The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [367]
The other two branches proposed by the CSS committee were to provide administrative and technical support for the ‘core business’ of the Service. Among the responsibilities of the Director of Finance and Administration was to be training, and the committee made the revolutionary (for SIS) suggestion that ‘a Training Section should form part of the post-war organisation’. Specific recommendations were made for ‘Officers’ Initial Training’ for all new entrants to the Service, ‘Advanced Technical Training’ – an annual course for ‘Officers at Head Office and Stations abroad’, and ‘Secretaries’ Training’. The underlying aim was to bring SIS into line with current training practices in the armed forces and business. ‘It is the policy of the Services,’ they noted, ‘and indeed of most large commercial firms, for all members of such services or firms destined for responsible positions in them first to obtain a good general knowledge of all departments and branches of the work. It is believed’, they continued, ‘that this principle should also apply in our case.’ The ‘advanced technical training’ was primarily intended for SIS officers, but could also be adapted for agents and even carried out at the stations abroad where they were to be run. Among the subjects it could include were secret inks, letter codes, micro-photography, radio communications, tradecraft and the ‘latest developments in concealing devices, document copying and special gadgets’.
Another area for improvement under Finance and Administration was the Registry, which for sensible security reasons had been evacuated to St Albans at the beginning of the war. When most of the rest of Head Office returned to central London less than a year later, the Registry stayed put. Inevitably it had expanded enormously during the war – its prewar staff of six increasing over tenfold – but the inconveniences and delays in moving documents between St Albans and London meant that some Head Office branches began to develop their own independent filing systems. The vitally important ‘central personality reference index’ also suffered, and by the end of the war had become so unreliable as a vehicle for tracing potential contacts and agents, that (as a subsequent SIS report observed) the Service became ‘dependent to an unhealthy degree on the relatively comprehensive index maintained by MI5’. The Central Registry was brought back to Broadway, and an effort was made to reconstitute the Service’s archives and personality records. Some improvements were made, but the branch remained understaffed throughout the 1940s. This was also true of security matters. In November 1945 Menzies appointed Valentine Vivian, the wartime overlord of Sections V and IX, to be his Security Policy Adviser under the designation ‘A.S.P.’. Establishing the security of the Service on a proper basis was an important development, though at the start Vivian was given no machinery to carry out his responsibilities. Matters improved, however, after he was made Inspector of Security in February 1947, with a staff officer to assist him.
Absorbing SOE
The fourth main branch proposed by the CSS Committee was Technical Services, which was to ensure that SIS had ‘at its disposal every type of technical apparatus or process required for the acquisition and communication of intelligence’, and it was the only part of the committee’s work which took much account of the mooted absorption of SOE into SIS. An ad hoc sub-committee on technical requirements, with representatives from SOE and the War Office, was set up under