The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [4]
Despite the fact that immense quantities of documents were destroyed, not least through lack of space, especially during the period covering the headquarters move from Broadway to Century House in the early 1960s, a substantial archive survives. The first thing to be said, however, is that (perhaps surprisingly) the archive contains comparatively little actual intelligence. Over the 1909-49 period with which I am concerned SIS was always primarily a collection agency, responding to specific or general requests for information from customer departments, principally its parent department, the Foreign Office, and the armed service ministries. The information requested (if available) was collected and passed on to the relevant department. Little or no analysis was applied to this material within SIS, apart from some outline indication about the reliability, or otherwise, of the source. Once the raw material was passed on to the user department, they processed it and normally destroyed the original documents. Intelligence assessments were the job of the particular desk in the Foreign Office, the Directorate of Military Intelligence and so on, not of SIS.
SIS’s deployment and work, therefore, was principally defined by the priorities and perceptions of external agencies. Between the wars Soviet Communism remained the chief target, and a particular concern with naval matters in the Mediterranean and Far East clearly reflected Admiralty perceptions and intelligence requirements. During the early and mid-1930s SIS resources, in any case constrained by an acute shortage of funding, were not focused on the developing challenge of Nazi Germany as much as (admittedly with the benefit of hindsight) they might have been. Although the Service was, nevertheless, quick off the mark to report German rearmament, there was evidently little demand in London for secret intelligence about internal German political developments. There is, for example, almost nothing in the SIS archives (both for this period and during the Second World War) about the persecution of Jews generally or the Final Solution. A report from Switzerland in January 1939 is a rare exception. An SIS representative had asked an Austrian-Jewish refugee if he could supply ‘any information about people in concentration camps’. The source said that he knew a man in Geneva who had spent nine months in Dachau, ‘but he doubted whether he could get this man to talk. He said German refugees were frightened of saying anything against Germany, because European countries were riddled with Nazi agents and they feared reprisals.’
One of the things I had hoped to do in this history was find instances when I could track the process from the acquisition of a specific piece of intelligence to its actual use, but in the absence of much of the raw material I have found this quite difficult (though in some cases not impossible) to achieve. I might remark that the situation is quite different with regard to signals intelligence where a considerable volume of the raw (or rawish) product survives and can readily be used, as in Sir Harry Hinsley’s magisterial volumes, to estimate ‘its influence on strategy and operations’, as his subtitle promises.6 During the First World War, nevertheless, I have for example been able to trace the use of human intelligence from the ‘Dame Blanche’ organisation in occupied Belgium, as well as the ready and informative response of the German naval spy TR/16 to requests for details of German losses in the Battle of Jutland in 1916. In the mid-1930s (though it was not always taken as seriously as it should have been) SIS reporting was used to inform British assessments of German