ABSTRACT
This contribution examines the role of American intelligence within British India, focusing particularly on the central place of 'empire' issues in AngloAmerican intelligence controversies between 1942 and 1947. Accordingly, it deals with the high politics of intelligence, rather than attempting to catalogue the complexities of individual operations. It seeks to suggest that, from late 1942, William J. Donovan's Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and also British secret services in Asia were increasingly preoccupied, not with the war against Japan, but with mutual competition to safeguard or advance national interests in the fluid situation created in Asia after Japan's dramatic southward expansion of December 1941.
