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posting and added that it was accepted policy that they should be employed in those appointments for which their qualifications and experience suited them’. Later that year he ruled that women ‘should be recruited on the same level as male officers, i.e. they should be able to be sent abroad to foreign stations’. While ‘there was no reason why a woman officer should not eventually become a representative . . . this would be the exception rather than the rule’, but he observed that currently a ‘minor Station’ had been under a woman officer since May 1946. But there was also the problem of obtaining Foreign Office agreement to any such appointment. In April 1949 they refused SIS’s application for cover for a woman officer in a Middle Eastern station. At home in the postwar years, too, there was a persistent shortage of trained secretaries, which the Service tried in part to address by running a hostel in Belgravia ‘where junior girls who could not find accommodation in London could live very cheaply’.

In 1948 a Recruiting Office was established for the first time (in clear recognition of the need to compete with other organisations and services for the best talent), and the following year the Civil Service Selection Board was brought in to help find suitable candidates. In January 1948 instructions were issued defining the three main types of officers the recruiters were to look for. In the first place were ‘General Intelligence Officers’ who should be ‘men of character, integrity and intellect, combined with imagination and subtlety’. This was a clear echo of the Bland Report recommendation that SIS ‘train up more of a team of all-rounders than at present exists’ and reflected the CSS Committee’s view that ‘the S.I.S. officer of the future, engaged on producing intelligence, should be able to fulfil the requirements of any of the Intelligence sections’.21 Second, there were ‘Unofficial Assistants’ who would work under natural cover, who should be ‘more hard-boiled, in whom integrity and intellect, whilst important, are less essential’; and, third, there were those to be recruited ‘on short-term engagements for special and interim purposes’.

The recruitment process continued in practice to involve a mixture of the informal and formal, as recalled by one officer who joined SIS in 1947. Having served in the Guards during the war, ending up with the rank of major, he had spent eighteen months in business before he started to investigate the possibilities of a career in the Foreign Service. Told by a friend ‘that a special department of the Foreign Office was looking for new entrants’, he expressed interest and was approached by an individual who took him to lunch twice at his club, Boodle’s in St James’s Street, and quizzed him generally about his life and background. Evidently having passed muster, the candidate was then questioned in some depth at the War Office by a ‘Miss Connolly’, and further interviewed by a five-member board chaired by the head of the Economic Requirements Section: ‘Many questions were put to me, but no information was given of the department for which I was being interviewed.’ A week later he was told he had been accepted and he was instructed to report to the SIS headquarters at Broadway.

Cover while assessing potential employees was a perennial difficulty. After a ‘Secretaries Combined General & Overseas Course’ in February 1947, one of the students complained that ‘at her first interview’ she had been ‘offered an immediate overseas post to an unnamed place at an unnamed salary’ and had been ‘told only that the work would be interesting’. She said that ‘naturally her parents would not agree to so vague an offer’ and any cover story that she now gave them was insufficient. They could not ‘understand why she was not given a detailed offer, such as would be given by an ordinary business firm, at her first interview’. Vivian, now the head of Service security, neatly summarised the problem as concerning ‘our dealings with men and women, who may never become members of S.I.S. but to whom sufficient information