The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [211]
Special operations and the creation of SOE
At the beginning of the war special operations, which comprised mostly sabotage and propaganda work, had been organised within SIS by Laurence Grand’s Section IX. But as Menzies observed to the Secret Service Committee in March 1941, the practice of ‘SO’ was frequently quite inimical to that of ‘SI’ - intelligence. Any spectacular act of sabotage, for example, was likely to provoke an intense security response from the enemy, which in turn could jeopardise the less dramatic and more sustained activities necessary for the acquisition of secret intelligence. Within SIS, moreover, the tension between special operations and intelligence was exacerbated by the personalities involved. Grand, for all his evident imagination and enthusiasm, was markedly better at ideas than administration, and there were worries about the lavish way in which he spent money on his various schemes. While in March 1940 Hankey had given him a qualified benefit of the doubt, in SIS Claude Dansey had raised the question of whether Grand should ‘conform and co-operate’ with the rest of the Service, or simply ‘go on galloping about the world at his own gait’. Cadogan was sufficiently concerned in May-June 1940 to canvass opinions about Grand and his work. Beaumont-Nesbitt, the Director of Military Intelligence, described Grand as ‘gifted, enthusiastic and persuasive, but I do not regard him as being well balanced or reliable’, and Archie Boyle of Air Intelligence said he was ‘an expensive luxury’. Gladwyn Jebb was the most damning of all. Grand’s judgment, he wrote with evident relish, ‘is almost always wrong, his knowledge wide but alarmingly superficial, his organisation in many respects a laughing stock, and he is a consistent and fluent liar’. Jebb conceded that Grand was ‘generous and liked by his staff’, but ‘to pit such a man against the German General Staff and the German Military Intelligence Service is like arranging an attack on a Panzer Division by an actor mounted on a donkey’.34
The whole question was reviewed at a high-level meeting with the Foreign Secretary at the end of June 1940 when Menzies effectively washed his hands of Grand. An informal pencilled note of the meeting gives a flavour of Menzies’s exasperation with his unbiddable subordinate: ‘“C” says responsibility too much for him. “D” [Grand] represents his own views as “C”’s. D’s great ideas. Doesn’t seek advice before putting out schemes . . . Schemes not weighed sufficiently . . . But C can’t control him.’
Over the summer of 1940 the management of British special operations was restructured. A new organisation, which emerged in September as the Special Operations Executive (SOE), was set up under Hugh Dalton, the recently appointed Minister for Economic Warfare, who (according to his memoirs) was instructed by Churchill to ‘set Europe ablaze’.35 Jebb was installed as chief executive officer of the organisation, which took over SIS’s Section IX, the rump of MIR (the special operations branch at the War Office) and responsibility for ‘subversive propaganda’. The transfer of Section IX to the new organisation was completed with such speed that it had been implemented before SIS had been formally notified. Although complaining about this, on 4 September Menzies assured Jebb that he welcomed the change and had no wish to retain responsibility for sabotage and subversive activities. Presciently, however, he noted ‘the grave disadvantage of running two sections of the secret service, with intimately interlocking interest, under two masters’. Sir Frank Nelson, who had worked for SIS in the Z Organisation in Berne, was given charge of special operations with Grand as his deputy, but, when it soon became clear that this would not work, Grand was summarily dismissed and transferred to a staff job in India.
Jebb