The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [210]
Whatever Menzies’s improved relations with the Joint Planning Staff and the War Cabinet Secretariat, the armed services continued to complain about the supply of intelligence from SIS. This was very evident from the March 1941 Secret Service Committee meeting which Cadogan specifically called ‘to ascertain whether the Directors of Intelligence had any points to make in regard to the operation of the Secret Service’. Inevitably they had. Their first concern was the likelihood of a German invasion of Britain. Although information from air reconnaissance and interception was ‘improving’, there was ‘still a lack of up-to-date information from agents’. ‘A good deal of intelligence of a somewhat vague and general character’ had been provided, but the War Office ‘were greatly exercised over the impossibility of obtaining exact information from ports in regard to the date and hour of the departure of invasion forces’. Menzies said that the main difficulty concerned communications. In the first place there was the problem of getting agents into occupied Europe. He reported that the Air Ministry ‘were doing their best’ and that he was ‘in touch with’ the Admiralty regarding ‘the provision of suitable craft’. As for the organisation on the ground, in Belgium it was ‘working satisfactorily’ and he hoped ‘in a month or two’ to have a large number of wireless sets operating in France. There were problems in Norway ‘owing to the indiscretion of Norwegian agents’, but good information was coming from Stockholm. Holland was ‘the weakest spot’, and there was ‘obstruction’ from the Dutch government-in-exile. In the Balkans Menzies said that the German occupation of Romania and Bulgaria had severely disrupted the flow of intelligence. Regarding Greece and Albania, ‘preparations had been made against an eventual overrunning of those countries’, but he warned that it ‘was not possible to guarantee that these plans would work in practice’.
Charged with the ‘inadequacy’ of information from Italy, Menzies said that ‘the greatest difficulty arose out of the disappearance of French information’, but asserted that his relations with the Vichy French Deuxième Bureau ‘were improving and he hoped to get more from that source’. Attention was also drawn to ‘the lack of reliable information from American contacts’ (presumably from diplomatic missions across German-occupied Europe). For much of the meeting the best Menzies could do was proffer vague promises that the position would get better. Regarding America he was ‘hopeful of improvement’. Information ‘had hitherto been difficult to obtain from North Africa’, but ‘the situation was now developing satisfactorily through the installation of W/T sets in Tunis’. Information about troop movements in Russia ‘was coming through better’, and ‘steps had been taken to improve the transmission of information from the Far East, but this again presented very great difficulties’. Responding to criticisms that ‘nothing whatever had been received form German ports’ about the movements of the German navy, Menzies said this was ‘largely’ due to the lack of wireless communication, ‘which had not been as fully developed before the war as it is now’.
All through the meeting Menzies had clearly been on the defensive, but right at the end he drew attention to the difficulties SIS faced arising from the ‘creation and expansion’ of special operations whose interests, ‘in many respects, ran counter to his own’. There was a question of ‘priorities, competition for agents, communication, transport, passages, etc.’. Menzies got the committee to agree that Cadogan should put up a recommendation to the Foreign Secretary and ‘if necessary’ the Cabinet, urging that intelligence should ‘always be given priority’ over special operations work.33 Although