The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [197]
Despite Sinclair’s efforts, the job was no shoe-in. Horace Wilson reported that Hankey (who had been made a member of the War Cabinet in heard ‘some good opinions’. Cadogan, while making it clear both that the Foreign Secretary would make the final decision and that the post should be filled ‘with the least possible delay’, asked the three service ministries for their views. Displaying army solidarity, the War Office backed Menzies. Air put forward Major Archibald Boyle, currently Deputy Director of Air Intelligence, who had been engaged ‘on intelligence work at the Air Ministry since the last war’. Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, proposed Captain Gerard Muirhead-Gould (naval attaché in Berlin, 1933-6). But, in what Cadogan described in his diary as a ‘tiresome’ letter, Churchill also waxed eloquent both about the matter generally and about the deficiencies of SIS. ‘According to custom,’ he wrote, ‘this appointment should fall to a Naval Officer.’ During Sinclair’s ‘declining years’, he asserted, ‘very great shortcomings were experienced by the Admiralty in the service we have received’. Cryptography was ‘a blank so far as we are concerned, and has become mainly political’, and he considered that the condition of naval intelligence was currently ‘altogether inferior to what we had in the last war’. Churchill, Cadogan grumbled, ‘ought to have enough of his own to do without butting into other people’s business’.6
Although Churchill told Cadogan that he had ‘been thinking a great deal’ about the matter, and that he had been ‘most favourably impressed’ by Muirhead-Gould’s ‘characteristics, as well as by his record’, the Admiralty nomination had its odd aspects. The DNI, Godfrey, appears to have been ignored completely as a candidate. Muirhead-Gould himself had a ‘weak heart’ which disbarred him from a sea command, and in 1940 apparently led him to be posted as Captain-in-Charge at Sydney, Australia. Cadogan, moreover, received a damning report on him from a Foreign Office source who said Muirhead-Gould had not been ‘a conspicuous success’ as an attaché. He was of ‘a suspicious and slightly irascible nature which leads him to look for insults, real or imaginary’. While captain of HMS Devonshire he had acquired the nickname ‘Captain Bligh’ (of mutiny on the Bounty fame). Unexpectedly, perhaps, he was ‘an expert on petit point, to which he devotes quite a lot of his spare time’. Cadogan caustically considered this was ‘the thing most strongly in his favour’.7
Written the day before he died, Sir Hugh Sinclair’s letter recommending that Stewart Menzies should succeed him.
Who else was in the frame? An undated note in Cadogan’s handwriting lists five names. There were three generals - Robert Haining, William Bartholomew and Thomas Humphreys - who had each served September 1939) had ‘some doubts about Menzies’, and suggested that Brigadier Jasper Harker (head of MI5’s counter-espionage and counter-subversion division) might have to be considered, as well as Admiral John Godfrey (the Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI)), of whom he had
as Director or Deputy Director of Military Operations and Intelligence; Lord Davidson, former chairman of the Conservative Party and a long-time confidant of Stanley Baldwin, who would have been regarded as a safe pair of hands; and Sir William Wiseman,