The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [369]
In time of peace [Menzies’s draft stated] it is essential for political reasons and also on grounds of economy that the S.O.E. organisation should be reduced to a small staff at home and that no operations or preparatory work should be carried out abroad unless and until authorised by the Foreign Office. The only exception to this ruling is in the case of certain activities in the Middle East and India which have been specifically authorised . . . Special operations with secret Intelligence are to form a unified Secret Service controlled and administered by you.
Caccia agreed on 2 February 1946 that this draft not only correctly reflected ‘the decisions of the Chiefs of Staff’ but also met ‘Foreign Office requirements satisfactorily’, and a circular telegram to British diplomatic representatives across the world in March 1946 laid down that henceforward there would be ‘a single Secret Service and C’s local representative’ would be ‘solely responsible in your country’. The Secret Service would ‘not undertake any activity other than obtaining intelligence without specific prior approval from the Foreign Office. In particular clandestine recruitment for resistance movements has been banned.’6
Winding up SOE took several years. The scale of the exercise is illustrated by the fact that special operations accounted for £500,000 of SIS’s 1946-7 estimated Secret Vote allocation of £1,750,000, more than the entire MI5 share (£325,000).7 Beyond special operations, moreover, SOE made a significant contribution to the postwar SIS in terms of technical capabilities and training expertise. On the technical research and development side, two establishments were set up, one building on SOE’s special strengths in such matters as sabotage, explosives, fuses, weapons and various chemical tasks, while the other, drawing on the experience of Gambier-Parry’s Section VIII, focused on communications and electronic development. But SOE’s greatest legacy lay in training, which during the war had developed on a much more extensive and thorough basis than that of SIS. Much of the SOE Training and Development Directorate was taken into SIS, and by the late 1940s was providing courses not only for officers, but also for secretaries and agents, who could be instructed in such matters as ‘black’ frontier-crossing operations, by land, sea or air (including by balloon). In his first progress report to the Chiefs of Staff on special operations, covering the first six months of 1946, Menzies expressed the hope that ‘almost all the staff of the joint Secret Service’ would have ‘received training during the next two years. Officers’, he noted, would ‘receive instruction in both S.O. and S.I. subjects’ so that they would ‘be able to undertake both types of work’. Progress, in fact, was not quite as rapid as Menzies had predicted. By mid-1947 fewer than forty officers had been on special operations courses, though all SIS recruits who attended the newly introduced ‘General Course’ (a hundred in 1946) were given ‘a short period of general instruction on the nature and requirements of S.O. work’.
SIS’s absorption of SOE was not universally approved. Field Marshal Lord Montgomery, who served as Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) from 1946 to 1948, regretted the loss of SOE’s independent expertise and attempted to reopen the whole question of special operations and secret intelligence organisation. In November 1946, during a discussion about the importance of Greece (where British forces were supporting the anti-Communist side in the civil war) and Turkey, he told the Chiefs of Staff Committee ‘that special operations in Turkey might prove to be of considerable value’, and he got the committee to agree to ‘a review of the control and responsibility for the S.O.E. organisation’. The following March he launched an outright attempt to shift responsibility for the whole secret service (including operations and intelligence) from the Foreign Office to the Ministry of Defence. He argued