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By Root 2873 0

when swift and decisive action could be more important than any theoretical bureaucratic constraints, but risky indeed in peacetime when the potential political costs of such action needed to be taken carefully into account. And doing so without consulting or informing other interested parties was no way to win friends, as is amply illustrated by the irritation of Sir Wyndham Childs, Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, in 1924 at the time of the Zinoviev Letter affair on discovering that SIS had been running a domestic agent. Where political matters were concerned, indeed, Sinclair was markedly less fastidious than Cumming, and, as illustrated in his relations with Sir John Anderson, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Home Office, not at all so concerned about the distinction between domestic and foreign intelligence-gathering.

In Anderson Sinclair came up against a seasoned Whitehall operator who was so well placed and bureaucratically adept (as well as being evidently unsympathetic to Sinclair’s empire-building tendencies) that he was never going to outflank him. In the departmental representation on successive Secret Service Committees, the three constant figures were Anderson (Home Office), Fisher (Treasury) and Hankey (Cabinet Office), as well as successive Foreign Office Permanent Under-Secretaries. While Sir Warren Fisher tended to back Sinclair and the Foreign Office view, Sir Maurice Hankey tended to side with Anderson, especially when the issue of interdepartmental responsibility for security and intelligence came up. Hankey’s insistence in 1925 that an undivided line of accountability to a specific government department, such as the Foreign Office or the Home Office, was more important than any sort of joint arrangement for a unified intelligence organisation may well have been coloured by memories of the unsatisfactory division of control between War Office, Admiralty and Foreign Office which had bedevilled Cumming’s Bureau in the First World War. Whatever his thinking, neither he nor Anderson, although content to leave SIS under Foreign Office supervision, was prepared to support an amalgamated intelligence organisation with Sinclair at its head.

During the deliberations of the 1925 Secret Service Committee Anderson had questioned Sinclair about SIS’s activities within the United Kingdom and quite clearly expressed his concern over the issue. Perhaps Sinclair’s political antennae were insufficiently sensitive to pick up the message, or perhaps he simply chose to ignore the implicit warning in Anderson’s attitude. Either way, he made a serious mistake. The 1931 dispute with Special Branch over the running of agents in the United Kingdom was a case in point. While the Secret Service Committee essentially took Sinclair’s side and primarily put the matter down to a personality clash, describing the policeman Colonel Carter as ‘temperamentally incapable of taking a broad view or of seeing that all three organisations [SIS, MI5 and Special Branch] were really working for the same cause’,10 it is clear that both Carter and Special Branch had a case. Apart from Carter’s alleged left-leaning politics (as identified by the politically right-wing Maxwell Knight and which may simply have reflected the policeman’s anxiety to be politically even-handed), and beyond Sinclair’s claims of the practical necessity of SIS operating within the United Kingdom, SIS had no formal brief to run agents at home. Carter, moreover, was not alone in resenting and opposing SIS’s expanding domestic work, as he was backed up by the Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Trevor Bigham. The continuation of domestic work, and the expansion of the Casuals, led directly to the embarrassing (for Sinclair) meeting in January 1931 when he was carpeted by Anderson, and following which, far from any unified organisation being created, SIS’s remit was restricted, it was stripped of the Casuals, and MI5, as the Security Service, was given expanded responsibilities for domestic British counter-intelligence. One consequence, indeed, of Sinclair’s