This Month in History - September
'The Friends of the Burma Hill People’, was set up after the war with the help of Frank Owen, Editor of the Daily Mail, and included among their membership Reginald Dorman-Smith, Colonel Cromarty-Tulloch, H.N.C. Stevenson and a number of high ranking intelligence and military personnel all of whom had worked with the Karen resistance. According to Henry Stoner who was invited to join one of their meetings;
'The aim that came from it was obviously just assist and aid the Karens when they rose in revolution, to get help to them, it wasn’t said in which form, but obviously arms if necessary.'
Cromarty-Tulloch took an active role in arranging for the shipment of arms and travelled to Calcutta with the intention of then sailing a boatload of arms to Moulmein. His contact in Rangoon was Alex Campbell, a former Force 136 officer, who was working as a foreign correspondent for the Daily Mail. Unknown to them was the fact that MI5 already had them under surveillance after discovering large amounts of money being transferred from Frank Owen and the Daily Mail to Campbell and Cromarty-Tulloch.
The plot was finally broken when a message sent by Campbell asking for the arms to be dispatched was intercepted resulting in the arrest and deportation of Cromarty-Tulloch and the imprisonment and sentencing to death, in Rangoon, of Campbell. The British Consul in Rangoon met with Campbell and after Campbell threatened to divulge a number of secrets that would embarrass London, he found himself immediately deported to England.
