• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2799 0

dealt with military planning and co-ordinating bodies, such as the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee and the Joint Planning Staff.2 Cavendish-Bentinck headed this department and was also chairman of the JIC until July 1945 when he was succeeded by Harold Caccia. Caccia, in turn, was followed in the autumn of 1946 by William Hayter, who served until the end of 1949, by which time the Services Liaison Department had been replaced by the Permanent Under-Secretary’s Department, which took over the work of both the Services Liaison Department and that of the private secretary to the Permanent Under-Secretary so far as it involved SIS and the other intelligence agencies. From early 1942 there had been a further link between the Foreign Office and the Service through the appointment of a Foreign Office representative in SIS Head Office with the designation of ‘personal assistant to the Chief’. Patrick Reilly and Robert Cecil had successively held the post until the latter was posted to the Washington embassy in April 1945. SIS officers occupied the position until October 1946, when there was a reorganisation of the Chief’s personal staff and Terence Garvey (who had been a private secretary to the Permanent Under-Secretary) was appointed to the new position of Foreign Office Assistant to CSS, which thereafter became the main link between SIS and the Foreign Office.

Early in 1946 Harold Caccia prepared a paper on the work of SIS which provides a useful snapshot of the Service in the immediate postwar period. Menzies, he asserted, was ‘doing all in his power to ensure that intelligence of the kind that only he can get will be provided’. Caccia, at least, was convinced, and his covering minute reflected the Foreign Office view, that by the beginning of 1946 the Soviet Union had already become the principal threat. ‘The main target is, of course, Russia,’ he wrote, ‘and in view of the difficulty of piercing the iron ring of Russian controlled territory “C’s” field is wider and task harder than ever before.’ He argued that three things were necessary from the consumer of intelligence: ‘patience, support and interest’. Patience was required ‘because it may take years to get an agent into the position of trust from which alone he can supply the information required’. Support was necessary ‘because the Secret Service will not be able to do the job without the necessary funds’ and interest ‘because the test is value to the consumer and it is as old as it is true that you get the Secret Service that you deserve’.

In his paper on SIS, Caccia raised a series of important issues for the postwar Service. These included the allocation of resources, both in terms of the overall Secret Vote and as between signals intelligence (in the broadest sense) and human intelligence; and tasking, with the linked issues of the SIS-MI5 division of responsibilities and the question of special operations. He began by listing different ‘clandestine methods’ by which the Service (including the Government Code and Cypher School) was currently organised to obtain intelligence. These included intercepted telegrams; intercepted telephone calls (marked as ‘very secret, & not known outside F.O.’); and ‘Agents’ reports’. He noted that the advantage of intercepted communications was ‘that we get from them the actual correspondence of foreign governments or their representatives’, while reports from agents were ‘mainly intended to cover quite a different field, namely those questions about which it is difficult, if not impossible, for regular representatives to get information by ordinary means’. He illustrated this by citing ‘the activities of communist parties’ as ‘an example of the sort of question asked’. Caccia then turned to the organisation of intelligence, noting that Menzies had ‘since the end of the war reviewed his whole organisation to try to ensure that he will be able to provide what is wanted in peacetime over a long period’. There were ‘two main problems’: ‘1. how to divide expenditure between . . . “intercepted” intelligence and . . . agents’ reports, and