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By Root 2613 0

to a special division of the Military Intelligence Directorate (M.I.5)’, the armed services and some other government departments (such as the Foreign Office and the Department of Overseas Trade) had maintained their own intelligence branches whose secret service arms were ‘collected under one roof, with one Chief; each having its own Sectional Officer’. The ‘necessity of having just one main Bureau’, he asserted, came first of all from ‘the importance of keeping secret, so far as possible, the very existence of any such Bureau, and even of its location as an office’, but it also reflected the need for co-ordination and the indivisibility of intelligence-gathering. ‘“Intelligence”, generally speaking’, he declared, was ‘not an affair of water-tight compartments’ and all sections ‘should be inter-dependent’. It frequently happened, moreover, ‘that a report sent in by an agent abroad under the heading of one particular Section, contains information important to another’. The ‘sailing of Transports’, for example, was ‘both a Naval and a Military affair’.

Illustrating the positive experience that had been gained during the First World War, Somerville set down a number of basic principles which held good for the Service in future years. ‘It is a fundamental rule of Secret Service’, he wrote, ‘that its agents must never interfere in the affairs of the country that is giving them its hospitality.’ This was for obvious reasons: apart from ‘fouling one’s own nest’, it was ‘difficult enough . . . to “dodge” the enemy counter-espionage, and still to obtain Intelligence about him’, but it would only add to ‘the difficulty to incur the resentment and enmity of the neutral police, as well’. He stipulated that agents were ‘never known by their proper names. Either they adopt some “nom de guerre”, or, more usually, are designated by a letter and a figure, e.g., “B.90”.’ No individual could ‘set forth on S.S. without “cover”, that is to say, a fictitious cloak for his real activities; – some open and legitimate pursuit, business, or calling under which he can operate without detection’. Potential agents should be approached only by ‘intermediaries’. Indeed, it was ‘desirable that a (non-British) agent should never know who his Employer or Paymaster really is’. Somerville declared that ‘experience shows that for Secret Service generally, much the best results are obtained by employing as agents of both sexes, those whose sense of honour is of as high an order as the courage, acumen, brains, audacity, and presence of mind which are the other essentials of success’. Perhaps a little superfluously (though this was probably a counsel of perfection), he added that ‘unscrupulous persons, merely out for large fees, and the rascals who so often offer their services, should be avoided, no matter how tempting their offers’.

By the end of the war the Bureau had developed a system for processing and evaluating information. Somerville described how ‘when any report from abroad’ was received in London, it was typed in duplicate and sent to the Naval Intelligence Department, ‘one of the copies being marked “Criticism Copy”’. The relevant officer in the Admiralty then annotated the copy with one of an eight-point scale, from ‘A – Believed to be correct’, through ‘E – Too vague to be of any value’, to ‘G – Of no interest’ and ‘H – Too old to check’. There was also a four – point grading of the report ‘as a whole’ from ‘Z.1’ (‘Good’) to ‘Z.4’ (‘Bad’). But the assessment of reports was itself problematic on security grounds. Somerville wisely observed that it was ‘often impossible, without giving away intelligence which should be kept absolutely secret, even from S.S. agents, to say more than is contained in one of these brief, and usually destructive “criticisms”’. In the case of operational reports, moreover, it was ‘obviously undesirable to give any criticisms whatever’. Nevertheless, ‘when a reasoned criticism can be given, its value to the officer abroad . . . is very great’. Not only would it ‘indicate to him the future lines on which it is best to