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was well aware of the need for the ‘friendly co-operation of C’ if special operations were to function efficiently, and he acknowledged potential clashes of interest, observing that ‘a project may quite possibly be good for purposes of Subversion, but bad for purposes of Intelligence’, and that there might be competition for transport and communications resources. To mitigate these, in an ‘Agreement between C [Menzies] and D [Nelson]’ (drafted by Jebb on 15 September 1940) he laid down at the start that all of SOE’s cypher communications would run through SIS, that intelligence collected by SOE would be passed on to SIS, and that SIS approval would be sought when engaging agents. All of these matters were to cause friction between SIS and SOE over the next few years, exacerbated by the exponential expansion of SOE under the dynamic leadership of Dalton, Jebb, Nelson and Lieutenant Colonel Colin Gubbins (who had been appointed Director of Operations), and at a time, at least initially, when SIS itself had few successes of its own.

During 1940 and early 1941 more or less satisfactory relations between SIS and SOE were maintained between Menzies’s liaison officer, Colonel E. E. Calthrop (a wheelchair-bound multiple sclerosis sufferer who had won a Military Cross in the First World War), and Frank Nelson, who was unfailingly courteous and collegial. SOE, nevertheless, complained about an incident of line-crossing in Lisbon (which was actually Claude Dansey’s fault, when in seeking to co-operate with special operations he allowed them to contact an existing SIS agent), while SIS complained of insecure behaviour by an SOE officer in Stockholm, planned sabotage jeopardising liaison relations in Finland and a risk of compromise over signals intelligence. A weekly meeting was organised between Jebb, Nelson and Menzies, but towards the end of April 1941 Admiral Godfrey at Naval Intelligence weighed in with a memorandum on the division of interests between SIS and special operations. He stressed how dependent the navy was on SIS intelligence and asserted that SIS operations in several countries were being damaged by SOE’s attempts to create sabotage organisations ‘with untrained personnel’, and he wanted a Chiefs of Staff directive embodying a general principle that ‘the collection of Intelligence in regard to the enemy and the safeguarding of the means of collecting this Intelligence in the future must have priority over other subversive activities’. But Menzies (as was his way), rather than seeking a ruling from supposed higher authority, accepted a solution offered by Claude Dansey to arbitrate between the two services on condition that both Chiefs gave him their ‘entire confidence’.

Dansey, who had the reputation of being a poor team player, set the position out in a clear-sighted and perhaps unexpectedly constructive memorandum to Menzies on 1 May 1941. ‘We have to face the fact’, he wrote, ‘that S.O.2 [SOE] lives and grows - at an astonishing rate - seemingly without any governing factor as far as finance goes, and that whether we like it or not they do become in a sense competitors,’ for example in the fields of communications, material and transport, and ‘above all’ in the limited supply of potential agents. ‘If we cannot kill [it], and I do not think we can let us for [the] sake of work and war effort try to live on & work on friendly terms. I for one counsel Collaboration.’ Menzies and Nelson accepted Dansey’s recommendation that the heads of the Geographical sections in both organisations should keep constantly in touch with each other to ‘settle questions to mutual satisfaction’, and any unresolvable differences should be referred to Dansey for a final decision. 36 Good relations between the two agencies were also assisted by Air Commodore Archie Boyle (the Air Ministry’s candidate for Chief of SIS in 1939) who was appointed SOE’s Director of Intelligence and Security in June 1941, a job he kept for the rest of the war. In September he and Dansey took charge of the circulation of all information from SIS to SOE. There