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War Room at 10.15 on the morning of 26 December. Rivet makes no mention of any Christmas Eve engagement with Menzies (or anyone else) in his diary, though he does mention lunch with Winterbotham ‘and other English officers’ on 12 December.19 As to Ronin’s presence in Algiers, Paul Paillole stated in his memoirs that he and Ronin arrived in England on 19 December 1942, and were met at Broadway by Menzies, and also that the two men met André Dewavrin in London on 27 December. An SIS telegram confirms that Ronin was in London on 27 December and was scheduled to fly to Gibraltar two days later. There is no indication in the Algiers station signals of any visit by the Chief and, finally, a surviving SIS staff member who was in Algiers in 1942-3 (albeit interviewed long afterwards) had no recollection whatsoever of any visit by Menzies. From the available evidence, the only foreign trips that Menzies made during the war were to Naples and Paris in October and Brussels in December1944.20

The fact that SIS survived the Second World War at all has been ascribed primarily to the supremely and perhaps incalculably valuable work of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS): the breaking of the codes and the precious Ultra signals intelligence which hugely informed Allied policy and operations during the war. Since GC&CS came under SIS’s management, and its product was distributed through SIS channels (and, in the case of the Prime Minister, frequently by Menzies in person), the argument is that SIS, not itself a very competent or successful intelligence agency, rode on the back of Bletchley Park’s achievements to a position by the end of the war of complacent and virtually invulnerable superiority.21 This happy situation, it is argued, meant that SIS remained nominally in charge of Government Communications Headquarters (as GC&CS became known in 1946) for another decade; that it was able to ensure the abolition of its apparent rival SOE; and that, with the backing of the Foreign Office, it was able to fend off proposals for a unified British secret service and any attempts by the armed service departments to take it over. All these things came to pass, but it would be naive to assume that the emergence and survival of SIS after the end of the war can be ascribed solely to the golden goose of Bletchley Park. For Menzies, it was not simply a case of carrying the sigint golden eggs to the Prime Minister. The goose had to be cared for as well, and it is clear that without the combination (eventually) of a light-touch superintendence over the internal organisation of GC&CS with a readiness to represent its interests vis-à-vis other government departments and to provide essential administrative and technical support (the latter from Gambier-Parry’s inestimable Section VIII), the signals intelligence organisation could not have functioned as marvellously as in the end it did.

This is not to say that the relationship between SIS and its signals intelligence stepchild was wholly untroubled during the war, but, whatever the difficulties and frustrations the code-breakers and their colleagues may have experienced with Broadway’s management, it is clear that from a very early stage Menzies (as Sinclair had been before him) was very well aware of the importance of GC&CS, devoting resources to it (not least Bletchley Park itself) and allowing it to expand with exponential rapidity over the first eighteen months of the war. (It might be remarked, moreover, that the unsystematic, chaotic style of recruitment, based on personal contacts and school and university networks which served GC&CS so well, was precisely the kind of thing which has been criticised in the case of SIS.) Menzies fought off two attempts from the armed services to wrest control of GC&CS from SIS, in the spring of 1941 and the winter of 1941-2. Both were principally instigated from the Directorate of Military Intelligence but Menzies successfully argued that the inter-service nature of GC&CS’s work (analogous to that of SIS itself) made the direct involvement of any individual