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By Root 2860 0

that collation work on Communism and hostile intelligence services would then be integrated as far as possible, together with any other areas of overlap where economies might be achieved, including the two registries. While the employment of secret agents in foreign countries was reserved exclusively to SIS, MI5 might ‘in certain circumstances’ apply to the Foreign Office for sanction to maintain a liaison officer in a foreign country. But such liaison would normally be through SIS channels. MI5 agreed ‘to seek straight Intelligence on behalf of and in collaboration with S.I.S. in British territories, within the limits of its own constitutional sanctions and its collecting resources’, and special liaison arrangements were made for the services jointly to run cases. On SIS’s side this was primarily handled by the Controller Production Research section.

After the agreement had been settled, Sir William Strang, who had succeeded Sargent as Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office in February 1949, wrote to Menzies enquiring about its practical results. Reflecting the overall government emphasis on economy, he felt sure that Menzies would ‘bear in mind the necessity, in these hard times, of confining representation abroad to what is necessary to the exclusion of what is only desirable’. In September 1949, Sillitoe proposed that SIME should close down in Greece, the Lebanon, Amman, Turkey and Iran, leaving the field to SIS, but that it should continue to work in Iraq where he had been ‘specially requested by the Foreign Office to negotiate with the oil companies in the hope of exercising some measure of supervision over their security’. He also proposed to hand over SIME’s secret agents in Egypt. Menzies agreed with these arrangements, apart from Greece, where he said it was not possible for SIS to take over SIME’s work altogether while British troops remained there (as they were to do until January 1950).16 In practice (and rather like the situation between SIS and SOE during the war), relations on the ground between SIS and MI5 were quite good. In April 1947, for example, Menzies had assured Hayter of the ‘very satisfactory collaboration’ between SIS and the Security Service ‘during and since the war’. Information was ‘exchanged on an entirely satisfactory and friendly basis’. SIME and SIS representatives, he asserted, had ‘for the past year regularly collaborated in the writing of papers for the J.I.C. Middle East, basing themselves on the information available to each organisation’.17

In the matter of ‘British’ or ‘foreign’ territory, and SIS’s role therein, British India was a special case. By the beginning of 1947 it was clear that the territory would become independent (as it did on 15 August, when it was partitioned into India and Pakistan), and SIS began to consider what intelligence arrangements would be necessary in the future. On New Year’s Day 1947 a meeting of representatives of MI5, SIS and the India Office’s intelligence organisation, Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), met to consider the issue. On security matters it was hoped that proper liaison could be established between MI5 and whatever Indian security organisation was established. As for SIS, it was recognised that even if the independent government of India was ‘willing to liaise in a friendly manner, it was improbable that they would, either on account of inefficiency or lack of interest, be able to furnish all the information required by H.M.G.’. Thus it was proposed that SIS should set up a covert organisation in post-independence India, which, as Menzies explained to Hayter in January 1947, would take over some of the work currently done by IPI, including intelligence about India itself and also about its neighbouring countries, which were all ‘without exception either contiguous to the Soviet Union, or are the object of actual or potential Soviet penetration’. Aubrey Halford in the Foreign Office agreed, believing that ‘it would be wise to assume the worst, that is, that the Indian Government will be either unwilling to co-operate with