The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [200]
There were problems, too, with the processing of information. There was a tendency on the part of the Service Liaison Sections simply to pass on raw intelligence to their customer departments, without comment or any assessment of the material’s reliability. By contrast, Malcolm Woollcombe and the Political Section collated information before forwarding it to the Foreign Office, and ‘made a point of eliminating all items of doubtful credibility or minor importance’. Apart from the fact that SIS was apparently better able to provide the kind of intelligence favoured by the Foreign Office, this procedure also appears to have contributed to the higher reputation the Service maintained with that department. On the other hand, the elimination or discounting of information believed to be unreliable or of only secondary importance could contribute to a situation where the Service was providing its customers with information about the world as the customers believed it to be, rather than necessarily the real picture. This was the nub of the producer-consumer dilemma which is a constant concern for any intelligence organisation and which for SIS continued throughout the war. It was constantly argued (with reason) that close co-ordination was highly desirable between the producers and the consumers of intelligence. Only then could the intelligence agencies fully understand what was required and thus meet their customers’ requirements. But if the relationship were too close, and the understanding too complete, then there was a danger that the intelligence sought and provided might merely reflect the preconceived needs of the consumers.
Whatever the potential dangers of too intimate a relationship between producer and consumer, it was clearly necessary for SIS to maintain close, if not also cordial, relations with the Foreign Office, the service ministries and the Ministry of Economic Warfare. This was also appreciated by the realists in the customer departments. One such was Admiral Godfrey, who contacted Menzies (before he had succeeded as Chief ) with what could be interpreted as a conciliatory peace-offering from a potential rival and critic. ‘I have been meaning to write to you for some time’, he wrote on 18 November, ‘about various aspects of intelligence work, which before the war I used to discuss with Admiral Sinclair.’ Noting that ‘we have a strong advocate in the First Lord’ (Churchill since September 1939), Godfrey proposed that the War Cabinet should be pressed to provide greatly increased funding for SIS: ‘The whole question is, I suppose, one of money and unless money can be made available in sufficient quantities, I doubt whether we are likely to get our intelligence.’
Having offered his support for SIS, Godfrey then provided Menzies with a list of the Admiralty’s six ‘primary needs’. First was ‘knowledge of the whereabouts of the more important German Naval units in and about German ports’. Godfrey, apparently less well informed (or less optimistic) than Menzies about the signals intelligence possibilities, argued that ‘whether or not Cryptography will ever again give us the knowledge we had of German movements in the late war’, a special effort should be put into placing agents in German ports as well as ‘in the acquisition of documents at their various Naval Headquarters and in Berlin’. Next Godfrey wanted knowledge of German shipping movements through ‘the Belts and Sound’ (the Danish islands at the entrance to the Baltic Sea) ‘and within sight of the Norwegian, Swedish and Danish coasts’. He stressed one particular interest: ‘You can well understand that information concerning the passage