The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [365]
Caccia recognised that the machinery for signals intelligence was ‘by its nature costly and uncertain’, but observed that all departments had ‘been anxious that this branch should be maintained if not at a wartime rate at least at a high scale for the sake of the “hard news” that it gives’. He reported that Menzies was ‘reorganising and rehousing his “factories”’; was in negotiation with the United States and the Dominions ‘for exchange’; and that he had got Treasury sanction for much of the ‘listening expenditure’ to be borne on the open Post Office Vote. In terms of human intelligence, Caccia noted that SIS had now to refocus its principal efforts on political rather than the military intelligence which had been the priority during the war. Major reorganisation was required, moreover, since during the war SIS had ‘worked so closely with other Secret Services that many of its staff have become “blown”’. There was also the problem of accommodating SOE’s residual functions of ‘training and research in this country and the collection abroad of those kinds of intelligence that are useful for S[pecial] O[perations] in war; suitable landing grounds, demolition targets, etc.’.3
In a further note on the work of the Services Liaison Department prepared in February 1946 for the new Permanent Under-Secretary, Sir Orme Sargent, Caccia confirmed that Menzies was engaged in a ‘root and branch reorganisation’ of ‘every single one of his various activities’ which, he thought, would ‘certainly not be completed before the end of the year’.4 Menzies, in fact, had begun planning for the postwar Service early in the spring of 1945, evidently as a response to the Bland Report, with the ‘C.S.S. committee on S.I.S. organisation’. He himself took the chair, though the day-to-day work was handled by his deputy chairman, Maurice Jeffes, who had been Director of Passport Control since 1938. The other full members of the committee were Dick Ellis, Bill Cordeaux and Kim Philby. Thus Menzies included a balance of long experience (Jeffes, Ellis and Cordeaux) and comparatively new blood (Philby), though in the latter case also presumably ensuring the distribution of the committee’s proceedings to the Soviet intelligence service.
When they reported on 13 November 1945, the committee stated that their overall aim had been ‘to plan for a practical peace-time S.I.S. organisation, which will be capable of rapid expansion in time of crisis’. They explicitly built on the Bland conclusions and both formalised and streamlined the structure of the Service as it had developed over the second half of the war. The committee proposed that SIS be divided into four main branches: Requirements, Production, Finance and Administration, and Technical Services. At the highest level of command it recommended that the Chief should be supported by an officer ‘to perform the duties of a true deputy . . . responsible to C.S.S. for the work of all four Branches’. Embedded in this proposal was an implied but definite criticism of the haphazard wartime practice of appointing every now and then a VCSS, DCSS and/or ACSS responsible for only partial areas of work. Each of the four branches would be headed by a director, and those directors could collectively act as an executive committee ‘when this may be deemed necessary’.
The Requirements Branch was to be ‘responsible for indicating and defining intelligence targets, for assessing production and for guiding and assisting the Production Branch and Stations in the fulfilment of intelligence requirements’. It was also to ‘maintain close liaison with G.C. & C.S., in order to ensure that the greatest mutual advantage shall be obtained from intelligence received’. Reflecting Bland’s emphasis on the need to improve SIS’s requirements dialogue with its consumers, the CSS committee proposed dividing the branch into seven sections, each responsible for a different intelligence area: political, counter-intelligence, scientific,