts in southern mainland China. When a written agreement was negotiated with the Nationalists, the Chinese contrived to include a guarantee of immunity from interference by the Hong Kong government for a Salvage headquarters in Hong Kong. The implications of this became apparent when in September 1949 the police made a number of arrests which confirmed that the Kuomintang were using Hong Kong as a base for undeclared intelligence and sabotage operations, a revelation that badly damaged SIS’s relations with the local authorities.

By this stage, too, doubts about Salvage reporting had arisen. R.1, the Political Requirements Section in Broadway, minuted in August ‘that information supplied so far by Salvage on important political and strategic issues has been quite unreliable and looks rather as if it was bogus’. Further concerns were expressed about the lack of source details, the frequent reflection of the reports in Hong Kong newspaper articles and the continued flow of tactical information despite the fall of Canton to the Communists in October 1949 and the consequent disintegration of the radio network. Only the sustained appetite for military intelligence from the armed service customers, and their continued assessment of Salvage reports as of ‘great value’, kept the scheme going. At the end of 1949, moreover, Britain’s future relations generally with the Nationalist Chinese were uncertain. In November London warned the Chief Controller Pacific in Singapore that the government was about to recognise the Communist Chinese People’s Republic, leaving him with the prospect that, if the Communists conquered Formosa (Taiwan) too, as seemed very likely, he might not only have to withdraw the station which had been specially opened there for Salvage work but also prepare a stay-behind scheme for the island. The writer of this telegram hoped that the warning would ‘enable you to handle Salvage sources in such a way as to ensure their continued support even on Formosan affairs’. It was a tall order, and small wonder that the message ended ‘Good luck’.

In August 1947 an SIS station was opened in Japan as part of the United Kingdom Liaison Mission to the United States Supreme Commander Allied Powers (SCAP), General Douglas MacArthur. The individual chosen to head the station was a Canadian academic, who had been born and reared in Japan. He had been running a Japanese-language school for the Canadian army, and was described as ‘a brisk, intelligent type of individual, much more “human” than the usual professor’. This officer who had no previous intelligence experience, underwent the two-month ‘Combined General and Tradecraft Course’ in London before travelling out to Japan to take up a university post, and his considered reflections on the course throw light on both the syllabus taught and the specific problems of intelligence work in Japan. He noted that the material presented in the training course was ‘necessarily based chiefly on the successful operation of stations in Europe’. While ‘certain principles such as decentralization for security, training and running of agents, investigation, carding and classification of sources and certain techniques such as are involved in the presentation of reports’ were ‘universally applicable’, there was ‘a mass of technical detail’ which applied ‘only partially’ or ‘not at all’ to Japan. The inability of a Caucasian to ‘fade into the local background’ was an obvious example. In ‘every area studied in the Course there were either natives friendly to Great Britain or well-disposed