The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [435]
For SIS the years between the wars were ones of gradual professional development, from the rather successful MIɪ(c) military, mainly tactical and de visu intelligence service of the First World War into a Service which was still learning how to set about covering the needs of its political and economic customers, as well as those of the armed services. Desmond Morton’s efforts to improve the grading of reports, the creation of Sections V and VI, and the flurry of developments in the late 1930s, especially those concerning GC&CS and on the technical side under Gambier-Parry, were very positive features. While a fair proportion of officers possessed useful qualities, such as a knowledge of languages, of foreign countries and of human beings, a degree of dedication and courage, and, with luck, a measure of native ingenuity, the Service was held back, both culturally and financially, by inefficient and damaging habits of poor recruitment and remuneration, and the almost total absence of systematic training in operational skills. Many of its officers were thus inevitably ‘second-raters’, a problem that continued into the Second World War, as Frank Foley observed from Turkey in March 1942. The management gap between the relatively tiny Head Office and the field was deep, spanned only by a few outstanding individuals. Leadership from the top was remarkably good, though overburdened with detail and the need to improve the Service’s relations with its masters and customers. Delegation was poor. It took the violent stimulus of the Second World War, with the enormous expansion of the Service which accompanied it, finally to set it on the road to true professionalism.
Stewart Menzies and SIS during the Second World War and after
Any assessment of the wartime performance of the Service must take into account Menzies’s role as Chief for all but the first two months of the conflict. In an environment (especially once Churchill became Prime Minister) where officials perceived to be inadequate were regularly replaced, Menzies was a great survivor. From November 1939 to the end of the war SIS had only one Chief, while its sister services MI5 and SOE both had three. Writing in the late 1960s, the distinguished historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, a wartime member of the Service, though admiring Menzies personally, described him as ‘a bad judge of men’ who ‘drew his personal advisers from a painfully limited social circle’ and never ‘really understood the war in which he was engaged’.13 Bill Cavendish-Bentinck, wartime chairman of the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee, told his biographer in the 1980s that Menzies became Chief merely because he was next in line, that ‘he would not have held the job for more than a year if it had not been for Bletchley’, and that ‘he was not a very strong man and not a very intelligent one’.14 The career SIS officer John Bruce Lockhart asserted that Menzies ‘didn’t know much about spying but had a good instinct for Whitehall politics’. Nevertheless, he was a canny bureaucratic operator and impressed those who mattered. Edward Beddington, who served as Deputy Director/Army in SIS from March 1942 until mid-1944 (and was himself no fool), worried about giving his entire allegiance to Menzies, and agreed to do so only on condition that he retained a right of direct access to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke. In his private memoirs (written in the late 1950s), Beddington recorded that he had known Menzies ‘as a young officer in World War I and did not trust him very far. He would, I thought, if he could do so at times pull wool over my eyes,’ but ‘would be much less inclined to do so if he knew that I had the right of access to the C.I.G.S., which would also confirm to him