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trained and equipped six agents with wireless sets in Norfolk, Suffolk, Sussex, Somerset, Cornwall and Devon, deployed mobile signals units across home commands and successfully ran a war game code-named ‘Plan 333’. This had ‘produced good signalling and 76% deciphered messages’. The network was eventually extended to include twenty-four ‘head agents’ with wireless sets. Recruitment was specially restricted to ‘people who, by the nature of their occupation, could remain in enemy controlled territory and continue their normal occupations without arousing undue suspicion’, such as ‘doctors, dentists, chemists, bakers and small shopkeepers’, all of whose jobs required them ‘either to move around in the course of their professional duties or to receive many visits from other people’. As one of his last acts while head of Section D, Colonel Grand also recruited some eighty saboteurs and supplied them with secret dumps of equipment and devices. Finally, in case the worst came to the worst (and echoing similar arrangements being discussed for the royal family), plans were prepared to relocate a skeleton SIS headquarters to Canada.

Organising potential stay-behind communications was not just a technical matter, but also involved the human problems of recruiting suitable agents. This, in turn, revealed some extraordinary preconceptions. Towards the end of September 1940 the Director of Military Intelligence reported that ‘M.I.6’ - evidently Gambier-Parry - was very pessimistic about the possibilities in Iceland, the Faroes and Shetland as ‘ethnologically, the peoples of all these Islands are far too primitive and unintelligent to master even the simplest methods of handling W/T, and the introduction of alien inhabitants would, of course, attract attention at once’. The Orkneys, he conceded, ‘might conceivably be a trial worth making, but my Admiralty contacts give me little hope, even there, of finding the right man’.

There were further headquarters changes in 1942, partly in response to criticism from customer departments. In February 1942 it was agreed that each armed service Director of Intelligence would ‘appoint a senior officer’ to SIS to act as a Deputy Director, who would ‘work in close concert with a Deputy Director to be appointed by “C” from among his existing staff’. Each of these officers was to ‘represent the particular needs of his own Service director’, and together they would ‘formulate plans with a view to improving the S.I.S. Service material, under the direction of “C”’.45 Menzies implemented this with effect from 6 March, when Colonel John Cordeaux became Deputy Director/Navy, Colonel Edward Beddington DD/Army and Air Commodore Lionel ‘Lousy’ Payne DD/Air. The intention, as Cadogan recalled three years later, was that Claude Dansey, the Assistant Chief, would ‘sit in with them as a Foreign Office Deputy’, evidently to ensure that political intelligence requirements were not entirely neglected in the face of the service departments’ demands. In order both to keep Foreign Office representation in SIS and to help Menzies with his administrative burdens, Cadogan sent Patrick Reilly (who had been private secretary to Lord Selborne) to Broadway to be his personal assistant.46

The SIS headquarters reorganisation of March 1942, indicating the way in which

Claude Dansey (ACSS) sidelined his rival, Valentine Vivian (DCSS).

Each of these men had intelligence experience. ‘Bill’ Cordeaux, as he was known, a career Royal Marine and keen amateur footballer, had worked in the Naval Intelligence Division since 1938. Beddington was a wise old bird, an Old Etonian cavalryman who had served in Military Intelligence during the First World War and then pursued a successful business career, ending up in the 1930s as vice chairman of the United Africa Company (later part of Unilever). In September 1940 he had been brought out of retirement by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir John ‘Jack’ Dill, an old Staff College chum, to run MI3, responsible for military intelligence on Iberia, Italy and the Balkans. This he did