The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [127]
SIS and signals intelligence
When he became Chief of SIS, Hugh Sinclair was also made non-operational director of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), Britain’s unified signals intelligence agency created out of the remnants of the wartime Admiralty and War Office cryptographic branches, NID25 (popularly known as Room 40) and MI1(b) respectively. 2 In November 1918, along with his scheme for an amalgamated secret service, the Director of Military Intelligence, William Thwaites, had proposed to his naval counterpart, Blinker Hall, that the two signals intelligence sections should be united in a single ‘School’ (so called to provide cover by stressing the organisation’s positive side, for example in studying ways to achieve secure communications). Hall agreed, deftly offering ‘housing room’ in the Admiralty ‘for the military side, so that all their joint knowledge and brains might be combined with the least possible over-lapping’. But Colonel C. N. French, Thwaites’s chief staff officer in MI1, opposed a rapid amalgamation. The War Office had been particularly successful with foreign diplomatic traffic. By 1918 they claimed to have solved fifty-two diplomatic codes, including those of France and the United States.3 French argued that ‘during the Peace negotiations’ the information produced by MI1(b) would ‘be as, or perhaps more, important than it has ever been during the time of hostilities’. Furthermore, since cryptographers were ‘somewhat kittle-cattle to deal with and all of them, if they are any good, have somewhat peculiar temperaments’, their work might suffer if they were ‘shifted from their present quarters in Cork Street [in Mayfair] to the Admiralty’.
French was not the only person with definite opinions on the subject. In January 1919 Lord Curzon (acting Foreign Secretary while Lord Balfour was at the Paris Peace Conference) declared that the Foreign Office was ‘the proper place for the new school to be housed’. Sinclair (at this stage Director of Naval Intelligence) disagreed. The School, he argued, should be located in the Admiralty, since the fighting services possessed the required expertise and ‘all the arrangements as regards deciphering messages’ were ‘already in existence in the Admiralty building’. This was not just a matter of convenience. ‘Without wishing to disparage the Foreign Office in the least,’ he continued, ‘it is considered that the atmosphere of calm deliberation which characterizes that department is not suited to an organisation such as the proposed Code and Cypher School, which, above all things, must be a “live” undertaking, especially in connection with the “breaking” of codes and cyphers.’ The matter was settled on 29 April 1919 at a conference chaired by Curzon, along with the First Lord (Walter Long) and the Secretary for War and Air (Winston Churchill), which decided that the new School should be placed in the Admiralty (albeit under civilian administration). Curzon, nevertheless, arguing that in peacetime its work would be almost entirely political, secured for the Foreign Office the valuable power of controlling the information produced. It was decided that he (as acting Foreign Secretary) should receive all intercepted telegrams and be responsible for passing them on ‘to the Prime Minister or other Cabinet Ministers concerned when they were of sufficient importance’.4
It is evident from the discussions in early 1919 that the Foreign Office, and Lord Curzon in particular, recognised the high potential value of the diplomatic decrypts produced