The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [289]
Petrie’s appeal to higher authority had what was presumably the desired effect in bringing Menzies round to a more accommodating position. ‘The letters you and I have exchanged . . .’, he wrote on 28 June, ‘have certainly cleared the air, and if I may say so allowed us to blow off a little steam.’ Menzies had taken the wise course of having an ‘informal talk’ with Petrie, and, having given ‘very careful thought’ to the matter, now conceded ‘that the general basis of your original proposals is logical’. Although he gracefully accepted the need for ‘a single unified body responsible for studying the activities of the enemy secret services and for co-ordinating and directing action to counter them’, he still could not accept that ‘this unified Contre-Espionage body should be divorced from my organisation and incorporated into M.I.5’. What he proposed instead was a joint section. Considerable discussion ensued into the autumn of 1942 over the details of how this might be arranged, including sharp differences of opinion about where this new body should be located, Menzies wanting it to be at the Section V base in St Albans, Petrie insisting that it should be in central London. But no joint section was ever created and by October the two services had formally agreed merely to hold regular bi-weekly liaison meetings, and even this appears to have petered out after a few months.
Yet both Petrie and Menzies had agreed on the principle of close cooperation, and Menzies’s change of attitude seems to have been important in bringing to pass what he had predicted in his first letter to Petrie, that ‘good liaison and good will should prove the solvent’. At a practical level, moreover, Section V and B Division officers actually appear to have been able to co-operate on a more or less satisfactory basis all along, despite occasional bouts of agency rivalry. Robert Cecil, for example, cited ‘first hand evidence [albeit from unspecified sources] that MI5 had full access to all relevant ISOS from the very beginning and that at the working level co-operation was good, as indeed the fruitful outcome testifies’. Relations between SIS and MI5 certainly improved markedly from late 1942, especially after Section V did move from St Albans to Ryder Street in St James’s in July 1943, which greatly facilitated personal contacts between the two agencies.11
Stewart Menzies to Peter Loxley of the Foreign Office refusing a request to transfer Kim Philby, later exposed as a Soviet agent, out of SIS. This letter demonstrates how trusted and valued Philby was by his unsuspecting Chief.
By 1943 Section V was organised into six main territorial sections – Kim Philby heading the especially important Iberian one – each responsible for counter-intelligence in specific areas across the world. There were also four specialist sections: one processing and analysing GC&CS material; another devoted to double-agent operations; a third which liaised on censorship with the various agencies concerned; and the last dealing with vetting (an important wartime innovation) and arranging facilities for agents to enter and leave the United Kingdom. The GC&CS section used ISOS to help assemble the details of enemy intelligence organisations and individuals which were collated in the purple primers. Dossiers of German intelligence personnel were prepared for the use of the armies in the field. As regards double agents, broadly speaking those run in the United Kingdom and from British military bases abroad were an MI5 responsibility, while those operating in foreign countries