The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [100]
The paper also summarised liaison with the other security and intelligence agencies. The ‘S.S. Branch’ of the police at Scotland Yard was ‘to all intents and purposes the complement of the S.I.S.’, while MI5 was responsible for ‘special intelligence’ in ‘all countries under the British Flag’ and was ‘concerned solely in the tracking of Foreign Military (and Naval &c) agents working in British territory, and with the moral security of the Armed Forces of the Crown’, another complementary function. MI5, moreover, had ‘no right to maintain agents of any kind in any Foreign Country without the knowledge and consent of S.I.S.’. The third analogous British organisation was Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), directed from Simla in India, though it had its headquarters in London. IPI’s function was ‘the watching of subjects of the Indian Empire in all countries save India itself and certain neighbouring States’. This involved working in foreign countries, but potential overlap with SIS was monitored by careful liaison and co-operation between the two services.
The outline of the Service’s ‘internal organisation’ reflected changes introduced by Cumming since the end of the war. As part of his postwar cost-cutting he told Ronald Campbell of the Foreign Office in March 1919 that he would have to give up the ‘Organisation by Departments’ – with separate sections for each customer department – which had been imposed on him in November 1917 and replace it with a ‘system on a “Geographical” Basis’, rather as had been the case earlier in the war. What in fact emerged was a combination of the two, with a Production side, primarily responsible for the overseas deployment of the Service, and a Circulation side, which provided the link with the customer departments, both ‘transmitting all information obtained’ and generally ‘acting as a liaison between the S.I.S. and the said Departments’. Reflecting the two-way process involved, this section later became known as Requirements. By early 1923, the Production side was envisaged as containing nine groups, covering different geographical regions, with a supervising Inspector over each, but, while seven groups covering Europe, the Near East and the Far East had been organised, the North American one was not yet operational and the South American Group was ‘definitely still only theoretical’. A diagram showing the budget figures for SIS’s overseas stations prepared later in 1923 shows that a New York station was in existence and indicates the share of expenditure met by Passport Control. It suggests that the £90,000 budget recommended by the Secret Service Committee in 1922 represented only part of the funds required for the Service. Out of a total budget of £170,800, ‘Headquarters’ was allocated £26,000 and £20,000 was earmarked for ‘Contingent’, leaving £124,800 for overseas operations. The income side showed four sources of revenue: an ‘S.S. Grant’ of £112,000; ‘Passport Control’, £44,000; ‘Far East Res[erve]’, £14,000; and ‘Scotland Yard’, £800.23
On the Circulation side, the armed service branches (Sections II-IV in the November 1917 arrangement) remained. Reflecting postwar priorities, Section V, Political, was the largest (with two officers and five secretaries in January 1923), and Section I, Economics (which had primarily been devoted to wartime blockade work), had disappeared altogether. In order to help maintain the secrecy of the organisation, Cumming and Nevile Bland agreed in February 1922 that requests for information from (and responses to) departments other than the armed services should all pass through the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office. Apart from Section V, there is not much evidence from the early 1920s, however, that the section numbers were widely used in Head Office. This, too, presumably reflected postwar realities: the elaborate 1917 (and, as Cumming had observed in 1919, expensive) structure for a Head Office of up to a hundred staff was not necessary in the evidently more informal postwar circumstances when the office