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assumed that another naval officer was the most appropriate person for the position, the appointment of the higher-ranking Sinclair also confirmed the degree to which the status of the Service had risen since its inception in 1909. Although Sinclair had plans for changes - in November 1923 he told Sir Eyre Crowe of the Foreign Office that he wanted ‘to undertake a certain re-organisation’ to make the Service ‘more efficient’ and ‘provide a basis for a war organisation’ - he in fact did little to change the Head Office structure which Cumming had introduced in 1919, with a Production side, responsible for the overseas deployment of the Service, and a Circulation (later Requirements) side, providing the link with the customer departments. As much for reasons of economy as anything else, in 1923-4 there was some contraction in the number of sections on each side, but the fundamental shape of the organisation was retained. For similar practical reasons, and as the overall size of the Service contracted, Cumming’s Regional Inspector system, with deputies allocated to co-ordinate work overseas, also withered away. While the prevailing shortage of money through most of the 1920s and 1930s severely circumscribed the activities of the Service, Sinclair certainly wanted to expand his overseas operations, as confirmed by his sending of Valentine Vivian in 1927 to investigate intelligence possibilities in the Middle East and the resulting extensive (though still-born) scheme which Vivian drew up.

At home, Sinclair, with Foreign Office backing, evidently nursed ambitions to lead a unified British security and intelligence organisation. In 1925 Nevile Bland thought ‘that unified direction was the ideal towards which we ought to work’ and in 1927 Sir William Tyrrell, the Permanent Under-Secretary, told Sinclair that he ‘never missed an opportunity’ of pressing the case for a single organisation. Sinclair himself told the Secret Service Committee in 1927 that SIS, MI5 and Special Branch should be amalgamated. But, whatever theoretical case there may have been for a single agency, the fact that Sinclair himself was by far the most eligible candidate to head it seems to have had the potential to alarm and antagonise colleagues in other parts of the security and intelligence community. In this respect the views of Sir John Burnett-Stuart, the Director of Military Operations and Intelligence, as expressed to the Secret Service Committee in 1925 are extremely revealing. Burnett-Stuart expansively declared that SIS had ‘improved enormously’ under Sinclair. Since there is no corroborative evidence for this assertion, it is unclear in what particular ways matters had ‘improved’, though the evidence from 1923 when Sinclair’s assumption of control over the Government Code and Cypher School was approved by the armed service Directors of Intelligence suggests that, as a former Director of Intelligence himself, he was thought to be sympathetic to the armed forces’ specific intelligence needs. Nevertheless, despite his praise for Sinclair, Burnett-Stuart was quite opposed to any amalgamation as he ‘would hesitate to put too much power into the hands of so energetic and capable an officer as “C”’.

Sinclair was pre-eminently a team captain within SIS, not in the wider Whitehall universe, and when he sought to expand his own and his agency’s reach, he found that the very qualities which made him such a good commanding officer tended to work against him. His strengths as a leader - charisma, decision and dynamism - which engendered a fierce loyalty on the part of subordinates, together with his inclination to press ahead with ventures without perhaps fully anticipating all the possible consequences, at times led him and SIS into crossing existing Whitehall boundaries and trespassing into the territory of other departments. Spotting and seizing an opportunity to work against Communist subversion in Great Britain (which also suited Sinclair’s evident political predilections) had characteristics of a fine battlefield commander, admirable perhaps in wartime