The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [214]
Selborne took this proposal to the Cabinet, but Menzies (as before) was firmly opposed to submitting SIS to any external arbitration. What was needed, he argued, was ‘a final act of priority, which must be accepted by both services’. He made it clear, however, that such a decision could really only go one way: ‘if it is decided that S.O.E. has priority, then it must be realised, without any equivocation, that information will suffer. If I have priority, I do not think it will necessarily interfere much with S.O.E.’ At the same time as Selborne was trying to get the Cabinet to adjudicate between SIS and SOE, the Chiefs of Staff came up with a proposal to amalgamate the two organisations, with a single executive head who would be under the ‘general direction’ of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, but with ‘provision for consultation’ with the Foreign Office. This was anathema to the Foreign Office where it was argued (with Menzies’s support) that differences could be smoothed out in a fortnightly meeting presided over by Sir Alexander Cadogan.39 The efforts here of both Selborne and the Chiefs of Staff echo the service ministries’ attempts during the First World War to prise control of SIS from the Foreign Office. War inevitably sharpened the tensions between the operational military and political information sides of secret service. This was powerfully exacerbated in the early 1940s by the existence of SOE, whose rapid growth and apparent ability to strike against the enemy - at a time when British military successes were especially welcome - tended to eclipse the quieter achievements (such as they were) of SIS.
Even so, in the Whitehall battle for independence and control, SIS and the Foreign Office were able to fend off the challenges of both the military and SOE. In fact, the absence of formal decisions about the precise relationship between SIS and SOE worked markedly to SIS’s advantage. The Cabinet never resolved the question and there was no ‘final act of priority’ such as Menzies had proposed. But the Foreign Office, in a typically effortless assumption of bureaucratic superiority, was able deftly to out manoeuvre attempts by less practised Whitehall warriors to change the status of SIS. Relations with SOE continued on a comparatively amicable basis even after Nelson, who resigned suffering from exhaustion in May 1942, was replaced by the more formal and assertive Charles Hambro. While tensions continued to trouble the relationship, there is evidence that in London at least a serious effort was made on both sides to work together.
When Hambro complained in July 1942 that the information flow from SIS to SOE was insufficient, Menzies demurred. ‘Your Regional Sections’, he wrote, ‘have, for some time past, been sending down officers about once a week to their opposite Sections here and . . . in some cases entire files have been placed at their disposal . . . I do not think under the circumstances any organisation could have behaved in a more generous way than we have.’ Although Menzies was (perhaps understandably) being more emphatic on this point than was absolutely necessary, Hambro backed off with quite good grace. Having consulted his people, he found they after all confirmed Menzies’s ‘impression of an improvement in the contacts between our respective Regional and Country Sections and’, he added, ‘I am most grateful to you and to the A.C.S.S. [Dansey]’.
Whatever the day-to-day relations between SIS and SOE, by the end of 1942 the Foreign Office had firmly resolved that there was no future for SOE after the war had ended. Essentially this was a further assertion of Foreign Office primacy. ‘My Secretary of State’, wrote Cadogan to Hambro on 22 December, ‘does not consider