The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [3]
Within SIS the practice appears to have been routinely to destroy documents once their immediate relevance or utility had passed. There is plenty of internal evidence indicating this, some of which has occasionally slipped out into the public domain. In a 1935 letter to Valentine Vivian, head of the counter-espionage Section V in SIS, Oswald ‘Jasper’ Harker of MI5 remarked, ‘An old report of yours regarding a Madame Stahl has just come to light - I enclose a copy as I believe your 1920 records have been destroyed.’4 Reviewing the work of SIS in the early 1920s, one officer observed that the SIS headquarters ‘receives from its overseas branches over 13,000 different reports per annum, exclusive of correspondence about these reports and administrative matters’. He noted that ‘the mass of papers involved immediately becomes apparent’. In order to keep the volume of material under control, he added that ‘every effort is made to destroy all matter . . . not needed for reference’. The practice of clearing out old papers has also been powerfully stimulated by the fact that the organisation has moved house on some six occasions during the last century.
Over the years some documents were recognised as having real historical significance and were preserved. One such is the ‘Bethell letter’, from the Director of Naval Intelligence to Mansfield Cumming on 10 August 1909 inviting him to become (as it turned out) the first Chief of the Service.5 There has, nevertheless, been intermittent, methodical and substantial destruction of records which may, or may not, have been of historical value. But I have found no evidence that the destruction was carried out casually or maliciously, as some sort of cover-up to hide embarrassing facts about SIS’s past. The destruction has resulted more from a cultural attitude where the retention of documents in general was assessed in the light of their current (and certainly not historical) value to the Service, primarily in operational terms.
The corollary to unrestricted access to the archives has been an extremely painstaking and fastidious disclosure process. From the start (and for obvious reasons) it was laid down that the identity of any agent could not be revealed for the first time in this book. One result of this stipulation is the regrettable need (from the historian’s point of view) to omit some significant and important SIS stories, as it would not be possible to include them without providing at least circumstantial details which could potentially help identify agents. Exceptionally, however, some agents’ names do appear in the book, but each case has been subject to the most careful and rigorous disclosure criteria. Where agents have clearly named themselves (not uncommon for individuals who worked during the world wars), this has been relatively straightforward, but simply arguing that an agent’s name is ‘in the public domain’ is not in itself sufficient, as the ‘public domain’ constitutes a great range of contexts, from unsubstantiated assertions in sensationalist and evanescent publications (what might be called ‘sub-prime intelligence literature’) to serious and scholarly articles by professional historians.
Strict criteria have also been applied to the naming of SIS officers, who have served both at home and overseas. SIS have acknowledged that I may include names of officers already released in official histories and through the transfer to The National Archives of papers from other government departments with whom SIS officers naturally liaised. But I have been unable to name a number of other Service officers on national security grounds (which in some instances have overrridden the imperatives of historical