The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [422]
A special intelligence relationship?
Liaison with foreign intelligence agencies - those of close allies as well as those of less friendly states - has formed an essential part of SIS’s work from almost the very beginning. Co-operation with the Allied United Nations against the Axis powers during the Second World War, and within the Western Alliance from the later 1940s, was particularly important. In many cases close wartime relationships - with Norway and the Low Countries, for example - underscored much friendly co-operation in the postwar years, some of which was formalised within the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation system after its foundation in April 1949. In other instances the perceived (and growing) threat apparently posed by the Soviet Union prompted some national intelligence and security organisations in countries which had been neutral during the war (such as Sweden) to forge closer ties with corresponding British agencies than hitherto. Commonwealth countries, too, like Canada and Australia, began to be treated by Britain more on the basis of formal international equality than had been the case before, when their unquestioning loyalty had largely been assumed. In November 1947 a production conference in Broadway heard that representatives ‘were keen on extending our relations with the Dominions’, and were particularly interested in ‘facilities, such as cover posts and the use of [diplomatic] bags’. The Dominions could also supply prospective agents and safe havens where defectors could be hidden away.
But the closest and most mutually productive relations of all were with the United States and they drew on the extensive (if not entirely untroubled) wartime relationships which had been established between the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), SIS, SOE and signals intelligence organisations on both sides. In March 1946 SIS summed up liaison with the United States as operating on four levels. First was secret intelligence liaison through Dunderdale’s Special Liaison Controllerate and the London office of the American Strategic Services Unit which had taken over intelligence responsibilities following the abolition of OSS in October 1945. This liaison included exchange of reports, of which in 1945-6 the numerical balance was much in SIS’s favour, with 4,403 being received as against 2,063 supplied. Well over half the SIS reports were on political subjects and most of the material dealt with Europe, though on Menzies’s instructions comparatively little information was passed concerning the USSR. There was a similar exchange of secret intelligence material through a member of the SIS Washington station. SIS’s counter-intelligence branch R.5 (formerly Section V) had a separate liaison in London with the American X2, which also had a separate link with MI5, mostly dealing with Communist matters. Finally, there was some local liaison between stations in the field. None of this was co-ordinated in any way and the view in Broadway was that ‘somebody in this office ought to be responsible for co-ordinating our world-wide policy towards O.S.S. [sic] and the details of our exchanges with them’. But there were also some concerns, as it was thought that American agencies had a tendency towards leakage, which meant that SIS had to be ‘especially careful about passing to the Americans the very information they themselves most want to have, namely that connected with the U.S.S.R.’.
In April 1946 Dick Ellis reported that the United States Chief of Secret Intelligence had stressed ‘the importance of the intelligence received’ through liaison with SIS. A recent British report had been rated ‘by MIS [the Military Intelligence Service] as the most valuable