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my own, but also for its cordial tone, which augurs well for our joint undertakings . . . No doubt’, he continued, ‘snags will arise, but I am confident that our firm realisation of a common purpose and a common gain will enable us to iron them out.’ Menzies went on to suggest that a common approach could apply to ‘other aspects of our joint campaign; e.g., to the intelligence support for our current operations and our future plans, and, in due course, to our use of propaganda’. The ‘close working relationship’ between SIS and the CIA, to which Hillenkoetter referred, was to become a crucial component in the extremely important Anglo-American strategic and military alliance which continued (despite the occasional wobble) for many years to come. Born of mutual self-interest, and perhaps even mutual self-preservation, the ‘special intelligence relationship’ remained a central feature of the foreign policy of successive British governments, lasting, indeed, for a long time after the end of the Cold War during which it was forged.

PART SEVEN

CONCLUSION

22

SIS: leadership and performance over the first forty years

The history of the British Secret Intelligence Service is far more than that of individual personalities, but any assessment of the Service’s performance over its first forty years has to take into account the specific contributions of the first three Chiefs: Mansfield Cumming, Hugh Sinclair and Stewart Menzies. For thirty of those forty years, from 1909 to 1939, the small size of the Service put a special premium on the role of individual officers, especially the Chief. This was so in the testing, early days when Cumming was not much more than a one-man band, and also during the First World War when he had to fend off the predatory attentions of the Admiralty and War Office. But it was also true for Sinclair during the interwar years, when the independent existence of the tiny cash-starved Service continued to be threatened, and customer departments made increasingly unrealistic demands of it. From 1939 to 1949 Menzies’s situation was rather different. After a difficult start, SIS established itself as an integral and valued part of the British war machine, not least (but also not only) because of the increasingly valuable signals intelligence emanating from Bletchley Park. Although the Service was challenged in some areas by the activities of SOE, its survival as an autonomous agency was never threatened in the way it had been during the First World War and immediately after. So secure was its independence that with sustained Foreign Office backing Menzies was able to see off Field Marshal Montgomery’s scheme in 1947 for the Ministry of Defence to take over responsibility for the Service. So it was, that by 1949, in keeping with the crucially influential recommendations of the 1944 Bland Report (and as interpreted by Menzies’s own 1945 postwar planning committee), SIS had emerged in a recognisably modern professional form, institutionally equipped, moreover, to survive and flourish for very many more years.

Mansfield Cumming and the establishment of the Service

We do not know if Mansfield Cumming was the only possible contender to head the foreign section of the new Secret Service Bureau in 1909, or whether the Director of Naval Intelligence sounded out other people in the month between the decision of the Committee of Imperial Defence on 24 July to form the Bureau and the letter he wrote to Cumming on 10 August saying he had ‘something good’ to offer. So far as the history of the Secret Intelligence Service is concerned, however, Cumming was an inspired choice. Not only did he grasp the essentials of secret service work from the very beginning, but he proved to be sufficiently robust and independent-minded to ensure the continued autonomy of his fledgling Service, especially during the First World War. His appointment was crucial to the early development of the Service. Plucked from the relative obscurity of studying harbour defences in Southampton, he adopted a rather different and calculated