Section to disguise its true purpose. Plans for an attack on Singapore In 1943, a 28-year-old British officer, Captain Ivan Lyon of the Allied Intelligence Bureau and Gordon Highlanders, and a 61-year-old Australian civilian, Bill Reynolds, devised a plan to attack Japanese shipping in Singapore Harbour. Z Special Unit would travel to the harbour in a disguised fishing boat. They would then use folding kayaks to attach limpet mines to Japanese ships. General Archibald Wavell approved the plan, and Lyon was sent to Australia to organise the operation. Bill Reynolds was in possession of a long Japanese coastal fishing boat, the Kofuku Maru, which he had used to evacuate refugees out of Singapore. Lyon ordered that the boat be shipped from India to Australia. Upon its arrival, he renamed the vessel MV Krait, after the small but deadly Asian snake. Lieutenant-Colonel G. Egerton Mott, the chief of the Services Reconnaissance Department, suggested that they should test the effectiveness of the plan by making a mock raid on a tightly guarded Allied port. Townsville, Queensland was chosen for the location of the attack. Operation Scorpion In January 1943, Lieutenant Samuel Warren Carey, a Z Special Unit officer based at Z Experimental Station, Cairns, Queensland, approached General Thomas Blamey with a proposition for a raid on the Japanese-occupied port at Rabaul, New Guinea. One submarine, with a small group of commandos on board, would be involved. The commandos would be dropped off Rabaul. They would then use their Hoehn military folboats (collapsible kayaks) to travel into the harbour and attach limpet mines to as many enemy ships as possible. They would then retreat to a volcano section roughly south of Rabaul, where they would hide out until they could safely rendezvous with the submarine. Blamey was sure that the unit would be captured and shot, but he authorised the operation, and issued Carey carte blanche authority to perform whatever actions he deemed necessary during the planning of the proposed operation, which was codenamed Operation Scorpion. By the end of March 1943, Carey had assembled a team of nine men on their base at Magnetic Island. Lyon and Mott arranged to have Carey's unit perform a mock attack on Townsville, although they were careful not to commit anything to paper. Townsville was a busy harbour full of troop transports, merchantmen and naval escort vessels, and tight security was maintained due to the constant