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By Root 2899 0

in international Communism who was later integrated into the SIS station, and the resulting casework produced what SIS afterwards claimed was ‘the deepest penetration of any national communist party in the world’. In Burma, too, SIS was able to provide valuable information about the ethnic minority Karens, whose guerrilla insurgency campaign in the late 1940s threatened to bring down the Rangoon government. In February 1949 the Karen leader Saw Ba U Gyi told the SIS representative himself that his people were ‘fighting for their very existence’, and SIS delivered a number of reports on the strength and disposition of Karen forces in the late summer of 1949 which Military Intelligence in the War Office warmly welcomed and graded ‘A’ for accuracy.10

Penetrating ‘Sovbloc’

When in April 1946 Frank Roberts, the British minister in Moscow, enquired about policy relating to covert operations, it was confirmed that there was ‘no change in the present position as regards Soviet Union under whom no secret service activities of any kind are conducted’.11 Three years later a production conference in Broadway noted the continuing ban on ‘clandestine operations of any kind on Moscow’. During 1946, however, the Foreign Office’s restriction on work within the Soviet Union began to cause frustrations within SIS. In August the Director of Production circulated a paper to the Regional Controllers about stepping up operations in this area. ‘In view of the paucity of information on the principal target, and the troubled nature of our political relations’, he asked if ‘we should not be justified in taking greater risks to obtain information’. There were, he suggested, two sorts of risks, ‘(a) those which apply primarily to the agent, and (b) those which give rise to the possibilities of diplomatic complications’. He thought it ‘obvious that if we were prepared to go the whole hog, we should obtain a great deal more information in a much shorter time’. By ‘going the whole hog’, he had in mind ‘wartime’ techniques, such as ‘parachute operations, widespread use of wireless, possibly raids of safes in Consulates etc. etc.’ This paper generated ‘considerable discussion’ at the next Regional Controllers’ meeting (on 2 September) when it was agreed that ‘a more forward policy might well pay dividends’. The Controller Northern Area, Harry Carr, noted that the head of the Moscow station was not allowed to do any clandestine work, but he felt ‘that potential lines existed there which might, without undue danger, be exploited if this restriction could be modified’. The representative in Helsinki was similarly prohibited from recruiting agents in Finland ‘for despatch to Russia: here too he felt a more positive policy might show results’. He also thought that it might help if he could equip agents entering ‘the Baltic territories’ with radios, ‘a practice which was still discouraged’. All the Controllers agreed that ‘the possibilities of W/T in connection with the penetration of Russia and its Satellite States should be actively explored’, and they also considered ‘the possibility of disguising such sets as American, Polish or French’.

Dick Ellis, the Controller Production Research, had lots of ideas about ‘burgling Russian Embassies and Consulates’, instancing ‘several operations of this nature which his organisation in the Americas had undertaken’. He said that any ‘such operations should not be conducted by normal Stations’ but that a separate organisation, ‘somewhat on S.O. lines’, should be ‘established to undertake strong-arm and burglarious methods of producing intelligence’. He thought that ‘a well conducted burglary might need some six months of preparation’. Sinclair, the VCSS, ‘agreed that it might be well worth trying’ but warned that ‘Russian Embassies, etc, would prove hard nuts to crack and suggested that a start might be made on the Legations of Satellite Powers’. Other suggestions included ‘planting Double-agents on the Russians, through the medium of British deserters (of which there are a number)’, and also the possibility ‘that a