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By Root 2718 0

Air Commodore Jack Easton, who had served in Air Intelligence during the war and been brought into SIS in August 1945, becoming Assistant Chief in November. Faced with SIS proposals concerned almost exclusively with communications, and SOE ones focused on the development of devices and equipment, Easton’s sub-committee had to try to combine and rationalise the two sets of requirements and propose realistic and economical arrangements for the future. This they did rather successfully, with the establishment of workshops on two separate sites, one concentrating on communications and the other on weapons and analogous technical devices. In due course (as suggested in the Bland Report) much of the cost of these establishments was met from the Open Vote of the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Supply respectively. Further Secret Vote funds were saved by the emergence from Gambier-Parry’s Section VIII in 1946 of a new Diplomatic Wireless Service under Foreign Office direction, which took charge of all the government’s secure communications requirements.

By the time the CSS Committee reported in November 1945, SOE’s fate had been well sealed. There was an effort to establish a continued independent role after its parent department, the Ministry of Economic Warfare, had been abolished in May 1945. Cavendish-Bentinck uncharitably thought that Colin Gubbins (who had succeeded Charles Hambro in September 1943) ‘saw himself as continuing indefinitely as head of S.O.E. equal to C and under a Director-General of the Secret Services’. But the Foreign Office remained determined to take it over as part of SIS. Cadogan told Bevin it was ‘essential’ that Menzies thenceforth should be head of both organisations; Bevin agreed and put the matter to Attlee, who on 23 August 1945 confirmed that there should be ‘a single head - that head being C’. In November, on the advice of an ad hoc committee chaired by Cavendish-Bentinck (which included Menzies and Gubbins as well as representatives of the service ministries), the Chiefs of Staff Committee defined a limited planning and training role for a much reduced SOE. It was to maintain a cadre organisation which would have ‘adequate clandestine contacts’, ‘up to date information regarding potential objectives’ and ‘covert communications capable of functioning at short notice on the outbreak of war’. Suggestions from within SOE that it might play an active role in occupied Germany and Austria against any Nazi revival, or a possible Soviet threat, got short shrift from Sir Orme Sargent in the Foreign Office. ‘All this seems to me excessively dangerous,’ he minuted on 28 November, at a time when there were still widespread (if, as it turned out, wildly unrealistic) hopes that the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union might continue in some form. ‘It is one thing to arrange for S.O.E. to maintain an organisation in this country in peace-time capable of quick and effective expansion in time of war, but it is quite another matter for it to embark on activities against Russia, or indeed any other friendly country, in present circumstances.’ It would be ‘time enough’ to do something of the sort when the government ‘decided to prepare for war against Russia – if, indeed, when that time comes, there is found to be any place for the tricks and contraptions used by S.O.E. in the last war with such dubious results’. He described SOE’s activities in Germany against unregenerate Nazis as those ‘of a secret police’, and a ‘dangerous and invidious task’ for which SOE was neither equipped nor originally created to perform.5

The absorption of SOE by SIS marked a stage in the progressive assertion of Foreign Office control over all clandestine activities overseas, a policy with which Menzies apparently fully agreed, as demonstrated by the draft of an important ‘directive to be issued to the Chief of the S.I.S.’ which he submitted to Harold Caccia in January 1946. Indeed, the fact that Menzies could write his own terms of reference demonstrated both his sensitivity to the requirements of his political masters and the