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By Root 2837 0

with radio communications and electronic development. Since this branch also managed the Foreign Office’s secure communications, it was administered jointly by SIS and the Foreign Office. Because both establishments took on a support role for agencies other than just SIS, arrangements were made (as envisaged in the Bland Report) for their funding to come from the Open Vote. Paralleling research and development was the administration of stores and equipment, including transport. An experienced army quartermaster colonel with the designation Q was brought in to manage this side of things. Q Branch also took over a photographic-reproduction and training team, which was housed in Broadway alongside a printing and roneo (reprographics) section which had existed since before the war.

Beginning in September 1947 the Training and Development Directorate produced a series of ‘Development News Letters’ to inform colleagues about their work. ‘The task of the Development side of D.T.D.’, declared the first newsletter, ‘is to evolve items of equipment for specialised work. We need [for example] a special type of silent weapon; we do not therefore have to do research work on either guns or silencers. That we leave to the research establishments, but we take their guns and their silencers and adapt them to meet our special needs.’ The range of work undertaken (and also therefore the kinds of activities that SIS operations might include) was indicated by the ‘five main lines’ currently under investigation. First was ‘a device which will increase the security of operators on burglarious enterprises’. Infra-red equipment having been found to be too heavy, a torch which cast a ‘deep red light’ was being worked on. Second was ‘a knock-out ampoule or tablet which will behave in a reasonably predictable manner’, bearing in mind ‘the variability of human beings’. Third was ‘a method of opening combination safes’, an ‘intriguing’ subject about which the experts were ‘not without hope’. They were experimenting with electronic devices ‘and not the sandpapering of finger tips which, we are convinced, was never an effective method of “finding the gap”’. Fourth was ‘a gun silencer which does not become less silent with use’. The department had already developed such a gadget and it needed only ‘to be adapted to a specific weapon when the requirement arises’.

The final problem was the ‘destruction of paper’, not at all an easy task, but one which the painful experience of the war suggested was worth addressing, bearing in mind the problems stations had experienced destroying documents ahead of the German blitzkrieg in 1940. In addition to the instances where a courier might need to destroy paper quickly, as well as the ‘daily destruction of waste’ in a building where fires might not be permitted, the research team focused on ‘the destruction of all those files you have kept till the last moment’ – inevitably those would include the most secret and most valuable papers – ‘and the last moment comes a little sooner than you expected. There is no time now to shovel the stuff in the fire because a determined man could hit you with one hand and pull the stuff out of the stove with the other.’ Various techniques were being tested, including accelerated burning and the chemical destruction of paper. Acid, for example, would destroy paper but at normal temperature this might take several days. A mechanism therefore had to be devised to raise the temperature both to char the paper (as ‘charred paper is easily soluble in sulphuric acid’) and to speed up the process as a whole. But no foolproof system had been developed yet. While the aim was to ensure ‘the rapid destruction of a filing cabinet full of files’ and ‘we hope the paper will disappear in the short time it takes a man to run up a flight of stairs’, the ‘way things are going it will have to be a short, fat, man with gout and broken wind’.

Postwar development work also reflected the special operations possibilities which were being discussed for the Service, as well as the challenge of infiltrating agents