• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2780 0

that ‘the system of control adopted in peace should conform as closely as possible to that required for war’; that the use of special operations as a means of furthering British policy ‘should not be lost sight of ’; and that ‘at present all the emphasis’ was on secret intelligence, and it was ‘not possible’ while the Foreign Office was ‘in control in peace to employ fully those “unacknowledgeable” activities which may be required in furtherance of British interests’. The Ministry of Defence, furthermore, was already responsible for some inter-service organisations, and if it took over SIS, ‘the Foreign Office would be relieved of the embarrassing responsibility for approving “unacknowledgeable” activities’.8 Neither SIS nor the Foreign Office was much swayed by this generous offer, and although Montgomery got the Chiefs of Staff Committee to agree with him, his attempt to prise SIS away from the Foreign Office soon came to a shuddering halt. ‘Monty’ was not a success as CIGS. Whatever his skills on the battlefield, the doctrinaire, brusque and hectoring style he brought to the corridors of power in London was no match for the perhaps more subtle and feline skills of veteran Whitehall warriors like Menzies.

But it was not just a matter of Menzies outmanoeuvring Montgomery in some deft bureaucratic quadrille, since it is clear that neither the Foreign Office nor, in fact, the Ministry of Defence was in favour of altering the responsibility for SIS. As the Minister of Defence, A. V. Alexander, told the Chiefs of Staff in June 1947, the transfer of SIS to his ministry was ‘not practical politics. Even if the Foreign Secretary were well disposed towards the idea, which he is not,’ he added, ‘I do not favour the transfer of the Secret Service to the Minister of Defence.’9

Managing the Service

Reconstructing the bureaucratic structure of SIS during and immediately after the Second World War is gravely hampered by the absence of some central administrative records. It is clear, for example, that after the appointment of the three armed service Deputy Directors in the spring of 1942, a Board of Deputy Directors (which it seems may have acted broadly as an executive committee) was formed with Claude Dansey, as Assistant Chief, in the chair. There is evidence that this body had meetings at which some notes of the proceedings were kept, but no full minutes of any specific meeting, let alone a complete set of its minutes (if indeed one ever existed), has been found in the archives. Under the reformed structure introduced following the recommendations of the Chief ’s reorganisation committee, from November 1945 there was a ‘Weekly Meeting of Directors’, and the Director of Production held regular meetings of his Regional Controllers, in which a wide range of matters was discussed, including administration, finance, recruitment, personnel, training and requirements. In the absence of any records of Directors’ meetings (which do not, apparently, survive for the 1940s), these minutes comprise the main central SIS records for the postwar period.10 The Regional Controller meetings were superseded in January 1947 by the ‘VCSS’s production conference’, which covered much the same range of business as its predecessor.11

During 1946 the structure recommended by the Chief ’s reorganisation committee in November 1945 was broadly adopted for the postwar Service. In the spring of 1946 (reflecting changing priorities), a Director War Planning was appointed. The Requirements Directorate – handling tasking and relations with customer departments – came into being under Claude Dansey, and the existing Circulating sections became known as ‘R.’ sections.12 In 1948 a liaison section, R.8, was created to handle relations with the SIS Production side, as well as the Government Code and Cypher School. Reflecting the increased importance of the Soviet target, the counter-intelligence section, R.5 (which had taken over the wartime Sections V and IX), was divided in two: R.5/Int. for counter-intelligence generally; and R.5/Com. to concentrate on Communism.