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By Root 2513 0

with commercial firms. One such was the majority state-owned Anglo-Persian Oil Company (forerunner of British Petroleum). In July 1931 Vivian had suggested to Morton that Anglo-Persian, with its global reach, might be a valuable source of information, especially about non-British oil concerns. Colonel H. E. Medlicott, head of Anglo-Persian’s Security Branch, agreed in principle that the company might co-operate with Morton, but told Vivian that it would be much easier if ‘this was divorced from [the] great secrecy of Secret Service’. Even while it remained part of SIS, Morton’s Centre had a very fruitful relationship with Anglo-Persian, over the next three years producing a stream of reports (mostly on Soviet Russia and Germany), which were circulated through a sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence. Under Morton the IIC developed a distinctive and autonomous existence which led Sinclair in October 1934 to separate it from SIS. Morton ceased to be a member of the Service and Major Humphrey Plowden took over as head of Section VI. The IIC became a customer of SIS, and Sinclair laid down that Plowden was ‘to work with the I.I.C. along the same lines as other circulating sections work with the government departments which they serve’.

Although the Passport Control cover which SIS representatives enjoyed between the wars had considerable practical benefits, especially in terms of funding, by the early 1930s it was beginning to become threadbare in places. Perhaps surprisingly, Sinclair seems not to have been very concerned about this. Responding in March 1934 to a complaint from the Director of Naval Intelligence about the nature of Steptoe’s real duties in China being ‘so widely known’, Sinclair blandly remarked that he did not think ‘this really matters very much, as the activities of our Passport Control Officers all over the world are perfectly well known’. A concern for deniability, nevertheless, seems to have been part of the motivation in the expansion of United Kingdom-based agents, of whom there was a gradual increase during the 1930s, and also the creation of the Z Organisation in 1936. This was an agent-running department for obtaining intelligence on Germany and Italy set up by Sinclair under the able but extremely acerbic Claude Dansey. Dansey, who had worked for Mansfield Cumming between 1917 and 1919, had rejoined the Service to be head of the Rome station in April 1931, where he remained until March 1936. Sinclair’s idea with the Z Organisation was to keep it entirely separate from the existing SIS structure, hoping that in the event of war it might have more chance of operating successfully than any of the existing networks.

Dansey set up his headquarters in Bush House, on the Aldwych, with business cover as the Export Department of Geoffrey Duveen & Co. One of his first officers, Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Cohen, a retired naval officer who had specialised in torpedo duties (when he may have come to Sinclair’s notice), was a Staff College graduate and spoke good Russian, French and German. In 1937 he was ‘interviewed anonymously by arrangement in my car on The Mall’, by a ‘Mr Mansfield’, who turned out to be Dansey. Cohen afterwards described Dansey as ‘a “copybook” secret service man. Dapper, establishment, Boodles [Club], poker-playing expression, bitterly cynical, but with unlimited and illogical charm available, particularly for women’.31 The organisation operated entirely under business cover and Dansey exploited his and Sinclair’s contacts in the business and commercial world to infiltrate and/or enlist people to work for them. Although the idea of a new, and more secure, wing of the Service was, perhaps, sound, the execution of the scheme left something to be desired. Recruitment appears to have been done just as haphazardly as for SIS in general, and training was rudimentary. One officer was engaged straight from Cambridge University, given a short briefing on military requirements and sent to Vienna, ostensibly working for a film company but actually to report on German order of battle