The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [416]
Papers were prepared on the possibilities of wireless and the use of burglary against the Soviet target for a Regional Controllers’ conference on 7 October. By looking realistically at the costs and benefits, they deflated some of the enthusiasm of the previous month. Despite the most careful disguising of wireless sets, and transmitting signals through cut-out stations in neutral countries, if an agent were ‘caught “red-handed” there was little doubt that he would ultimately be “broken” and the greatest care would have to be taken if British complicity was not to be revealed’. As for the delivery of agents and radio sets, it was felt that in practical terms this might not be very difficult, but that the air force were unlikely to agree to any operation involving a ‘long distance flight over Russia or Russian occupied territory in Service aircraft’. The ‘picking up of agents’, moreover, ‘presented a far more difficult problem’, as ‘more elaborate ground organisation’ would be necessary. Jack Easton, the ACSS, an airman himself, thought, however, that RAF co-operation might be possible ‘for dropping agents a few miles inside hostile frontiers. Arrangements might be made to do this on the assumption that . . . faulty navigation or adverse weather [could] take aircraft a short way off their right courses’. Thus ‘we might be able to drop men and material just within the frontiers of such places as Russian occupied Germany, Russia itself, the Ukraine, Poland and possibly Lithuania’. These reflections were seriously hedged about with qualifications and well-founded worries that other government departments might both disapprove and fail to offer any assistance.
The same tone suffused the discussion of burglary. While it might be a ‘short cut to obtaining valuable information’, the ‘basic snag was that if ever responsibility for the crime were fixed on S.I.S. it might give rise to a diplomatic incident out of all proportion to the value of the information received’. The only justification for planning an operation of the sort was that ‘the results would be outstandingly important and the risk had been reduced to a minimum’, in which case it ‘would almost inevitably involve the presence of inside sources and if these existed there would be no need for burglary at all in the ordinary sense of the word’. While agreeing with this, Ellis (now Controller Far East) thought that an operation might be ‘so technically perfect’ that the burglary need never be discovered. He confirmed this by describing two burglary operations he claimed to have organised during the war where ‘two Embassies had been penetrated and highly satisfactory results obtained’. Despite this example, the conclusion drawn was notably conditional: ‘burglary was almost certainly not worth attempting if the person burgled realised that burglary had been committed’. If it could be done ‘so that this was not known’, an operation might, ‘after careful weighing up of the risks’, be justified, but only ‘in certain cases’. Above all, ‘inside assistance was most necessary’.
The ban on SIS work in the Soviet Union was understood to refer to operations run within the country itself, for example by the Moscow station. There was a less stringent restriction on operations aimed at penetrating the USSR and the Soviet bloc from neighbouring countries, including those employing members of disaffected national minorities. When a new officer took over the Stockholm station in late June 1945 he was told his main task was to work against the Soviet Union which was ‘now permissible . . . in all countries except the U.S.S.R. itself ’, this being defined as including ‘the late Baltic States’ and ‘Poland east of the Curzon line’. At this stage he was merely to ‘try to obtain contacts with a view to penetrating Russia should this be allowed at a later date’. In November London informed him that it was ‘now permitted to penetrate Russia from perimeter’.