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of war were becoming more complex, ‘e.g. Radar, Rockets, Jet propulsion, Atomic energy, etc’. SIS officers in the field, therefore, would have to be well briefed about the latest developments. Rushbrooke proposed that ‘a small number of specially selected, skilled scientists and technicians should join S.I.S. in order to act as technical advisers’. These individuals, moreover, ‘should be of sufficient scientific status to enable them to gain an entree when necessary to foreign academic and university scientific circles’. It was in ‘such a milieu’, he argued, ‘that early information of interesting developments may be obtained’.23

While the Bland Report was being considered, the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee commissioned Cavendish-Bentinck and Denis Capel-Dunn, the JIC secretary, to prepare a study on ‘The Intelligence Machine’. Like Bland, Cavendish-Bentinck and Capel-Dunn stressed the need for the ‘strongest possible Secret Service in peace’, but they also argued that only one agency should be responsible for counter-espionage, and that, since scientific and technical intelligence was likely to be of the highest priority, SIS should concentrate on this specific target. This clearly reflected the armed service departments’ intelligence priorities, as did their proposal that the whole intelligence machine should be co-ordinated by the JIC, under the general direction of the Chiefs of Staff. They further suggested that there should be a Central Intelligence Bureau, headed by the Chief of SIS, which would gather and collate material from all existing intelligence sources.24 Menzies, however, objected to this. He felt that the JIC should remain a non-executive and co-ordinating body, overseeing the whole machinery of intelligence. ‘It was’, he claimed, ‘quite impracticable for a consultative committee of this kind to wield any executive authority over organisations that had executive functions.’ As the head of an intelligence-gathering agency, he also thought it wrong that he should head the proposed Central Intelligence Bureau, a consumer organisation. In fact, something of the Bureau concept was established when, without involving SIS or Menzies, in August 1945 the Chiefs of Staff set up a Joint Intelligence Bureau to take over (primarily from the Ministry of Economic Warfare) the collection and study of information on transportation, defences, airfields and various economic subjects.

Although Cavendish-Bentinck was associated with both the Bland Report and the JIC study, the two papers broadly embodied different conceptions of how SIS, in both organisation and function, might fit into the wider government framework. The JIC paper reflected the operational, technical and scientific priorities of the armed services, which, moreover, dominated intelligence requirements in wartime. By contrast, the Bland conclusions embodied the longer-term, more political needs of the Foreign Office, which tended to be more apparent in peacetime. At the command level throughout the war (as had been the case in 1914-18), SIS was under continual pressure to integrate its organisation and activities into the military machine. For the most part, arguing both security considerations and a sustained obligation to gather political as well as military intelligence, the Service resisted these attempts to erode its autonomy, although in some places (notably South-East Asia Command) it was unable fully so to do. What the Cavendish-Bentinck and Capel-Dunn paper represented was an attempt at the highest level, once victory was in sight, to ensure that the peacetime organisation of ‘the intelligence machine’ largely matched the wartime needs of the service departments and their particular perceptions of what intelligence was about. Why this attempt failed was in part down to superior Whitehall footwork by the Foreign Office as opposed to the service ministries; but it also reflected the anticipated peacetime intelligence requirements. It may also indicate a more profound British uneasiness with military and potentially militarised organisations which