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By Root 2905 0

economic, naval, military and air, along with a co-ordination section, which might estimate ‘the degree of success achieved by S.I.S. in meeting requirements’ as well as producing general background and information papers. The committee also suggested staffing levels for each section, with counter-intelligence (headed by Philby) being the largest with ten officers. This reflected the inherited importance of its predecessor, Section V, and the prevailing assumption that Nazi organisations would continue to pose a major threat after the war. It was also to provide advice for overseas stations about ‘penetrating, countering and disrupting’ foreign secret services and ‘subversive political movements’. Scientific intelligence was thought especially important and had been ‘assigned almost the highest priority in the S.I.S. brief ’. ‘Even though the results may be few and far between,’ concluded the committee, ‘they are likely to be of overriding importance,’ and it was felt that ‘the discovery of the majority of the world’s scientific secrets’ was ‘more likely to occur as a result of information from S.I.S. sources than any other’. Thus the Scientific Section was allocated a specific research and collation function which it was hoped would be an improvement on the wartime experience, as ‘the somewhat lamentable story of ad hoc committees created to deal with “Crossbow” [German V-weapons] strongly underlined the advantages of centralising the intelligence within a trained unit’.

In parallel to the tasking function of Requirements was the intelligence-gathering function of the Production Branch, responsible for ‘obtaining all forms of secret intelligence’ and also undertaking ‘such Counter-Intelligence activities in the field as fall within the sphere of S.I.S.’. There is a hint here of the overlapping functions of MI5 and SIS which periodically troubled inter-agency relations, but it also embodies a significant use of the term ‘counter-intelligence’, which became the preferred SIS terminology and denotes active attack on the intelligence services of other countries, rather than the more defensive ‘counter-espionage’. Implicit in the usage is the SIS belief that ‘counter-intelligence’ is to a great extent directed towards the protection of its own operations and security as well as towards the more generalised security of the state. The committee envisaged that the Director of Production would also ‘superintend and co-ordinate all double-agent and deception activities’. It proposed creating five Regional Controllers, responsible for the operations of ‘all S.I.S. Stations and organisations’, as follows: Western Europe (CWE), covering the Low Countries, Iberia, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy, as well as West, Central and Southern Africa; Northern Area (CNA), responsible for Scandinavia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the USSR; Eastern Mediterranean (CEM), covering Hungary, the Balkans, Turkey, the Middle East as far as Iran, and North-East Africa; Far East and Americas (CFE&A), ‘responsible for all countries east of India, and also for the Western Hemisphere’. The fifth, Controller Production Research (CPR), was proposed to be ‘responsible for all agents controlled direct from Head Office’, as well as ‘talent-spotting’ for the other Regional Controllers. This arrangement operated from late 1945, though in May 1947 the Western Europe Controllerate was divided into an Eastern and a Western Area.

On the production side one organisational anomaly remained which even the tidy-minded root-and-branch reformers on the CSS Committee were unable to remove: the Special Liaison Controllerate (SLC), which constituted the rump of Biffy Dunderdale’s wartime empire and embodied his carefully nurtured liaison arrangements begun with the prewar French and later adding the wartime Polish intelligence service. In what was effectively an independent station based near London, Dunderdale ran an operation ‘with a highly specialised staff of Russian-speakers, mostly of Russian origin’ engaged in collecting, processing and distributing Russian-language