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Concerns about security also contributed to a situation where SIS’s role in providing intelligence was not always acknowledged when customer departments used it in their own reports. The issue surfaced early in August 1940, after Anthony Eden (the Secretary of State for War) had complained in Cabinet that he was getting ‘no information from France’ and Churchill had received a report from General Spears, his personal representative with General Charles de Gaulle, of a Free French agent’s visit to Brittany (which had actually been organised by SIS). De Gaulle had escaped to London in June 1940 and assumed leadership of the Free French movement. Churchill sent for Menzies and ‘dressed him down roundly for his failure to produce more information from German-occupied territories’. When Menzies retorted that ‘a very fair amount of information was in fact obtained’, Churchill suggested ‘that there was a conspiracy to keep this from him’ and directed Menzies to ‘send copies of all such reports’ directly to Major Morton for submission to him. Menzies responded almost immediately with a batch of reports which Morton appreciatively told him on 18 May were ‘exactly the sort of thing I want to see’. More importantly, perhaps, the Prime Minister ‘was very grateful for the information’. Menzies also had to keep the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, sweet and, ‘in order to avoid the Prime Minister producing some titbit of information at the Cabinet culled from an S.I.S. report which the Foreign Secretary has never heard of ’, he promised to keep him fully informed as well.26

This was the origin of the system whereby for the rest of the war Menzies himself personally supplied Churchill with raw intelligence, while also sending SIS reports to Desmond Morton at No. 10 Downing Street. But, as Menzies recalled afterwards, from now on ‘a small red box’, of which only he and the Prime Minister had the keys, ‘was deposited on the latter’s bed each morning, within it all relevant reports, and intercepts obtained by G.C. & C.S., over the previous 24 hours’. A September 1940 note by Churchill’s principal private secretary, Eric Seal, more prosaically recorded that the daily boxes ‘from “C”’ were ‘to be put on the Prime Minister’s desk and left for him to re-lock’. The boxes were marked ‘“only to be opened by the Prime Minister in person”. This marking’, added Seal, ‘is not mere camouflage and is to be taken seriously.’ However precisely they were supplied, in time these boxes contained material from Britain’s single most valuable intelligence source - the German Enigma decrypts - which in turn contributed to the close relationship that built up between Menzies and Churchill and undoubtedly enhanced SIS’s reputation at the highest level. In the spring of 1941 Hugh Dalton (Minister of Economic Warfare) noted that Churchill regarded Menzies as ‘a wonderful fellow, and was always sending for him’.27

Liaison between the services and SIS was not just a one-way street, and SIS’s reluctance to be integrated into the central intelligence machinery could have its costs, as demonstrated by the recriminations that followed the disaster at Dakar in September 1940 when a Free French expedition, supported by a British naval flotilla, was driven back by the local French forces. The operation had been compromised by leakages from among the Free French and Poles in London.28 It had also been assumed that the Dakar garrison, and the Senegal French colonial administration, would readily come over to the Free French side, and SIS was criticised for not warning to the contrary. Menzies indignantly observed that ‘as we were not specifically asked to obtain information from the Dakar district’, he assumed that ‘the requisite data’ had been provided by ‘other sources’. He suggested that, had he been given a month’s warning, it might have been possible to provide more information about local feeling in Dakar, and in any case the Vichy authorities knew all about the plans, owing to their being public knowledge in ‘far too wide a circle’ in London.