The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [414]
A further difficulty was that the United States military administration had forbidden intelligence work of any kind, even by allies. The prospective head of station felt that there had been ‘a tendency throughout the Course to underestimate the Americans’, but while they might be ‘amateurs on the European stage’, they had ‘studied the Pacific area very thoroughly’ and could not ‘safely be regarded as clumsy amateurs in any part of the Far East where they operated in the past or are operating today’. This made ‘the task of carrying on clandestine illegal operations under the noses of the local administration very much more difficult than it would seem to be in any European or Mid-Eastern area with the possible exception of Russia’. As for the recruitment of agents, he observed that ‘in the European area apparently there are everywhere persons who are willing to work for pay and who are completely venal so far as their own countries are concerned’. This, he asserted, was not the case in Japan. It was true, however, that ‘Chinese, Koreans and possibly White Russians could be employed on this basis’, though only with ‘extreme safeguards’, as such people, he claimed, were ‘completely unreliable and unprincipled’. In the case of the Japanese, he hazarded that a ‘combination of ideological motives with adequate payment’ might be a possibility. He finally reflected (and this was accepted in Broadway) that success would be possible only through very slow and careful ‘groundwork’, allowing that it might take ‘two to three years’ before any substantial results were obtained.
A typical Military Intelligence questionnaire for SIS, indicating the kind of information customer departments wanted in the postwar years.
The head of station was absolutely right about the difficulties facing SIS operations in Japan, and the slowness with which any kind of network might be built up. It proved impracticable, moreover, for him to act as head of station while carrying a full load as a university professor, so another Service representative was more conventionally installed in the British mission in Tokyo. While he was directed to collect intelligence from China, Korea and, if offered, the Soviet Far Eastern territories, the main priority was Communist activities in Japan itself. During 1949 the Tokyo head of station reported a general lack of progress in the region, blaming this on a combination of the Americans having bagged the best available local sources, a shortage of Japanese-speaking Unofficial Assistants and the demands of cover work.8 In late 1948 George Blake was sent to head a new station in Seoul with instructions to target north-east China, as well as Communist activities in Korea. Blake, the son of a naturalised British father (originally from Istanbul) and a Dutch mother, had served in the Dutch resistance movement and the Royal Navy before joining SIS in 1944. By the end of 1949 he had made little headway. Shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War he was captured by the North Koreans and subsequently recruited as a Soviet spy.9
One Asian country in which SIS achieved success was Burma, where a station was opened in late 1947, shortly before the country became an independent republic and left the British Commonwealth. Both the head of station, Edward James, and his assistant had gained wartime intelligence experience with the British Fourteenth ‘Forgotten’ Army during the Burma campaign, and they were able to bring their specialist knowledge of the region and local contacts to the task. The main objective was penetration of Communist organisations in the country, particularly the pro-USSR Red Flag and the pro-China White Flag parties. An agent with friends in the police was able to acquire periodic Special Branch summaries, and another source was involved in liaison between the Karen nationalist movement and the Red Flag party. The information obtained was discussed with an MI5 Security Liaison Officer, a specialist