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future organisation of the S.I.S.’. Bland was at the time ambassador to the Netherlands government-in-exile. Having first been posted to The Hague in September 1938, he had had the disagreeable task of fielding the diplomatic fall-out from the Venlo incident in 1939, an experience which could have prejudiced him against SIS. But he was already well acquainted with intelligence matters, as in the 1920s he had been private secretary to five successive permanent under-secretaries, and had been secretary to the Secret Service Committee in the 1920s. The other two members of the committee were Loxley, Bland’s successor in that crucial private secretary position, and Victor ‘Bill’ Cavendish-Bentinck, who had been chairman of the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee since the beginning of the war. The surviving documentation confirms that Loxley was the key member of the group. He acted as secretary and prepared the text of the report, which among other things addressed all the issues he had raised in his original letter to Menzies. Bland told Cadogan that the ‘principal credit’ for the report was due to Loxley, who was no doubt also responsible for the lightly ironical tone which suffuses parts of the text. From the very start the committee worked ‘in conjunction with “C”’, and Loxley circulated drafts not only to his fellow committee-members, but also to Menzies at SIS.7

The Bland Report – ‘Future Organisation of the S.I.S.’ – which was completed in October 1944, is a crucial document in the history of the Service. Despite the vicissitudes which SIS had suffered thus far during the war, its continued autonomous existence was powerfully embedded in the report. Its findings formed the basis for the organisation of the Service as it emerged after 1945. And if, as seems to have been Loxley’s intention, the report was designed as a pre-emptive strike, seeking to establish the Foreign Office vision of SIS’s future role and relationship with the rest of government, then it was outstandingly successful. Menzies, too, could hardly have hoped for a more favourable result. Summarising the ‘cardinal points’ of the report for Cadogan, Bland stressed first that SIS and GC&CS ‘must always remain under the direction’ of the Foreign Secretary. Second was the conclusion that ‘no secret organisation should again be allowed to operate abroad’, except under the direction of SIS. Thus was SOE’s future decided (at least by the Foreign Office). Bland further proposed that SIS ‘must start to build up a really secret organisation behind its existing, much too widely known, façade’, and the report also included a remarkably forthright and positive manifesto for the future role of the Service, embodying an assumption that in the postwar world human intelligence would be of enhanced importance:

S.I.S., however costly, is far the cheapest form of insurance in peace time against defeat in war, but to be effective it must be efficient. It can only be efficient if staffed with the best men we can get. We can only hope to get the best men if we can offer them first class pay and prospects. We must never again try to run the S.I.S. on the starvation level of the lean years between 1920 and 1938. It is necessary to emphasise the importance of an efficient S.I.S. now more than ever, inasmuch as it seems unlikely, in the light of developments in cyphering, that we can count indefinitely on obtaining the bulk of our most valuable and secret information through the G.C. & C.S.8

The opening section of the ‘Bland Report’, which laid the basis for the postwar Service.

The report itself is a substantial thirty-eight-page document, in which all aspects of the Service were considered. Recruitment, as Bland had indicated in his letter to Cadogan, was fundamental to its success, but it was also ‘the most difficult of all the problems that at any time face C. If . . . the S.I.S. does not succeed in attracting the right men, first-class results cannot possibly be forthcoming.’ Good pay was essential, and the prewar practice of seeking recruits ‘among men with private means