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close to one another that it is possible for the Officers in each Department constantly to have personal conversations with Officers in any other’. Sinclair argued that the Zinoviev Letter ‘was a classic illustration of the overlapping inevitable under the present system’. It had been discovered abroad, was addressed to the Communist Party in England, and ‘enjoined revolutionary action both in civil and military spheres’. Thus, ‘under the present arrangement of divided responsibility in the British secret service’, it concerned SIS, Special Branch and MI5. Childs had already told the committee that ‘he had never seen C in connection with the Zinoviev letter’. Sinclair ‘had not told him that he proposed to employ an agent in this country for this purpose, and the result of such employment had not been reported to him’. Sinclair’s agent, moreover, had ‘claimed to be in a position to report the proceedings at the meeting of the Central Executive Committee of the communist party at which the Zinoviev letter was considered’. But Childs firmly asserted that he ‘could prove through agents that such a meeting had never been held’.29 In this respect, Childs was right and Sinclair was wrong.

On 24 March the committee met to ‘take stock’ of the evidence so far submitted. The secretary, Nevile Bland, minuted ‘that unified direction was the ideal towards which we ought to work’ and that ‘the first step to this end was to associate the various branches in one building’, though both Sinclair and Kell strongly objected to being housed in Scotland Yard. In a subsequent note, Sir Maurice Hankey objected to the first of these conclusions, on the grounds that the connection with government departments ‘for whose benefit they were respectively established’ - Foreign Office, Home Office and so on - was more important than those between agencies. His ‘present inclination’ was ‘not, even as an ideal in the distant future, to go beyond doing everything we can to secure the closest co-ordination without altering the present balance of Ministerial and Departmental responsibility’. The committee’s pace of work slowed down over the summer of 1925. Sir John Anderson, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Home Office, who had attended all the meetings so far, was formally added to the committee in June, as was Sir William Tyrrell, who had succeeded Sir Eyre Crowe as Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office after the latter’s early death at the end of April. Evidence was taken from the service Directors of Intelligence, who expressed ‘general satisfaction with both S.I.S. and M.I.5’. While General Sir John Burnett-Stuart, Director of Military Operations and Intelligence (the Directorates of Military Operations and Intelligence having been amalgamated in 1922), declared that while ‘S.I.S. had improved enormously under “C”’, he was ‘quite content with things as they were’. He ‘would hesitate to put too much power into the hands of so energetic and capable an officer as “C”’. There was also ‘the advantage of the check which three separate organizations automatically provided on each other’s results’.30

Having commissioned a report on the Special Branch (which concluded that it required some internal reorganisation) the Secret Service Committee delivered their report in December 1925. They had ‘no hesitation in saying that if there were to-day no British secret service of any kind’ and they had been called upon to organise one from scratch, they ‘should not adopt the existing system as our model’, but would have endeavoured ‘to create a single department’. Yet ‘the heterogeneous interests, liaisons, traditions and responsibilities of the different services’, as well as the ‘marked reluctance of the majority of those concerned to advocate any drastic change’, left the committee with ‘a strong impression that an attempt to form a coalition would, if it were not an actual failure, at any rate lead to no great improvement’. Hankey’s argument about maintaining existing departmental responsibilities was accepted (for example: ‘Place the head of the Indian Political