Sir Walter Fletcher was involved in Operation Remorse it was different than any other of SOE missions. Its origins stemmed from Operation Mickleham a plan to buy surplus Rubber, he had calculated that there was large amount of rubber that could be siphoned off its Asian producers and converted into hard cash.

This ploy failed due to a lack of agents willing to purchase the surplus rubber, so he turned his attention to other sources of income, that of Quinine Tungsten Silk and Mercury

From this Operation Remorse sprang, it was a scheme that was set up to launder goods in exchange for hard currency in order to finance some of SOEs dealings. It didn't involve glamorous female agents going undercover or interrogation by the Gestapo, it was a war fought across the counters and vaults of banks . Yet it is far easier to prove Remorse's success than its more famous SOE’s exploits.

The items for sale in this British made black market included cigarette papers, indigo dye, motor spares, proprietary medicines, and bicycles all were sold at a healthy profit. Organisations other than the government became clients, ICI and the Red Cross all used Remorse's expertise in the black markets.

IOU’s were sold for local currency, promising to repay the owner in sterling after the war.  The Remorse team came up with the idea of buying at rock bottom prices the assets of Chinese rupee accounts in India, frozen at the start of the Chinese-Japanese war in 1904/5

The Indian banks were still operating under a British colonial government would then unfreeze the assets for the SOE. So a Chinese merchant with £100,000 worth of rupees locked up in Calcutta would be offered £22,000 in rupee notes in Kunming China, with Remorse pocketing the difference.  At one point, the Kunming office received a cable from London asking them to stop trading for a while, why? Thanks to Remorse, it had made a worldwide operating surplus for the month and they were having trouble explaining the situation to the chiefs of staff.

The operation's total profits may have amounted to as much as £77m. SOE was probably the only spying organisation to come out of a war with its books, at least for Far East operations, in the black. No wonder Fletcher was awarded a knighthood after the war. By the end of 1945, Remorse had been shut down. Immediately after the war, Sir Walter Fletcher took his seat at Westminster as the Conservative MP for Bury, until ill health forced him to stand down in 1955 he died the following year.

HS 1/135/276 /291/292/293 Remorse