The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [206]
If after the completion of Hankey’s report Menzies hoped for a breathing space, during which he could settle down and develop the Service to meet wartime demands, he was to be disappointed, as the dramatic German drive into Scandinavia, the Low Countries and France once more put SIS under severe pressure. On 9 April 1940 German forces invaded Denmark and Norway, swiftly occupying all of the former and much of the latter. On 23 April, Sir Samuel Hoare, the Air Minister, and the only Cabinet minister to have been an SIS officer, wrote to Hankey that he had ‘been a good deal worried by the fact that we had no serious warning from S.I.S. or other intelligence sources of the German invasion of Norway’. Hoare said that there had been some Air Intelligence reports indicating ‘that something out of the ordinary’ was taking place on 6-7 April and that these had ‘of course’ been passed on to the Admiralty and the War Office. He felt that the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee should be used to collate ‘the various reports received by the Air Ministry and by other Departments’ and comment on ‘the mass of information which is circulated to the War Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff’. This raised two issues: the acquisition of intelligence and its processing. Hankey responded quickly on both matters. He asked Menzies to comment on the first and in the meantime told Hoare he agreed that the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee should produce more complete appreciations. With a deft sideswipe at Hoare’s own ministry, however, he added that so far as assessment was concerned it was ‘the job of the Intelligence Departments of the Services’ to weigh secret service information ‘with intelligence from other sources, such as diplomatic channels and air reconnaissance’. He recalled ‘that for months past we have been receiving warnings’ of German force concentrations in Baltic ports, yet he was afraid ‘that our Service Authorities have never taken the possibility of an attack on Denmark and Norway sufficiently seriously’.21
The very next day Menzies saw Hankey and gave him a report ‘showing the information that had become available and had been sent forward prior to the Scandinavian invasion’. Hankey was ‘greatly impressed with the Note’, and passed it on to Hoare. ‘In my opinion,’ he commented, ‘S.I.S. present a cast iron case. They have given warnings which, in the aggregate, are as definite as you could expect to receive.’ He pointed out that SIS did not take responsibility ‘for forming appreciations on the material they submit. That is the job of the Service Departments . . . When S.I.S. have sent the information to the Heads of the Intelligence Departments in the Services they have done their job.’ Hankey bluntly observed that the service Directors of Intelligence had ‘to see that those responsible for plans and operations get the intelligence in the right form’, and he rather suspected ‘that that is where the fault lies’, thus placing the matter firmly back in Hoare’s departmental lap. Hankey, however, was too old a Whitehall dog needlessly to antagonise a fellow minister. ‘It may be’, he observed, ‘that intelligence and operations are not quite sufficiently linked up’, and he therefore strongly supported Hoare’s ‘idea of intelligence appreciations’.22
Hankey, nevertheless, was sufficiently concerned about the processing of intelligence that he thought the matter should be taken up with the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. He sent Menzies’s report to Sir Horace Wilson, observing that although most of the intelligence had been sent to the Directorate of Naval Intelligence ‘we did not get any warnings as far as I can