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By Root 2671 0

the Bland committee hinted at in the concern their report expressed about public suspicions that ‘something like a Gestapo’ might have been operating in Britain. For British decision-makers, and perhaps also for the British people, part of the price of winning the war was the ostentatious rejection of those very military values and strengths which had largely made victory possible. In institutional terms, SIS, even though it embodied many military qualities and to a very great extent served the needs of the armed forces, was much more likely to survive and flourish in the postwar world as an explicitly civilian organisation under the accommodating supervision of the Foreign Office.

PART SIX

FROM HOT WAR TO COLD WAR

19

Adjusting to peace

Although the conclusions of the Bland committee in December 1944 laid out the broad principles upon which SIS was to develop in the post-war years, the assumption underlying the report that there would be a breathing space after victory had been secured during which the machinery of British intelligence (and, indeed, perhaps the country as a whole) could regroup and reorganise proved over-optimistic. The realities of the postwar world, in which renewed challenges for Britain and SIS, especially those posed by the Soviet Union, combined with national exhaustion and virtual bankruptcy, soon swept away any sense of euphoria. The unexpected change in government following the July 1945 general election, when the Conservative Party and Winston Churchill were decisively defeated by Labour under Clement Attlee, meant that SIS had a new set of political masters. Although Labour had been an integral part of the wartime coalition administration, and Attlee (among other Labour ministers) had been inducted into the existence and role of SIS, the reforming zeal which Attlee’s Cabinet brought to the whole range of government focused attention and resources on domestic matters and national reconstruction. But it also underpinned a readiness to review the postwar intelligence organisation and SIS’s place within it.

Whitehall warfare

In the summer of 1945, following one of Bland’s recommendations, Sir Findlater Stewart, who had been head of the Security Executive and a member of the XX Committee, had already begun an inquiry into the Security Service, MI5. The perennial question of whether MI5 and SIS should be merged into a single organisation was considered briefly but rejected, and Stewart produced a draft directive for MI5’s peacetime operations which confirmed that it existed solely ‘for the purposes of the Defence of the Realm’ and that its responsibilities were confined to British territory. ‘M.I.5’, wrote Stewart, ‘should continue to be responsible for obtaining “counter intelligence” in the Empire by the means used in the past. But’, he continued, ‘the acquisition of intelligence, including counter-intelligence, by secret means elsewhere, must remain a matter for S.I.S.’ Attlee (after consulting Menzies) approved the directive in April 1946, though only after his Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, had insisted that the Foreign Office’s intelligence role was formally recognised by adding a sentence to the effect that ‘on matters affecting the Foreign Office or the responsibilities of S.I.S., no action should be taken, except after consultation with the Foreign Secretary’.1

By the end of the war SIS’s relations with the Foreign Office operated on a number of levels. At the top, important policy matters were handled through regular personal contact between Menzies and the Permanent Under-Secretary, Sir Alexander Cadogan, who was succeeded by Sir Orme ‘Moley’ Sargent in February 1946. At a lower level the Permanent Under-Secretary’s private secretaries (notably Peter Loxley before his untimely death in February 1945, his successor Tom Bromley, and Aubrey Halford from the beginning of 1946 until the spring of 1949) played an important role in day-to-day contacts. From 1943 the Services Liaison Department in the Foreign Office, which came directly under the Permanent Under-Secretary,