Josip Broz Tito i njegovo vreme

[Yoda]

a propos bliskosti komunista i ustaša, naravno da postoji epizoda s početka '30ih, kada se radilo na zajedničkom cilju razbijanja jugoslavije, što je potrajalo do narodnofrontovske faze u istoriji kominterne/kpj. o razmerama saradnje (više taktička nego strateška, imho) je već dosta napisano, a kpj je posle toga (od 1934/35) ulazila u saradnju sa hss i u temama poput zahteva da se uklanjaju ćirilični natpisi u gradovima u hrvatskoj (savskoj i primorskoj banovini tada).a propos koče popovića, moje pozitivno mišljenje o njemu je dosta splaslo kada sam pre godinu-dve čitao njegove analize, stavove i sl. u diplomatskom arhivu. često je imao vrlo cinične opaske koje su bile na granici rasizma ("izgleda kao pravi jevrejin", "razmišlja kao jevrejin" itd) a i inače je važio za vrlo tešku osobu, prznicu.

Ima tu oko Koce ozbiljnijih stvari. Umeo je da napise kako su Srbi u civilizacijskom i kulturnom pogledu ostali na nivou od pre sto godina. Cak i da je tako bilo, a nije - nisam primetio neki duh samopreispitivanja zbog toga. I tu jeste Djuric u prvu kad kaze da ne mozes da igras velike igre ako ti se namecu provincijalne.Koca je politicki poginuo bas zato sto je hteo da nametnutu elegantnu provincijalnu igru ogoli i prekine, gde bi evropeizacija Srbije isla i mimo Jugoslavije. Broz, Ameri i Sovjeti nisu razumeli takva resenja.

[Lord Protector]

Мени је код Коче био чудан његов поданички однос према ЈБТ-у. Ратно умеће и искуство није изнедрило политичку смелост. Лако би то било објаснити конформизмом салонског комунисте, али Коча није био само салонски комуниста. Пре је то нешто у структури личности, ко ће га знати.

Edited August 27, 2013 by slow

[Yoda]

Suprostavljao mu se Koca, ali je to doslo prekasno. Brozovo unutrasnje i spoljno balansiranje za par godina progutalo je Rankovica, maspokovce, tzv. srpske liberale, Kavcica, Crvenkovskog.

[Yoda]

Svi novi detalji oko sefova i blaga na Indijana Dzons topiku

[Filipenko]

Proponenti monarhije i kralja koji se gnušaju podaničkih odnosa...

a propos bliskosti komunista i ustaša, naravno da postoji epizoda s početka '30ih, kada se radilo na zajedničkom cilju razbijanja jugoslavije, što je potrajalo do narodnofrontovske faze u istoriji kominterne/kpj. o razmerama saradnje (više taktička nego strateška, imho) je već dosta napisano, a kpj je posle toga (od 1934/35) ulazila u saradnju sa hss i u temama poput zahteva da se uklanjaju ćirilični natpisi u gradovima u hrvatskoj (savskoj i primorskoj banovini tada).

Daj ne zajebavaj. Vrlo dobro znaš da slow smatra da su komunisti i ustaše jedno te isto, isprepletano, i to ne misli na prvu polovinu tridesetih i velebitski ustanak, već baš na period od 1944. do recimo 2004. Lepo je videti da to nailazi na značajno razumevanje kod moderacije koja će potegnuti i poneki prospekat KPJ iz tridesetih (čije je vođstvo Tito likvidirao BTW) da bi potvrdilo izmišljene naznake veza komunista i ustaša 1945.

[Yoda]

Ne samo to. Moderacija tvrdi da Sveti Duh Broz proishodi od Oca Lenjina i Sina Hitlera.

Edited August 27, 2013 by Yoda

[Filipenko]

Vrlo vickasto. Kad sutra budemo čitali teze o saradnji ustaša i partizana, čim se neko bude usprotivio dajući kao primer šta znam koncentracione logore u kojima su partizani završavali, očekujem da će buffalo bill da uskoči sa pričom "nije to baš tako jednodimenzionalno, Hebrang je na mističan način izašao iz Jasenovca, i dugačko se tu klupko motalo sa svih strana, bilo je tu neke saradnje..."Jebiga, sa jedne strane banujete savindana što napiše nešto o Markalama, a ovde puštate da se ustaše izjednačavaju sa partizanima. OK, jasno je sve, ne podnosite partizane, sloboda vam je mrska, ali sami sebe sjebavate takvim ponašanjem.edit: da ne spominjem još kad uskoči Praslin. Čovek mrtav ladan piše da je otkrio super taktiku, kako će komuniste izjednačavati sa Hrvatima i ustašama, i to je tako super vickasto. Jebiga, očigledno trebamo da se izražavamo simpatičnije i vickastije.

Edited August 27, 2013 by Filipenko

[Yoda]

Filipe, mislim da je vreme da se iskulira malo. Imas topik o moderaciji i pisi sta zelis.

[Prospero]

edit: nebitno

[Filipenko]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n7t5XP2flQ Savka o starim vremenima...

[Filipenko]

Vila Leke Rankovića danas utočište beskućnika!

Edited August 29, 2013 by Filipenko

[Lord Protector]

Lažu Britanci, Tito nikad ne bi pobegao.

Tito '48. tražio azil u ŠvajcarskojIzvor: Jutarnji listU knjizi "MI6 Istorija tajne obaveštajne službe 1909-1949.", koja je predstavljena u Beogradu, navodi se da je Josip Broz Tito 1948. tražio azil od Švajcarske.Bilo je to, kako tvrdi autor Kit Džefri, u vreme sukoba sa Staljinom kada se sovjetska invazija na Jugoslaviju smatrala vrlo mogućim scenarijom.Knjiga je prva službena istorija britanske obaveštajne službe, koja sadrži gotovo 800 stranica napisanih na temelju intervjua i dokumenata MI6-a, a koja završava na početku Hladnog rata, prenosi Jutarnji list.Autor knjige, Kit Džefri sretao se, kako je rekao, sa značajnim ograničenjima dok je pisao knjigu, od činjenice da su mnogi ključni obaveštajni dokumenti uništeni, do neizbežnih političkih dvoumljenja oko toga da li bi u knjigu trebalo uvrstiti neke detalje, na primer treba li otkriti imena davno penzionisanih agenata koji u vreme dok su bili aktivni nisu bili otkriveni. Njihovh identitet je zaštićen.Među tajnim agentima koji su radili za MI6 ima i nekoliko Jugoslovena a dve strane govore o Draži Mihajloviću i Josipu Brozu Titu i njihovom odnosu sa Nemcima i saveznicima.Knjiga "MI6 Istorija tajne obaveštajne službe 1909-1949." u Velikoj Britaniji je objavljena još 2010. i izazvala je veliki interes. Detalj o Titu otkriven je kad je knjiga nedavno prevedena za srpsko izdanje pa su je beogradski istoričari i recenzenti detaljno pročitali.

evo dela iz knjige:

Bearing in mind the manifest difficulties facing SIS representatives based in Iron Curtain countries, particular efforts were made to penetrate the Soviet bloc from neighbouring states. Yugoslavia was a special case. Marshal Tito, the Communist wartime resistance leader, had to defeat internal opposition from right-wing groups before establishing a stable government in 1948. After he broke away from the Soviet Union that summer, for a time the survival of his regime was in doubt. In July it was reported to SIS that Tito himself had approached the Swiss authorities about the possibility of seeking asylum there. The political situation in Yugoslavia stabilised and Tito survived to preside for another thirty years over an ultimately unsustainable ethnic federation, but SIS made little progress in the country during the 1940s. In 1947, using an agent under business cover, the Service acquired extremely detailed information about Yugoslav civil and military petroleum installations and reserves, but subsequent efforts to continue the flow of information by recruiting an employee of a Western oil company as an Unofficial Assistant came to nothing

Edited August 30, 2013 by slow

[Filipenko]

:lol:Obožavam ograničene, dirigovane istorije tajnih službi sastavljene od beležaka koje pišu od strane države zaposleni britanski Dejani Lučići u službi babljeg visočanstva umesto da ih stave u ludnice, gde im je mesto.

[Prospero]

ima ona priča dan tane, kad je '71 tito došao u LA i imao susret sa predstavnicim jugoslovenske emigracije. oni su se onako poređali u špalir, i dan tana je bio među njima. po njegovoj priči on je pobegao iz yuge '52 (čini mi se) navodno jer su mu brat i/ili otac glavili ćorku zbog politike. sad, dolazi tito do njega, on mu se predstavlja i na pitanje "kada ste vi otišli iz jugoslavije" tana odgovara sa "pobegao sam '52". tito ga drugarski lupi po ramenu i uz osmeh kaže "eh, kakvo je bilo vreme i ja bih bežao da sam mogao". :)

[Lord Protector]

Evo o WW2 na ovim prostorima, isto iz knjige:

The Bari stationIn August 1944 Cuthbert Bowlby, who had been designated H/Med since October 1943, began to consider long-term strategy in the Mediterranean theatre and press London for guidance about this. Reflecting the changed focus of military operations, he proposed concentrating the regional SIS effort in Italy and Istanbul, and running down the Middle East headquarters in Cairo. Arguing that Austria should be the main base for SIS activities throughout south-east Europe after the war, he raised the possibility of working into the Soviet sphere from there, as well as from Italy and Bulgaria. Although he stressed that such operations would not be ‘palatable’ to the Soviets, he thought that they ‘could be undertaken without their knowledge, provided that it is skilfully and methodically thought out’. London considered such planning to be premature. Although he had raised the matter generally with Bowlby the previous September, Menzies now preferred ‘to await the experience which we may gain from our first contacts with the 95-landers [soviets] in our joint missions in the 91-land [balkan] countries’. Reflecting the unusual consequences of fighting a war alongside a past and potentially future enemy, Marshall-Cornwall realistically thought it unlikely that ‘any of our present personnel’ in the Mediterranean could be used in renewed operations against the Soviet Union. But, as he observed to John Bruce Lockhart (who had also raised the matter of forward planning), SIS needed to ‘draw a clear distinction between post-armistice plans and peace plans’. For the moment all that Bruce Lockhart (and Bowlby) need consider was the former. Planning for the longer term was not their business, but would be conducted in London.Bruce Lockhart’s No. 1 Intelligence Unit was one of the SIS successes of the war. From later 1943, following the Italian capitulation, it had a sub-section liaising with the Italian Military Intelligence service, SIM, which had particularly good right-wing and Italian army sources. Another sub-section, which was kept completely separate, developed contacts among Italian opposition groups, including the Communists. Bruce Lockhart brought over from North Africa a leading party activist – with the appropriate cover-name ‘Rosso’ – to ‘establish the Communist Party in Southern Italy’, gave him wireless sets and got him to organise his comrades in the north ‘to transmit military intelligence to us’. Bruce Lockhart, moreover, personally fetched Rosso’s wife and child ‘from a hovel in Tunis’ and brought them to Italy, for which, he recalled some years later, ‘I suffered an orgy of osculation not only by the wife but by [Rosso] – a very unpleasant memory.’ The networks in northern Italy, which proved to be an extremely fruitful source of valuable information, were run by Brian Ashford-Russell, an ex-Commando who had been badly wounded and taken prisoner in North Africa. Having lost the use of his left hand, and being left-handed, he had managed to get himself repatriated under the Geneva Convention as unfit for further military service. He made a tremendous success of his task. Reporting on him in mid-1944, Bowlby described his performance as ‘astounding’. ‘As far as I can remember,’ he wrote to Menzies, ‘during my 6 years in your organisation, nothing very much has ever been produced from Italy, which makes the results achieved all the more meritorious. Somehow he has made Italians enthusiastic about this kind of work which is no mean achievement.’ Bruce Lockhart reported in August that he ran his section ‘like clockwork’, was ‘very loyal’, and ‘once given instructions, no matter how much he disagrees with them, he carries the instructions out to the letter’. Here Bruce Lockhart dryly added that he had ‘found this a somewhat rarer virtue in [sIS] than in the Army’. Ashford-Russell, however, was not perfect. Bowlby described him as ‘a man of extreme (there is no other word) personal ambition which prompts him to aspire to quicker promotion than is the normal practice in this organisation’. But he was also ‘extremely able’. Bowlby and Bruce Lockhart, therefore, had ‘ignored the former, except to tell 32300 [Ashford-Russell] not to be a B.F. [bloody fool], and concentrate on the latter, our main objective being to obtain information which might assist in defeating the Axis’. In this, he concluded, ‘our efforts have been fully rewarded’. Menzies shared Bowlby’s concern about Ashford-Russell’s personal ambitions. ‘Past experience’, he wrote, had demonstrated that ‘conceit’ was ‘a dangerous trait for those engaged in our particular trade’ and (perhaps with Venlo in mind) he could ‘call to mind several disasters from this characteristic, which generally means that the individual despises his opponents, with dire consequences’.But London continued to worry about ‘liaison’ with ‘Communists, Socialists and Patriots’. Bruce Lockhart explained that the reason why SIS had to ‘remain on friendly terms’ with the Communists in the liberated area was ‘partly in order to obtain recruits’, but ‘far more to obtain access to their organisations North of the [enemy] line’, adding that it was ‘fair to say that 80% of the information coming from North Italy is obtained from Communist, Socialist and Patriotic organisations’ and it was ‘doubtful whether without their help we could even have got our network started’. Lest the station should be suspected of having gone off the rails politically, in July 1944 he reassured Bowlby he was satisfied that ‘in our relations with the Communists and Socialists’, SIS had not ‘gone beyond what was strictly necessary for obtaining military information’.Ashford-Russell ran most of these networks, and through him SIS provided the Italian Communists with communications equipment and codes for them to report back on enemy order-of-battle information, but the Service also routinely monitored all Communist signals traffic. By this means, and through a British officer openly based in the Party headquarters in Naples (though not formally acknowledged as being SIS), the Service gathered much political intelligence as well. Shortly before the fall of Rome in June 1944 Palmiro Togliatti, General Secretary of the Communist Committee for Liberated Italy and future leader of the post-war Italian Communist Party, arrived from Moscow. Although he ejected the SIS representative, he promised that Communists would continue to supply information, but from now on this was limited to military matters. In the spring of 1945, when it was clear that the Germans were beaten, and much of northern Italy was in Communist hands, Togliatti terminated the wartime marriage of convenience with SIS. While the volume of intelligence from Communists fell off in early 1945, other left-wing groups continued to supply a considerable quantity of information through Ashford-Russell’s head agent in Milan, who was a political activist. From May to September 1944, in a series of reports marked by this agent’s ‘wide experience . . . of men and their problems’, he covered the partisan organisation and operations, the dispositions and morale of the Germans, Italian Fascist forces, propaganda, politics, economics, the Church and the press. In October, having briefly come out to Rome for consultations, he and a colleague were infiltrated back behind enemy lines in the unhappily named operation ‘Wop/Risky’ (a title both offensively inappropriate and insecure, since the point of a code-name is ideally to bear no relation whatsoever to the operation in question). They were flown from Bari to Lyons in France, and proceeded to Chamonix where they climbed to 12,000 feet and on foot crossed a corner of Switzerland into Italy. Since it was ‘undoubtedly the hardest’ mountain crossing, the Germans did not ‘consider it worth watching’. This agent continued to report for the first four months of 1945, until the end of the war in Italy.Another of Ashford-Russell’s agents (not, in this case, a Communist), ‘Dragonfly’, had been recruited in South America and operated in Rome for four months during early 1944. He ‘used to lunch regularly’ with Herbert Kappler, the SS chief in the city, ‘and report back to us on the meetings’. He sent large numbers of messages by wireless, and, despite being warned of the dangers of enemy direction finding, refused to cut down the volume of signals, arguing that ‘risks had sometimes to be taken and he would not abandon his post at this critical moment (shortly before the fall of Rome)’. In the end he was caught red-handed (though ‘while the door was being forced open he had time to burn all his papers’), and was shot at Dachau several months later.Reflecting afterwards on the success of his Bari operations into northern Italy, Bruce Lockhart recalled that by the end of the war they had had ‘about 30 or 40 wireless sets coming up daily giving German order of battle and troop movements’. This had made them ‘somewhat swollen headed’ and ‘we thought we knew all the answers’, but ‘we didn’t realise how easy it was being made for us’, as army headquarters could audit SIS product against very good prisoner-of-war interrogation intelligence, ‘first-rate aerial photography and first-rate Sigint’. This ‘admirable collateral’ meant that ‘as soon as an agent or group started to send something unlikely or improbable all lights flashed at G.H.Q. and straight away the information was shown up as being phoney’.Bruce Lockhart’s other section was headed by Major James Millar, who was posted to Bari in January 1944. Millar, a Scot educated at St John’s College, Cambridge, had joined the Service in March 1939 and had served briefly in Berlin and Zagreb, before being posted to Bari to work on Yugoslavia and Central Europe. This included ‘Germany south of River Main, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Austria’, though the penetration of Germany was carefully described only as ‘an ultimate objective’. Within six months, Bowlby, by now himself installed at Naples, reported that Millar (along with Ashford-Russell) had ‘produced excellent results’ and ‘merited several bouquets from our local customers’. Yugoslavia was another of those places where SIS had to work with Communists. The domestic resistance movement was dominated by two mutually opposed groups: the Partisans, led by Josep Broz, ‘Tito’, the prewar leader of the Yugoslav Communist Party; and the virulently anti-Communist Četniks, under the royalist General Draža Mihailović. Although at the startthe two groups had to some extent co-operated, and Mihailović had been backed by the Allies, signals intelligence and reports from SOE missions in Yugoslavia gradually revealed that the Četniks were increasingly collaborating with Axis forces against the shared Communist foe. Churchill became convinced that the leftist Partisans were much more likely to draw German troops away from the west and in February 1944, therefore, the government resolved to withdraw backing for Mihailović and support only Tito.5In SIS, which seriously began to target Yugoslavia only after the Italian surrender, differences remained about whom to support among the resistance. For some, old anti-Bolshevik habits died hard. In April 1944, following a visit to Bari, Bowlby worried that Millar and his staff were ‘far too Tito-conscious’. He complained that ‘pictures of Tito cover the walls’ of Millar’s office and he asked London to send out large photographs of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, ‘to be hung in some prominent place’ in the office. This, he felt, ‘should have the desired effect of intimating to 35,600 [Millar] that there are limits to local partisanship’. Bruce Lockhart appreciated Bowlby’s point about Tito, whom he considered was certainly a ‘tool of the Russians’. He argued, nevertheless, that Millar was right ‘in putting all his money on Tito’ as this was ‘undoubtedly his best chance of obtaining good military information’. So it was, and most of the intelligence which SIS acquired about Yugoslavia came from overt SIS and SOE liaison with the Partisans. As Bruce Lockhart noted in May 1945, although it was ‘not an SIS problem in the precise sense of the word’, the Yugoslav intelligence which Millar produced was nevertheless ‘consistently on a very high level’ and ‘at one period YM [the army] and YA [the air force] were almost entirely dependent on the intelligence produced by 35600 [Millar] for their planning’.Worries about left-wing politics affected individual SIS officers as well, including one of the men in Millar’s section, Kenneth Syers, who had been recruited into the Service in late 1942. Educated at King’s College, Cambridge, he had been a journalist before the war, then a British Council lecturer in Yugoslavia from 1939 to 1941, and spoke fluent Serbo-Croat. In August 1943 he was dropped into Yugoslavia as an officer-agent, was brought out in November 1943 and served in Bari before spending another spell in Yugoslavia from May to September 1944, after which he was posted home to Section I (Foreign Office liaison) in Head Office. He had first come to the notice of David Footman (head of Section I) in the latter part of 1943 ‘when he sent us a series of reports on the political aspects of the Partisan movement’, the quality of which was, in Footman’s experience of political reporting, ‘quite unique’. ‘They were endorsed by [Fitzroy] Maclean,’ the British representative with Tito, and made ‘a considerable impression on the Foreign Office including the strong pro-Mihailovist element then there’. His reports, in both quantity and quality, had been ‘of greater value than perhaps those of any other officer in our Mediterranean station’. But, on his posting to London, Syers’s political opinions came under close scrutiny. While Footman admitted that they were ‘undoubtedly Left’, he was prepared to believe Syers ‘when he says he is not a member of the Communist Party’ and the very fact that he had had ‘trouble with the Partisan authorities seems to show that this is correct’.Valentine Vivian was not happy about Syers, who was, he said, among a number of SIS officers who were ‘so far Left as to be scarcely distinguishable from Communists’. Although, having looked at Syers’s file, he found no evidence to support his contention, in November 1944 he nevertheless asked Roger Hollis of MI5 to look into Syers’s background. Towards the end of the year, Syers announced his intention to marry an SIS secretary, who had worked most recently at Bari. When Rex Howard checked up on her, he discovered that she was a niece by marriage of Maxim Litvinov, the prewar Soviet Foreign Minister, a fact which, curiously, did not appear on her file. Vivian then raised the matter with Kim Philby, who also wrote to Hollis. Hollis replied in January 1945 that MI5 had no record of her and ‘nothing of great relevance’ on Syers. Two months later, however, Hollis reported that they had evidence that connected Syers to ‘a certain Communist in the Army Education Corps named Hobsbawm, who was before the war an undergraduate at Cambridge’ (and who subsequently became a very distinguished historian). When Vivian passed Hollis’s letter on to Philby, saying ‘I don’t much like the look of this,’ Philby rallied to Syers’s defence, though in terms which seem remarkable, given the benefit of hindsight and his own role as a Soviet agent in SIS:Syers seems to be remarkably unfortunate in his choice of friends! I have had several conversations with him recently and he has consistently reiterated his intention of taking up journalism at the earliest possible opportunity. It would seem, therefore, his connections with Communists are less sinister than might be supposed, since it is hardly conceivable that the C.P.G.B. [Communist Party of Great Britain], or any Soviet organisation, would dream of letting him leave S.I.S. once he had got his foot well inside it. Moreover, he makes little attempt to conceal his interest in Marxism and Marxists - an attitude which is hardly consistent with sinister designs.In July Philby still professed that he was at a loss to know what to advise about Syers and suggested pressing Hollis for more information. This time Hollis was more forthright, noting further contacts between Syers and Eric Hobsbawm and at least one other ‘leading Party member’. He advised that Syers and other similar left-leaning officers in SIS should be allowed to ‘return to journalism or whatever work they wish to follow as soon as this can be done’. So it was to be. Syers, the suspected Communist sympathiser, left to work for the Liberal-leaning News Chronicle, while Philby, the unsuspected Soviet spy, stayed on.Dealing with the Soviets and penetrating the BalkansSIS’s relations with the Soviet Union during the Second World War were extremely problematic. The USSR and its global ambitions, having been a major target for SIS since the revolutionary years, remained so for the period from the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 until Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But, all of a sudden, the USSR became an ally, and a British mission was sent to Moscow to underpin good inter-Allied relations, facilitate support for the Soviet war effort and, it was hoped, encourage the exchange of (among other things) information which might be of mutual benefit. Right at the start, too, it was also seen as an intelligence opportunity. In July 1941 Admiral Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence, wrote to Menzies about the possibility of embedding intelligence officers in Moscow who could work on acquiring information about the Soviet navy. It was, he declared, a ‘golden opportunity to obtain that intelligence regarding the U.S.S.R. which we have lacked for so long’. But there were worries in Broadway that any such operation ‘would only result in compromise’. Menzies argued that ‘the Anglo-Russian alliance against Germany’ had ‘not altered my policy of endeavouring to obtain U.S.S.R. Armed Force information’, but Godfrey would appreciate ‘that I have to tread very warily as regards any further stepsI may take’. The British ambassador and mission in Moscow, he continued, were ‘most anxious that nothing should be done which may in any way impede their efforts towards a successful collaboration with the U.S.S.R. authorities, the result of which may have much influence in winning the war’. Despite the somewhat elliptical language (and demonstrating that Menzies was clearly alive to the political ramifications of the proposal), this was a definite SIS refusal to meet a direct request from a customer department.Intelligence, however, was central to the new Anglo-Soviet relationship. Having rallied to the Soviet side in the summer of 1941, there was actually very little practical assistance that London could offer, and when an Allied supply mission, including United States representatives, arrived in Moscow in the autumn it became abundantly obvious that the bulk of any available war supplies would come from the USA. In the meantime, as Bradley F. Smith has observed, ‘out of a combination of necessity and desperation’, the British Military Mission in Moscow under General Noel Mason-Macfarlane ‘always came back to intelligence exchange as the best available method of aiding the Russians and demonstrating Britain’s military prowess and importance’.6 But the best British intelligence was based on Ultra material, and there was never any suggestion that the USSR could be let into the secret in the way the USA had been earlier in the year. Menzies was instructed to ‘work out a scheme’ for transmitting ‘highly secret information’ to Macfarlane, who, in turn, was told ‘to pass on nothing to the Russians likely to compromise our sources of information’. Apart from the marking ‘from most reliable sources’, Ultra material, which was transmitted to Moscow over a dedicated, secure SIS wireless link, was paraphrased and massaged to obscure its origin. When Churchill pressed Menzies in July 1941 to send Ultra-based material to Moscow, Menzies observed that the immediacy of the information (which was of course one of its greatest strengths) could jeopardise the source if it were sent without some delay. ‘It would be impossible’, he wrote, ‘for any agent to have secured such information’ and transmitted it so quickly. He therefore arranged for the gist to be buried among other War Office material, and the Soviets to be tipped off that SIS had a ‘well-placed source in Berlin’.7Even so, Menzies worried about the security of Ultra and the volume of material being provided. In September 1941, on a copy of an Air Intelligence signal to Moscow containing from ‘most reliable sources’ (evidently German air force Enigma decrypts) information about Luftwaffe dispositions on the Eastern Front, he minuted: ‘I am very concerned about these comm[unication]s & I think [we] sh[oul]d refuse to let this type of info[rmatio]n go forward.’ Intelligence security did not just apply to the Soviets. In August 1941 London sent Macfarlane a complaint from the Turks that their military attaché in Moscow ‘was getting very little information from our M.A.’. Since it was ‘very important to maintain good relations with the Turks’, London requested that Macfarlane pass on ‘what information you feel possible’. Menzies thought that this might be ‘dangerous’ and asked Commander Denniston at Bletchley Park about Turkish cypher security. Denniston reported that 90 per cent of the Turks’ diplomatic signals and ‘all’ military attaché messages between Moscow and Ankara were ‘practically fully legible . . . Hence it may be assumed that any information passed to the Turkish Ambassador or M.A. may be read by the enemy.’In September 1941 SOE signed an agreement with the Soviet intelligence agency, the NKVD, to co-operate in subversive activities in all countries outside their respective spheres of influence. An SOE mission was established in Moscow under Colonel George Hill, an old Russian hand and longstanding anti-Bolshevik who had worked for SIS during the post-revolutionary period and rejoined the Service in Section D at the start of the war, subsequently transferring into SOE. In the face of the German push towards Moscow during the winter of 1941, all foreign missions were evacuated to Kuibyshev, a provincial city on the River Volga. Here Hill cheered up his colleagues by inventing ingenious vodka cocktails.8 While the NKVD were aware of Hill’s role, there was also an unavowed SIS representative in the party who began to develop contacts in the parallel Polish and Czechoslovak military missions for intelligence. The most productive of these was Colonel Leon Bortnowski, code-named ‘Perch’, who was the Polish intelligence service representative in the USSR from August 1941 until September 1942. Although Bortnowski was avowed to the NKVD he offered to pass on information to SIS from his own Polish network and released Polish prisoners-of-war. A shopping list was prepared in London, with the Air Section asking for information about Russian aircraft production and the transfer east of aircraft factories. The Naval Section wanted Bortnowski to ask the Russians ‘what warships, especially battleships, aircraft carriers and cruisers are building in Japan’ and if the Germans had ‘any gas, other than those known in last war’; the Economic Section were primarily interested in oil production and the ‘condition of the railway system’; and the Political Section requested information about morale, ‘with special reference to whether there is any serious or organised opposition to the Soviet regime’. Bortnowski was able to supply some economic material, but there were complaints at Broadway about its quantity and that he was unable to respond to supplementary enquiries. For one officer this merely illustrated ‘how unsatisfactory’ it was ‘to rely on Foreign representatives to get us our information’, as the source was both ‘in a delicate position’ and ‘not under our control’. ‘We, as an organisation,’ he continued, ‘should and must rely primarily on our own intelligence collecting weapons rather than those of our Allies, friends or neutrals.’In December 1941, however, Bortnowski did supply what were described as ‘authentic Russian documents’, Soviet General Staff intelligence reports concerning Turkey, Afghanistan and India, which showed that the USSR was ‘very well informed about British activities in India and elsewhere’, and for which London sent a special message of thanks.9 In May 1942 the possibility was raised of using Polish agents to ‘find out something’ about the ‘policy and present activities’ of the Comintern. David Footman in Broadway appreciated that ‘our representative has, of course, to watch his own step very carefully in Soviet Russia, but the Poles might not have the same diffidence about making these enquiries’. Valentine Vivian saw merit in the proposal. ‘We should, I think, be wrong’, he wrote, ‘not to keep abreast of Comintern (a) Policy & (b) activities. The directives we have seen to the C.P.G.B., and the tactics now being employed, show that Communism may at the end or towards the end of the war be a force to reckon with.’ But, he added, ‘policy with regard to anything Russian’ is ‘delicate’. Frederick Winterbotham, now in the counter-espionage Section V, thought the whole proposal was ‘very undesirable’. ‘Our man in Kuibishev’ might pick up ‘scraps’, he argued, but this ‘would in no way compensate for the risk of the Soviet authorities discovering, or suspecting, what he was up to’. Faced with this opposition, Vivian dropped the notion.In December 1942 it was proposed to send an avowed SIS officer to the Soviet Union to act as Hill’s assistant and work on the ‘exchange of information’ with the Soviets, though Broadway recognised that this would be a ‘difficult task’. All the Allies found the Soviets hard to deal with in this respect. Colonel Stanisław Gano, the Polish intelligence chief, said that while he had ‘supplied the Russians with a fair amount’, he had ‘received nothing in returnexcept questionnaires of a very childish nature’, and Hatton-Hall, head of the Army Section at Broadway, regretfully observed that it was ‘hopeless to expect the Russians to reciprocate. We must be prepared to get nothing back.’ Lieutenant Cecil Barclay, a twenty-eight-year-old sailor who had been hired by SIS in 1938 to assist in Section X (the telephone-tapping department), and had subsequently stayed on at Head Office, was posted to Moscow in June 1943. Over the next two years he acted as the conduit for signals intelligence material, and, as had been expected, most of the traffic was one-way. In November 1944, however, he was given some captured German code-books, of which one (‘Schlüsselanleitung zum Rufzeichenschlüssel’ – ‘key instruction to call-sign key’) provoked great excitement at Bletchley Park. It would, declared the Director, Commander Edward Travis (Denniston’s successor), ‘mean that one of the biggest difficulties of the moment will be solved. In other words, Barclay has got a catch.’On 13 October 1943, Vivian told Peter Loxley that ‘about six months ago’ he had obtained Menzies’s approval to establish a small unit (Section IX) to concentrate on the ‘illegal’ or underground aspects of the Communist movement in foreign countries, and to handle cases of Communist or Soviet penetration and espionage. An MI5 officer, J. C. Curry, had been seconded to the section and SIS now wanted to adopt ‘a cautious, forward policy’ of tackling this target, including the exchange of information with allies. Recognising ‘the extreme delicacy of the matter’, Vivian assured Loxley that ‘few have been made aware of the nature’ of this work. Sir Orme Sargent (Deputy Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office) was immediately enthusiastic: ‘I quite agree to the proposal . . . in fact, I am surprised that this branch of our intelligence services should have been allowed to fall into desuetude.’ Sargent was keen to know how far Communist organisations operating in the Balkans had taken root among the population, ‘and how far they are being supported by Moscow’. Loxley therefore quickly told Vivian that the Foreign Office had no objection to SIS developing Section IX’s work, ‘provided that discretion is observed, and provided that you do not do anything in the U.S.S.R. itself (despite Soviet espionage in this country)’.10As Soviet forces moved towards Berlin in April 1945, Barclay suggested that the ‘time had come’ to start on counter-espionage within Germany, and asked Broadway if there were ‘any special addresses in Berlin which interest you and what do you want from them’? He could also pass to the Soviets lists of names of the more important German intelligence officers ‘suspected of remaining in Berlin’, or (and here he reflected prevailing concerns that the Nazis would seek to preserve some clandestine organisation after their defeat) staying ‘elsewhere in east to work underground’. London replied with a list of eighteen intelligence service addresses in the Berlin area, along with nineteen ‘Mil. Amt’ names, including that of the organisation’s head, Walter Schellenberg. (The Militärisches Amt had been created in June 1944 when Himmler’s SD had swallowed up the Army Intelligence Abwehr.) There were also nine officers’ names specifically from Amt VI (the overseas branch of the SD), including ‘Obersturmbannführer Eichmann’. While London had ‘no definite evidence of a stay-behind network being set up in territory occupied by the Russians’, they added seven names of officers ‘known to have been employed in intelligence work against Russia’. Barclay’s raising of the issue and Broadway’s ready supply of names and addresses were a product of that brief period at the end of the war when it was believed that Anglo-Soviet intelligence co-operation (such as it was) would continue, if only in the pursuit of Nazism.That this might not be the case should already have been apparent from experience in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, where the insertion of SIS teams following the liberation of countries by Soviet forces proved to be extremely problematic. As early as the spring of 1944 Harold Gibson had secured Menzies’s cautious approval to take soundings in Turkey, ‘with a view to obtaining our representation in all Russian occupied Balkan territories’. Gibson then prepared a paper for Likhterov, the Soviet military attaché, suggesting that SIS could ‘offer certain facilities and contacts’ in areas occupied or likely to be occupied by the Soviets, which could be ‘exploited to mutual advantage’. Although Likhterov had been encouraging (if non-committal), in August London directed that liaison with the Soviets would be handled by Barclay in Moscow. In the meantime Gibson continued planning for SIS representation in Romania and Bulgaria. On 23 August the twenty-two-year-old King Michael of Romania, who had seized power from Marshal Ion Antonescu, surrendered to the Soviets and the following day declared war on Germany, thus committing his army against the Axis forces still in the country. The following day Gibson sent the first of several increasingly pressing requests to London for permission to proceed to Romania. ‘In my opinion,’ he wrote, ‘it is important to stake our claim quickly and no time should be lost in moving forward as soon as possible.’ From Naples, Cuthbert Bowlby urged that a party be sent at once. On 27 August Gibson asserted that the Soviets were ‘badly in need’ of operational intelligence from Romania, which his contacts could help supply. This ‘should surely help justify’ his presence or that of another SIS officer. But London was discouraging. The following day Menzies signalled that the Foreign Office had promised not to despatch personnel into the zone of Soviet military operations without Moscow’s explicit agreement and Gibson was instructed to stay put. There was better news about Bulgaria, which announced its withdrawal from the war on 26 August 1944. Two days later Menzies announced that the Foreign Office had lifted its objection to the despatch of an SIS party and instructed Gibson to make preparations, but not to take action just yet.In London, meanwhile, the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, approved a proposal that SIS should be allowed to operate in all liberated territories, but with ‘one stipulation’, that ‘no party should be sent into Roumania in advance of the official mission’ in order ‘to avoid possible complications with the Russians’.11 Gibson continued to lament the ‘loss of a great opportunity’, especially since the Americans in the shape of OSS were planning to send in a party. He was further exercised by the hold-up in permission to enter Bulgaria. ‘Regarded from this end,’ he signalled in September, ‘the delay in moving S.I.S. parties into the Balkans has been catastrophic,’ and the Service had ‘lost a unique opportunity of getting there first . . . and being on the spot to pick up and direct important contacts’. SIS had instead ‘been forestalled by our go-ahead American colleagues who could act unrestrictedly and were not afraid to do so. Result is they have strong and energetic teams in Bulgaria and Roumania already functioning to good purpose.’ Menzies would not budge about Romania, though he was prepared to let Gibson go to Bulgaria. In the case of the former, while he appreciated Gibson’s ‘disappointment’, the Foreign Office line was clear, and he ‘must abide by the higher policy laid down’. As to the latter, the wisdom of London’s caution was soon demonstrated. In mid-September Gibson and a small SIS staff moved to Sofia by road from Istanbul. But on 25 September they (and the OSS mission in Bulgaria) were peremptorily expelled by the Soviet authorities.Echoing Gibson’s feelings, Cuthbert Bowlby wrote a ‘slightly despondent’ letter to Menzies regretting the British failure to exploit the situation in Bulgaria and Romania. SIS, he said, had ‘naturally come in for a good deal of criticism’, which he had staved off by citing the Foreign Office ban. Neverthelesssurprise had been expressed that a secret organisation such as SIS should be prevented from operating anywhere it wished at any time regardless of official restrictions: ‘What, they say, is the use of being a secret organisation if you are tied by the same rules which govern open activities?’ Here Bowlby was voicing a common attitude about SIS (and similar agencies), but one which dangerously confused operational matters with policy considerations. With the former, secret operations might well not be bound ‘by the same rules’ which governed ‘open activities’. But the latter was entirely different. Menzies, who claimed to Bowlby that he was ‘just as disappointed’ by the turn of events, carefully observed: ‘You must realise . . . that at no time, and especially not in war time, can our functions be carried out with a total disregard of Government policy.’ In this particular case, moreover, there could have been ‘very little prospect of any penetration’ remaining unknown to the Soviets. The Foreign Office feared that the entry of intelligence personnel into an area which could properly be described as within ‘the zone of military operations of our allies’ might have been resented ‘as bitterly as we should resent the unannounced arrival of 95-land [Russian] personnel in, let us say, 13-land [belgium]’. In the event, moreover, the Foreign Office’s apprehensions had been justified by events, and the suggestion that the Soviets had welcomed the Americans and were surprised by the British failure to appear on the scene was ‘now shown to be wholly at variance’ with the official view taken in Moscow.