The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [288]
Unsurprisingly, this proposal did not go down at all well in SIS. Vivian prepared a draft reply (which does not survive in the archive) which he did not expect Menzies ‘to approve as it stands, since I have “dipped my pen in vitriol”’. Menzies’s reply of 11 May, while not vitriolic, was a detailed, frank and robust rejection of Petrie’s case. He started with an exaggerated definition of the purport of Petrie’s proposal: ‘that Section V. of S.I.S. should be absorbed into M.I.5, [and] that you yourself as the latter’s Director General should assume exclusive control of the Section V. functions’. Petrie, furthermore, and here Menzies quoted from the MI5 paper, would have ‘the right to communicate information and to issue directives as to what was required for the proper discharge of security functions everywhere’. He cast severe doubt on MI5’s competence to carry out delicate counter-intelligence operations in foreign territories of which they had no experience. Neither he nor the Foreign Office would agree to the transfer of Section V since the intelligence it circulated was of far wider than simply security significance. It was ‘unsound’, moreover, that Menzies, ‘as the Director of the G. C. & C. S., and being acutely aware of the vital importance to the national interest of preserving the secrecy of its material as a whole, should relinquish responsibility for the treatment of any portion of its output’, or ‘any measure of control over XX agents abroad’, where SIS understood operational risks and conditions better than MI5. Past proposals for the amalgamation of SIS and MI5 (for example in 1927 and 1931), he argued, had had ‘the virtue of logic, which the present one has not’. Besides, he concluded, the dangers of separation had been exaggerated and ‘good liaison and good will should prove the solvent’.
Petrie did not take this lying down. His reply on 5 June, which had a slightly sarcastic tone, corrected the inaccuracy of Menzies’s definition of his proposals: he had not suggested that he should assume ‘exclusive’ control of Section V functions, but was merely advocating the ‘unified direction of counter-espionage as a subject’. He introduced some shrewd new arguments. Until a year before, he wrote, Section V had consisted ‘of only a handful of officers, and was in very deep water’. As a consequence it had drawn ‘considerably’ on MI5 staff: ‘Are we to accept it then that they alone are capable of handling the products of C.E. intelligence by some esoteric method outside our comprehension and competence?’ He observed that both SIS and SOE had ‘for months past been suffering serious losses of agents on the continent’ because of German penetration, and asserted that SIS was ‘not producing enough C.E. material because of “operational” claims’, and was ‘falling down over “operational” [activity] because of your neglect of C.E., so that the vicious circle is complete’. He acknowledged that amalgamation of SIS and MI5 had been rejected in the past and said that ‘speaking for myself ’ he did not favour complete amalgamation, on the (faintly odd and certainly debatable) grounds that he did ‘not believe that as a race we show to any advantage