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the better.’ Commenting generally on the particular importance of counter-espionage in wartime, the committee noted that it was ‘a branch of activity which demands, when at its height, heavy expenditure on staff, card indices and other records’ and ‘it would be a great mistake if the main branch of the S.I.S. were to be handicapped after this war through the expenditure on counter-espionage work not being ruthlessly pruned when it is no longer of major importance’. There was, moreover, a potentially difficult political dimension with counter-espionage work, and in an early draft of the report Bland firmly recommended that SIS ‘should not direct its energy to investigating the activities of political organisations’, such as ‘Communists, Anarchists, &c . . . unless specially directed to do so, and then only for such time as may be considered absolutely necessary’.12 The committee also recognised that there was much ‘duplication and overlapping’ in this area between SIS and MI5, and it was ‘grossly wasteful to have two separate bodies covering so much of the same ground’. They therefore recommended that ‘at an early date’ there should be a separate inquiry into the division of responsibilities between the two agencies.

Counter-espionage was an area which the committee thought was ‘always likely to be a fruitful field for collaboration’ between SIS and secret services in other countries. During the war there had been very close contact between SIS and ‘the secret services of our Allies’, with the result that those services were ‘now all very familiar with the personnel and to some extent the methods of the British S.I.S. This may not matter to-day,’ reflected Bland; ‘but we do not consider that it is a state of affairs which should be allowed to prevail for a day longer than is necessary once the war is over.’ The committee did not support ceasing all collaboration with Allied secret services as after the war it could ‘yield good fruits’. They felt, moreover, that ‘token open collaboration with the secret services of other countries may serve to conceal the fact that our real energies have been diverted to other channels’. Collaboration (or ‘liaison’ as it came to be known) ‘should only occupy a small part of S.I.S.’s energies’, which should primarily be directed towards developing an entirely self-sufficient ‘postwar organisation whose methods and personnel and other secrets should be entirely unknown to any foreign secret service’. Reflecting, among other things, continuing assumptions about Britain’s future status as an autonomous Great Power, the committee affirmed that ‘it is upon itself, and upon no one else, that the S.I.S. should in the main rely’.

Bland also addressed the tricky topic of special operations. Noting that SOE’s ‘present activities’ were not within their terms of reference, the committee somewhat disingenuously reported that they ‘therefore thought it wiser not to ask any members of the Organisation to appear before us’. But having consulted quite a few other people, including departmental heads in the Foreign Office, as well as ‘certain Service representatives’, they observed that it was ‘impossible to conduct any enquiry into the S.I.S. without coming across numerous examples of the harmful impact upon it of the present existence of a second, independent secret organisation functioning in the same fields’. The report therefore decided it to be ‘inconceivable that there should exist in peace-time any secret organisation operating in foreign countries that is not responsible to the Foreign Secretary’; that SOE should be wound up as an independent organisation; and that such special operations functions as it was thought appropriate to retain should be managed by SIS.

This had been the Foreign Office view for some time. In December 1942 Cadogan had written to Charles Hambro at SOE, explaining that the Foreign Secretary had ‘firmly concluded’ that after the war there would not be room for two secret services, and that no clandestine organisation would be allowed to operate on the Continent except under