The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [142]
Back at SIS Sinclair circulated a summary of the meeting to Menzies, Morton and Vivian. Vivian minuted, ‘we are up against bare faced distortions of the truth’, and Morton provided a series of comments on Anderson’s charges, broadly backing up Sinclair’s points, though he contradicted the assertion that two civil servants had been temporarily employed. ‘No endeavour’, he wrote, ‘has ever been made to recruit a Civil Servant.’ A ‘private friend’ of the ‘Intermediary’ (Knight) had ‘volunteered in his spare time to collect certain information quite unconnected with his Department’, but this ‘was stopped’ and orders had been ‘given that no Civil Servant should be employed’. He confirmed that the organisation comprised only the ‘Intermediary’ and four agents, ‘and all efforts to obtain information’ were ‘confined to these five, with the negligible exception that occasionally the Intermediary hears certain scraps of information in social talk, supplementing what had already been received from the four agents’. Morton also confirmed Sinclair’s answer about Knight’s alleged membership of the British Fascisti, though the detail of the answer is open to question and perhaps Morton himself had been misled on this point. Knight had certainly been a member of the British Fascists, serving as Assistant Chief of Staff of the organisation as well as its Director of Intelligence. Whatever political views he had held at the time, in the early 1950s Knight claimed that he had joined the Fascists at Makgill’s request in 1924, merely ‘for the purposes of obtaining information’, and had remained a member until 1930 ‘when it more or less became ineffectual’.43
Relations between SIS and Special Branch took another dip in the spring of 1931 when Bigham unilaterally decided to dispense with the services of the officer who had jointly run the two agencies’ registries for the previous two years. Sinclair thought this ‘a retrograde step calculated to destroy a valuable system, built up, not without difficulty, for the purpose of implementing the recommendations of the Cabinet Secret Service Committee’. After Bigham had refused to reconsider his action, Sinclair complained to Vansittart, noting that he would ‘endeavour to continue to co-operate with Scotland Yard, but if trouble arises in connection with any failure of such co-operation, I must decline to be held responsible for it’. In the light of this serious breakdown in relations, the Secret Service Committee (now comprising Anderson, Fisher, Hankey and Vansittart) was reconvened ‘to discuss the difficulties which had arisen in the inter-relation between C’s organisation and Scotland Yard’. Bigham and Carter told the committee ‘that S.S.1 (Captains Miller and Liddell) was superfluous and their work in so far as it was necessary could be done by Colonel Carter himself ’. They also regarded the section ‘as being an outpost of C’s organisation and liable to involve Scotland Yard in difficulties’.44
After the committee’s first meeting, Vansittart bravely organised a party for its members, as well as Scotland Yard and SIS people, which Sinclair afterwards thought had succeeded ‘in clearing the air a bit’. Bigham and Carter, however, remained adamant that Miller and Liddell had to go. Sinclair, who saw them as ‘experts in considering foreign subversive movements in relation to affairs at home and on a much broader and more important basis than that open to the Police side of Special