The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [287]
Counter-intelligence
Beyond the signals intelligence and technical branches of the Service, the department which grew most dramatically during the war was the counter-intelligence or security Section V. Before the outbreak of the war it had comprised three officers: Valentine Vivian, who had run the section since its creation in 1925, an assistant, and Colonel Felix Cowgill, who began work in March 1939, apparently ‘on the understanding that he might in due course expect to succeed Vivian, aged 52, as the anti-Communist expert’.8 Cowgill, the son of a missionary, came from the Indian Police where he had served as personal assistant to Sir David Petrie when he had been Director of the Delhi Intelligence Bureau. It had become apparent in the 1930s that the Germans were targeting SIS networks abroad and before the war two Section V officers were posted overseas: one to Brussels and Rodney Dennys, who had been sent to The Hague in 1937. Dennys later claimed that ‘after Cowgill’s arrival he, rather than Vivian, became the driving force’ of the section and ‘it was almost entirely due to his initiative, drive and abilities that Section V not only grew rapidly in size and efficiency, but also was the one H.O. section that really had a finger on the pulse of its sub-organisations in the various Theatres of war’.
Allowing for some special pleading on the part of a former Section V officer about the excellence of his branch, its expansion was certainly impressive. By 1945 it had 163 officers, three times the size of any other single Head Office branch, apart from Gambier-Parry’s mammoth Section VIII. In addition, Section IX, which was created in May 1943 to take on the study of Communism and Soviet espionage (which the focus on Germany had caused to be largely neglected), numbered thirty-two officers by Victory in Europe Day, making a grand total of 195 SIS counter-intelligence officers at the end of the war. The growth of Section V was stimulated not only by its counter-intelligence work, but also by the fact that from the end of 1940 Menzies entrusted Cowgill with the security of GC&CS signals intelligence material which was beginning to come on stream and which came to be known as ISOS. Having its own officers in stations abroad with their own cypher communications, this section became something of a service within the Service, arousing some resentment of its position and the resources it absorbed. The high seriousness, moreover, with which Cowgill took his responsibilities over the precious ISOS (and related) material, which was vital both for counter-intelligence and later deception operations, and the extremely tight restrictions which he imposed on its distribution, caused some friction, both within the Service and in its relations with other bodies, MI5 above all.
The expansion of Section V was initially assisted by its sister service. In June 1941, for example, MI5 approved an SIS request to release staff for the section, though not without some internal dissent. ‘Its work is so essential to our Service’, minuted one MI5 officer, ‘that . . . we are fully justified in making this sacrifice.’9 There was, however, a strong and growing feeling in MI5 that SIS had no business trespassing in what was essentially MI5’s primary concern. On 17 April 1942, Sir David Petrie, now head of MI5, while assuring Menzies that he wrote ‘with the single purpose of doing better a most important job’, made a bid to take over Section V altogether. He sent Menzies a paper arguing for the amalgamation of Section V with B Division of MI5, which was responsible for investigating all threats to security. His case was founded on ‘the basic desirability, or indeed, necessity, of handling a single subject as a whole instead of in two parts. The German espionage organisation’, he declared, ‘does not recognise our artificial divisions of a home and a foreign