The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [354]
Bland stated that the ‘main task’ of the SIS was ‘to obtain by covert means intelligence which it is impossible or undesirable for His Majesty’s Government to seek by overt means’. It followed that, with the exception of some counter-espionage work conducted ‘for the better protection of its own agents’, SIS did ‘not collect intelligence for itself but for its clients’. Consequently, if waste was to be avoided, it was ‘at all times important that S.I.S. should know what its clients want’. Requirements should be clearly indicated, and an appendix to the report included Foreign Office and service ministry priorities for SIS in the postwar period. But the committee also thought – and here perhaps is evidence for Menzies’s own discreet role in the formulation of their report – that it was ‘almost equally important that consumers should not try to foist on to the S.I.S. work which it is not really the latter’s function to perform at all’.10 Consumers were ‘apt to do this in three main ways’: by asking SIS for information which, ‘at any rate in the first instance’, could be obtained overtly; ‘by putting enquiries to the S.I.S. on quite trivial matters’ (though what constituted, or who decided, what was ‘trivial’ remained undefined); and by expecting the Service ‘to perform digestive work’, summarising and collating reports, which was properly the task of the consumers.
The Bland committee wanted to sort out the relationship between the Service and its consumers. Central to this was the role of the Foreign Office and Bland recommended that the wartime innovation of seconding a member of the Foreign Office as personal assistant to C should be continued after the war. This official would handle all liaison matters between the two departments, and a second Foreign Office representative would be attached to Major Woollcombe’s Political Section to deal with the transmission of SIS intelligence to the Foreign Office. The committee similarly thought that the policy of appointing senior service representatives to SIS should be continued (though not as deputy directors, but as senior naval/military/air representatives). Bland argued that ‘the ideal arrangement would be attained’ if these officers were ‘of high reputation’ and if it were understood that their career prospects would be enhanced by secondment to SIS.
Turning to the matter of SIS representation abroad, the committee pondered the various arguments for the Service operating under diplomatic or independent business cover. It had been suggested to the committee that, with or without the knowledge of the company concerned, SIS could recruit employees of British firms operating in foreign countries, or ‘suitable Chairmen of British Companies’ could be asked ‘to provide cover in their offices abroad for regular S.I.S. personnel’. In the former instance the committee worried about possible conflicts of interest, and in the latter it thought that ‘such obliging Chairmen are likely to be few’. While the committee were considering this matter, Claude Dansey wrote to Peter Loxley that he had been hearing ‘on all sides that everyone is recommending the use of “Big Business” for S.I.S. in the future’. Dansey was scathing about the possibilities and sent Loxley a memorandum about his difficulties with ‘Big Business’ before the war. ‘The plain truth’, he asserted, ‘is that the men in Big Business can never see beyond their own financial interests’ and would not directly help SIS. From the war itself, he asked, could anyone ‘quote an instance’ of any firm which had ‘ever delivered [a] drawing of machine tools – something which was