The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [281]
PART FIVE
WINNING THE WAR
14
The tide turns
SIS grew spectacularly during the war. This is reflected in a summary of SIS’s wartime accounts drawn up by Paymaster Sykes in June 1945. Sykes broke down the total sums into three main sub-divisions: ‘S.S.’ (secret service), GC&CS (signals intelligence) and ‘Section 8’ (Gambier-Parry’s technical branch). In 1940-1 the total expenditure was just over a million pounds, with ‘S.S.’ spending £889,000 (as opposed to £117,000 in the mid-1930s), GC&CS £79,000 and Section VIII £111,000. Three years later secret service spending had increased more than threefold to £2,828,000 and Section VIII’s fivefold to £569,000, but GC&CS’s had risen over sixteenfold, to £1,302,000. Numbers of personnel had increased commensurately. In April 1939 there had been forty-two officers in SIS (of whom fifteen were special operations – Section D, later hived off into SOE) and fifty-five secretaries. At the beginning of 1944 SIS had 837 people working at headquarters: 307 officers and 530 secretaries, as well as an unknown number of other support staff, including janitors, cooks and cleaners. Section VIII and the Radio Security Service had 190 officers and 4,783 other ranks (which included wireless operators abroad), while GC&CS had a total of 7,847. As for SIS personnel abroad (excluding the Mediterranean Command, for which figures were not available), there were 253 officers and 322 secretaries.1 These figures do not include numbers of agents, which are effectively incalculable. In 1946, for example, Menzies, evidently including anyone who served even in the most minor capacity, claimed that during the war ‘we had 25,000 French agents working with S.I.S. and the D.G.E.R.’ (the French secret service).2
Headquarters reorganisation
The growing size and responsibility of SIS continued to put pressure on its administrative structures. Following the 1942 reforms, when the service Deputy Directors had been brought in and the production side tidied up, further changes were made in the spring of 1943. Partly to improve liaison with the War Office, and partly to ease his administrative load, Menzies had his old friend General Sir James Marshall-Cornwall transferred from SOE to SIS and appointed Assistant CSS on 29 March. The intention was that he should understudy Claude Dansey (who had been redesignated Vice CSS in October 1942), and act for him in his absence. Marshall-Cornwall, who had served in the Intelligence Corps during the First World War and had been military attaché in Berlin from 1928 to 1932, remained as ACSS for the rest of the war but his time at SIS does not, on the whole, seem to have been particularly happy. It was apparently intended that he should relieve the sixty-seven-year-old Dansey of some of his burdens, assuming responsibility for his territorial concerns across Europe. He took over the supervision of Mediterranean stations, but Dansey held on to his French operations. In the careful words of Robert Cecil (who succeeded Patrick Reilly as Menzies’s personal assistant at the end of September 1943), writing long afterwards: although ‘showing signs of wear’, ‘“Uncle Claude” remained sufficiently himself to resist intrusion into the secrets of the networks he was developing in France in anticipation of D-Day’.3 Marshall-Cornwall, too, had a tendency to bypass existing arrangements, which upset the occasionally somewhat Byzantine SIS chains of command. Both John Bruce Lockhart in Bari and Harold Gibson in Istanbul grumbled about his ‘interference’. The former told Cuthbert Bowlby that Marshall-Cornwall’s ‘complete