The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [434]
After 1928, Sinclair appears to have made no further efforts to raise the question of the Passport Control system and SIS’s relationship with it. Even though the PCO cover became increasingly thin, he seems not to have been too bothered by this, as indicated by his apparently untroubled admission in 1934 that ‘the activities of our Passport Control Officers all over the world are perfectly well known’. A more fundamental problem arising from the system was its inflexibility, since to a very considerable extent SIS’s overseas representation was tied to countries with which Britain had visa agreements. If - or rather when - SIS’s priorities changed, it could prove difficult to transfer resources to other locations. Sudden demands for increased intelligence from the Mediterranean in the mid-1930s provoked by Mussolini’s expansionist foreign policy, for example, produced a situation where operations in Malta were expanded and restricted turn and turn about, as funding was made available or withdrawn. Apparently for the most part content to work within the PCO system, Sinclair seems to have begun to think strategically about overseas operations only when he set up the Z Organisation in 1936, which, as it turned out, was too late and too hastily assembled to be of much long-term use.
During the 1920s and into the 1930s there was a manifest national, and SIS, over-emphasis on the revolutionary threat from the Bolsheviks. The challenge was real, but not as dangerous to the stability of the United Kingdom as it was perceived to be, though potentially more dangerous to some parts of the empire which had begun to entertain thoughts of independence. Despite White Russian fabrications and operational difficulties, SIS’s coverage of the revolutionary activities of the Comintern was reasonably good, that of other aspects of Soviet policy much less so. From the later 1920s, however, the Service began to learn from its experience of covering these targets and much improved its ability to analyse and assess the intelligence it gathered. During the 1930s attention was directed far too late to the coinciding threats posed by German rearmament and the rise of the Nazis. There were national political and psychological inhibitions external to SIS which in part account for this, as there was little or no relevant tasking from the main customer departments. Clearly reflecting his naval background, Sinclair’s own perceptions of the chief threats to British interests - Italy in the Mediterranean and Japan in the East - reflected the prevailing concerns of the Admiralty for most of the interwar period. It took the Admiralty a lot longer than the Air Ministry, for example, to see Germany as a significant (let alone the most important) potential enemy. In this respect Sinclair and SIS were simply reflecting the priorities of (at least) one of their main customer departments. SIS’s supply of information about political developments within Europe was also hampered by the low status and mistrust accorded to the Service by British diplomats. Combined with the embargo on operating against host countries these were disincentives to SIS coverage of local