The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [41]
Professionalism and expertise
In his postwar review of February 1919, Boyle Somerville observed that an important limitation on the ability of the Secret Service to gather and process the most useful information was the dearth of ‘Naval officers, technically qualified to deal with Intelligence’. There were hardly enough of them to provide the staff in Cumming’s Head Office, let alone supply specialist assistance in the foreign stations which directed and debriefed the agents who actually collected the information. ‘Unfortunately,’ he remarked, ‘specialists in Naval Intelligence can scarcely be said to have existed before the war, and in any case, those at all competent to deal with it were required either at the Admiralty, or for Active Service afloat.’
The result of this was that ‘officers for S.S. abroad – sometimes not even sailors – had to be instructed, somewhat hurriedly, in a bare outline of the requirements, and sent out to do their best’. Somerville argued that until intelligence became a specialism in the navy, ‘like Gunnery or Torpedo’, there would never be a proper cadre of officers to ‘supply the needs of the Admiralty Intelligence Division, and of the Secret Service’. These were perennial problems, concerning both Military and Naval Intelligence. The services themselves had so few first-class intelligence officers that, despite a frequently expressed desire to populate, if not actually control, all the intelligence-gathering agencies, they were reluctant to lose them to the Secret Service. Career army and naval officers, for their part, hesitated to opt for secondment lest association with such an apparently dubious specialism might damage their own career prospects.
Well aware of the equivocal position which Cumming’s organisation occupied in what might be described as the British defence community – meeting important needs, while not readily fitting into orthodox armed service hierarchies – but also convinced that the Service had done well during the war, Somerville, as the first ever ‘officer in charge of the Naval Section in the Secret Service Bureau’, considered it his ‘duty’ to record ‘the means and methods that have proved successful during the War; so that my successors may not find themselves on entirely unknown and untried ground, in following up and improving these methods’. Reflecting growing professionalism on the part of the Service and its officers, Somerville’s review not only provides an instructive summary of how Cumming’s organisation coped with its first great test, but also set out a rationale for its very existence. Somerville argued that the procurement of naval and military intelligence (which he defined as ‘Information upon which Action can be taken’) involved two ‘mutually dependent’ main objects: first, ‘Intelligence respecting the affairs of the Enemy, or Espionage’; and, second, ‘the prevention of the Enemy from obtaining Intelligence of our affairs, or Counter-Espionage’. Information of the first sort could either be acquired ‘openly, or directly in the face of, or in defiance of the Enemy; and, if necessary, forcibly’; or it could be ‘obtained by outwitting the Enemy; by entering his country and penetrating his counter-espionage devices; by bribing of traitors; and by any other means (but usually by cunning rather than by force), discovering his affairs and activities. This’, he said, ‘is known as Secret Service or “S.S.”.’ Somerville observed that, while during the war counter – espionage had been ‘relegated