• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2720 0

until Dill’s successor, Sir Alan Brooke (‘Brookie’ to Beddington), asked him to take on the job at SIS.47 Between the wars Payne had intermittently worked in Air Intelligence, but in 1938, threatened with appointment as the Senior Air Staff Officer in Iraq, he had resigned and become air correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. Canvassing then for an intelligence job, he had approached Vernon Kell at MI5. Kell passed him on to SIS, who rejected him as ‘not thought suitable’, though conceding that he had a ‘good brain, which he is willing to use if given time’. He also had ‘some strange friends, but is often well informed, probably due to the fact that information is more readily obtained in bed’. At the start of the war, however, he had been taken back on to the intelligence strength at the Air Ministry.

The new appointees quickly set to work and by the start of April had sketched out proposals for a headquarters reorganisation. They began by stressing that if SIS’s ‘primary duty in war-time’ was ‘the obtaining (excluding intercepting) by clandestine methods information for the Fighting Services and the Foreign Office, then its present organisation needs reconsideration, particularly if it is also accepted that such information is chiefly of use where action can be taken’. They agreed that too much of SIS’s time and resources was taken up by work for the security Section V and the economic Section VI. They proposed reducing the latter to a liaison section and curtailing the work of Section V ‘to those aspects of C.E. [counter-espionage] work on which it is possible to take action at once or at some readily foreseeable future date, or which provides positive intelligence for S.I.S.’. Another important recommendation was that the Production Branch should be combined under the four Deputy Directors, who would constitute a board with Dansey in the chair. In order to take some of the pressure of work off Menzies they also proposed ‘the decentralisation of the work of S.I.S. to Vice “Cs” in Middle East, India, Africa other than N. Africa [and] America’. They also wisely (and perhaps with the hiatus of late 1939 in mind) suggested that Menzies should designate an officer as deputy ‘to act for you in the event of your illness, or in case of your death pending a fresh appointment’.

We can, perhaps, see the hand of Dansey in these proposals, which excluded his old adversary Valentine Vivian from the Board of Deputy Directors, likely to become the key executive body in the revamped structure. Yet since there is no evidence that Menzies made any specific decision about nominating a potential successor, Vivian (who was left in charge of liaison with MI5, the Ministry of Economic Warfare, GC&CS and ‘Eire’) may have been content with his continuing status as Deputy Chief. The rest of the recommendations were implemented at the beginning of May, with each of the Deputy Directors taking responsibility for specific geographical regions, as well as retaining their primary service liaison function. Although this appeared to be a sensible tidying up of the central SIS bureaucracy, some anomalies remained. Responsibility, for example, for links with the Vichy French (Section P.5, ‘special lines known to ACSS’, under Beddington) was kept separate from the Free French (in Section P.1 under Dansey). It also remains questionable whether combining responsibility for some elements of the production and for circulation of information in individual directors was necessarily a wise move. Moreover, giving responsibility for production matters to the three service Deputy Directors certainly undermined the original intention that ‘each officer would represent the particular needs of his own Service director’ within SIS.48

Indeed, as is so often the case, these outsiders brought into SIS appear to have fallen under the seductive spell of the Service and took to defending it against their home departments. Less than a month after his appointment, Payne, for example, wrote a long and thoughtful memorandum in which he ascribed the intelligence failures of May