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the SIS representative in the USA during the First World War. It has been suggested that Claude Dansey was interested in the job, but Sir Ronald Campbell, the British ambassador in Paris, having spoken to Dansey (whom he had known since 1914 and thought was ‘reliable’), told Cadogan that Dansey did ‘not want the job himself and admits that he is too old for it’ (he was sixty-three). Nevertheless, observing that Dansey had ‘worked for “C” for 25 years or so’ and ‘knows the thing inside out’, Campbell thought it might be worth while Cadogan speaking to him, which he did on 16 November when he presumably sought his views on the succession. ‘I’m sure he’s very clever & very subtle,’ wrote Cadogan in his diary afterwards, ‘but I have no proof of it because I can’t hear 10% of what he says.’8

After three weeks, Cadogan began to worry about the delay in coming to a decision. Menzies, he thought, ‘was in a difficult position, and it’s silly of everyone to go on funking Winston’. Finally, on 28 November at a meeting attended by the Prime Minister and the three service ministers, the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax ‘played his hand well and won the trick’. It was unanimously agreed that Menzies should have the job, but also that there should be ‘some enquiry’ into the organisation of the Service. The next day Halifax saw Menzies, offered him the job, urged him to ‘take an early opportunity of having a frank discussion’ with both the Air Minister and the First Lord, neither of whom was satisfied with the information their departments were getting from SIS, and told him of the proposal that ‘two members of the War Cabinet, Lord Chatfield [a former First Sea Lord, currently Minister for Co-ordination of Defence] and Lord Hankey, might be asked to go into the matter [of SIS organisation] and to give us all the benefit of their great experience’. According to one member of the Service, John Darwin, the appointment of Menzies was ‘a tremendous relief to us all. Nothing can replace old Quex but SGM has never really had a chance with such an overwhelming character as his commanding officer, during the past fifteen years.’ It is, he added, ‘wonderful to think that, after the vicissitudes of the last few weeks, we have got somebody that one can trust at the head of things’.9

Responding to customer departments

The Service ministries’ criticisms of SIS around the time of Sinclair’s death were sharpened by the very embarrassing Venlo incident of 9 November 1939 when two SIS officers, having been enticed into a meeting with what they thought were representatives of German army opposition to Hitler, were captured on the Dutch-German frontier (see chapter 11). Menzies naturally sprang to the Service’s defence, but he thought the timing of the complaints was appalling. ‘If the Service has lost the confidence of the Departments,’ he wrote to Gladwyn Jebb on 14 November, ‘it seems monstrous that those in charge have waited the departure of the Chief before launching their criticisms.’ He was clearly very anxious about the overall position of SIS and told Guy Liddell of MI5 that ‘every sort of intrigue’ was ‘going on by those who want to take over the organisation’ and that criticisms were ‘being made from every quarter from ignorant people’.10

To defend the Service’s recent work, Menzies assembled a twenty-six-page document with reports from section heads. He wished to stress, ‘with all possible emphasis, that the S.I.S. work has been carried on in enemy, or potential enemy, countries, under very great difficulties, faced as we have been, by an all-powerful and ruthless enemy contre-espionage service’. He noted that in the 1914-18 war secret service efforts to penetrate Germany had been ‘a complete failure’ (though the prewar agent TR/16 had continued to transmit reports), whereas ‘in this war, in spite of well nigh insuperable obstacles, the flow of information from inside Germany, for all Departments’ had been ‘maintained unceasingly’. He added that ‘one of our chief successes of recent years’ had been the penetration of foreign ‘Secret Services