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Europe (the German Group), based first in Cologne and later in London. At the end of 1925 he became head of a new Section V at Head Office, devoted to counter-intelligence and counter-Communist work. Sinclair also used him to think strategically about the Service, as with this Arabia report, following a four-month tour between December 1926 and April 1927, during which Vivian visited Egypt, the Sudan, Palestine, Transjordan, Aden and India. En route he happily discovered that SIS was better received in the field than at home. ‘The element of reserve perceptible in the attitude of Departments at home towards S.I.S. expansion in Arabia’, he wrote, found ‘no echo in the attitude of the local British administrations’. Because of the ‘vastness and backwardness’ of Arabia, there was ‘no one centre or nodal point from which the country as a whole’ could be ‘worked’. Cairo, in fact, was the only possible place for a representative (who would be additional to the existing head of station). But he also proposed that three ‘advanced bases’, under a ‘chief local agent’, be established: at Jeddah in Saudi Arabia itself; at Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast of Sudan; and at Bushire (Bushehr) in Iran on the Persian Gulf (where the work could be handled by the existing British- Indian Political Agent). Jeddah would be used ‘for collecting information from the Hejaz and Ibn Saud’s dominions’; Bushire for central Arabia; and Port Sudan for ‘Southern Arabia and Eritrea’. Vivian drew up quite an elaborate plan with projected costs of £3,500 a year for ‘a minimum practical beginning’. This, he hazarded, would be sufficient for ‘a nucleus from which an organisation of a more permanent nature’ might be expected to grow. But, however strong the theoretical case might have been for SIS expansion in the 1920s, there were no available funds to support it, so the scheme was still-born.

One aspect of the scheme on which Vivian focused particular attention was that of the chief local agents. Although they ‘need not be British or European’, he argued that ‘they should be selected from among persons already established on the spot’. He observed that Jeddah posed a particular problem due to the presence there ‘of a very intelligent, potentially hostile element in the person of Mr. H. St. J. Philby’. Philby was ‘the one individual in Jeddah, who, if he were otherwise than he is, could solve our difficulties’, being ‘second to few Englishmen . . . in his knowledge of modern Arabia’. Unfortunately, however, he had become ‘seriously disgruntled on account of his disagreements with the Government on Arabian policy’, and ‘whether sincere or merely posing (as I suspect), now pretends to champion the interests of Ibn Saoud [sic] against “exploitation by British Imperialism”’. Vivian had encountered the self-opinionated Philby as an assistant commissioner in the Punjab before the war, and Vivan’s wife Mary had been a childhood friend of Philby’s wife, Dora. It is curious that, while in the 1920s St John Philby (whom Valentine Vivian thought was admirably qualified to be an SIS agent) was widely but wrongly suspected in Arabia of being a British spy, twenty years later no one, let alone Vivian, had the slightest suspicion of his son, Kim. When Kim joined SIS in the 1940s, Vivian took a personal interest in his progress and was in later life sharply criticised for fostering his career in the Service. It was a cruel irony indeed that the Service’s anti-Communist expert should have taken under his avuncular wing the Service’s worst Communist traitor.

7

Domestic matters

During the 1920s the modern title of the Service gradually became established. Although the report of the 1925 Cabinet Secret Service Committee spoke of the ‘Secret Intelligence Service, commonly known as S.I.S.’,1 an abbreviated version of the report (in the SIS archives) used the term ‘Special Intelligence Service’, which suggests that even in SIS itself some uncertainty remained about what the Service was called. In October 1928 a police Special Branch memorandum described SIS as ‘the Special