The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [134]
So it may well have been in SIS, whose officers had numerous contacts and acquaintances in Conservative political and business circles. It is highly likely that some talk of the letter, if not the text itself, was shared beyond Whitehall. In April 1969 Desmond Morton even claimed that Stewart Menzies had sent a copy of the letter to the Daily Mail through the post, an assertion greeted with ‘amazement and disbelief ’ inside SIS.27 On 21 October 1924, however, three days before the letter’s publication and because of its particular encouragement of subversion within the armed services, complete copies of the text were circulated to the home military commands in Great Britain, and it was reported that the Admiralty were considering similar action. With such a wide distribution it was surely only a matter of time before the document became public. Whoever leaked the letter, SIS’s role was less than glorious, and the whole affair shows how an almost obsessive and blinkered concentration on one target can dangerously influence the exercise of sensible critical judgment.
The 1925 Secret Service Committee
The Zinoviev Letter affair exposed weaknesses in the co-ordination of work between SIS and Special Branch in particular, and in February 1925 Stanley Baldwin reconvened the Secret Service Committee of Sir Warren Fisher, Sir Eyre Crowe and Sir Maurice Hankey to report ‘on the existing organisations and their relationship to one another’, and to make recommendations ‘as to any changes which in their opinion would conduce to the greater efficiency of the system’. At their first meeting the committee decided that in reviewing SIS, MI5 and the Special Branch at Scotland Yard ‘their broad aim should be to secure greater concentration, both administrative and geographical’. They also agreed to consider ‘whether the ideal of placing the three branches under one chief is attainable’. Their first evidence was from Sinclair who bluntly described the ‘whole organisation of British Secret service’ as being ‘fundamentally wrong’. The continuation of Indian Political Intelligence (IPI) ‘as a separate entity was a farce’. MI5 ‘contained several vested interests due to the length of time which certain officers had served the department’. ‘With proper reorganisation’, he thought that MI5’s staff of thirty could be reduced to about five. Overall, he argued strongly for amalgamating SIS, the Government Code and Cypher School, IPI and MI5 ‘under one head and one roof in the neighbourhood of Whitehall’. All work ‘concerning communism and similar movements’ should be transferred from Scotland Yard to the new organisation. The Passport and Passport Control Offices could be ‘housed on the ground floor of the same building as cover, as well as for convenience’.28
Over three weeks in March 1925, the committee interviewed all the other relevant agency heads, and on 19 March brought Sinclair and Sir Wyndham Childs together to discuss a list provided by Sinclair of ‘recent examples of lack of co-operation between this Organisation [SIS], Scotland Yard and the Home Office’. They showed ‘the inefficiency and waste of time, money and labour now involved in S.S. work in general, owing to C’s Organisation, Passport Control Department, G.C.&C.S., M.I.5, I.P.I. and Scotland Yard not being under the same roof or housed so