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By Root 2478 0

‘Foreign Section’ of a new Secret Service Bureau, and over its first forty years grew from modest beginnings to a point in the early Cold War years when it had become a valued and permanent branch of the British state, established on a recognisably modern and professional basis. Although for most of this period SIS supervised British signals intelligence operations (most notably the Second World War triumphs at Bletchley Park over the German ‘Enigma’ cyphers), it is primarily a human intelligence agency.1 While this history traces the organisational development of SIS and its relations with government - essential aspects for an understanding of how and why it operated - its story is essentially one of people, from the brilliant and idiosyncratic first Chief, Mansfield Cumming, and his two successors, Hugh Sinclair and Stewart Menzies, to the staff of the organisation - men and women who served it across the world - and, not least, to its agents, at the sharp end of the work. It is impossible to generalise about this eclectic and cosmopolitan mix of many nationalities. They included aristocrats and factory workers, society ladies and bureaucrats, patriots and traitors. Among them were individuals of high courage, many of whom (especially during the two world wars) paid with their lives for the vital and hazardous intelligence work they did.

SIS did not emerge from a complete intelligence vacuum. For centuries British governments had covertly gathered information on an ad hoc basis. In the seventeenth century successive English Secretaries of State assembled networks of spies when the country was particularly threatened, and from its establishment in 1782 the Foreign Office, using funding from what became known as the ‘Secret Service Vote’ or the ‘Secret Vote’, annually approved by parliament, employed a variety of clandestine means to acquire information and warning about Britain’s enemies.2 By the end of the nineteenth century the army and the navy, too, had intelligence-gathering branches, which processed much information acquired relatively openly by naval and military attachés posted to foreign countries.3 But, after the turn of the twentieth century, with foreign rivals (Germany in particular) posing a growing challenge to national interests, British policy-makers began to look beyond these unsystematic and unco-ordinated methods. As the Foreign Office worried about the possibility of its diplomatic and consular representatives becoming caught up in (and inevitably embarrassed by) intelligence-gathering, the notion of establishing a dedicated, covert and, above all, deniable agency came to find favour.

The Secret Service Bureau, and the subsequent Secret Intelligence Service, remained publicly unacknowledged by the British government for over eighty years and was given a formal legal basis only by the Intelligence Services Act of 1994. The fact that a publicly available history of any sort has been commissioned, let alone one written by an independent professional historian, is an astounding development, bearing in mind the historic British legacy of secrecy and public silence about intelligence matters. It is also an extraordinary once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (and privilege) to be appointed to write this history, though I am well aware that the fact that I have been deemed suitable to undertake it may in some eyes precisely render me unsuitable to produce an independent account of SIS’s history. But of that the reader must judge.

Part of the agreement made on my appointment was that I should have utterly unrestricted access to the Service archives over its first forty years. I am absolutely confident that this has been the case and it has been an unparalleled treat to be let loose in the archive, which is an immensely rich (though in places patchy) treasure-trove of historical materials. In addition to this access, I have also been allowed to read some post-1949 materials bearing on the history of the Service. In general, the SIS attitude to archives was that they should be kept only if they served some clear operational