CONFIDENTIAL
covering SECRET
A F Thorp Esq OBE Head of F1(Air) Ministry of Defence Main Building Whitehall
SW 1
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
London S.W.1
18 April 1972
LAET
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Dear Thorp,
THE BUILDING OF THE SNAKE FENCE IN HONG KONG
Thank you for your letter of 3 March. I am grateful for the clarification of the phrase in Curzon's earlier letter, but paragraph 4 of your letter recording the FCO view of 1969 seems to make Curzon's remark academic.
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Before commenting on Curzon's proposal for arbitration I must revert to the body of his letter which misinterprets completely the substance of the Governor of Hong Kong's telegram No. 1320 by quoting only from its penultimate paragraph where a subsidiary advantage of the building of the fence was mentioned - that is its contingent use against refugees. I cannot do better in seeking to describe the conditions of 1967 than to let you read for yourself Chapter 8 of the Hong Kong Government's confidential report on the disturbances. This, I attach. It nowhere describes the building of the Snake fence, but it gives a graphic description of the situation which faced the military and the police on the border with China. After reading it I doubt if the Ministry of Defence will wish to describe what the troops were dealing with as "illegal immigration".
3. Secondly I must ask you to look again at my letter of 14 February in which I too dealt with the exchange between Hall of the then Commonwealth Office and Cass which took place in October 1967. I do not deny that Hall wrote in the terms described and that he quoted the opinion of another senior officer of the Commonwealth Office.
All I can say,
and from personal experience which neither of the others concerned had, is that they were wrong in the views they expressed. The fence was not "in the nature of an immigration control measure", except as a subsidiary option to its main purpose.
CONFIDENTIAL covering SECRET
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