The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [438]
While Menzies was nominally Director of GC&CS, Alastair Denniston, an Olympic field hockey player who had worked in the Admiralty’s code-breaking Room 40 during the First World War, had been its operational head since the School’s establishment in 1919. By the beginning of the war its administration was carried out by officers in Broadway with advice from a Joint Committee of Control composed of representatives from SIS and GC&CS. But this cumbersome system broke down under the enormous pressures of wartime demands and sudden growth. In October 1941, some weeks after Menzies had shown Churchill around Bletchley Park, four cryptanalysts wrote directly to the Prime Minister telling him of serious delays in their work due to staff shortages. ‘As we are a very small section with numerically trivial requirements,’ they wrote, ‘it is very difficult to bring home to the authorities finally responsible either the importance of what is done here or the urgent necessity of dealing promptly with our requests.’ The need was mostly for additional female clerical personnel, though they reported that ‘some of the skilled male staff’ who had so far ‘been exempt from military service’ were ‘now liable to be called up’. The cryptanalysts claimed that they did ‘not know who or what’ was responsible for their ‘difficulties’, but they specifically exempted Commander Edward Travis (Denniston’s deputy), who had ‘all along done his utmost to help us in every possible way’. Churchill responded immediately with instructions marked ‘action this day’ that the cryptanalysts were to ‘have all they want on extreme priority’, and on 18 November Menzies reported that every possible measure was being taken.23
In December 1941, responding to a renewed attempt by the War Office to assert control over GC&CS, the Chiefs of Staff asked the ‘Y’ Committee (which comprised Menzies and the three service Directors of Intelligence) to look into the administration of signals intelligence. The following February Menzies implemented a series of reforms which finally ‘inaugurated a period of continued improvement’. Diplomatic and commercial cryptanalysis was taken away from Bletchley Park and relocated in London under Commander Denniston, as Deputy Director (C), while the much more extensive armed forces work remained in place under Travis who, as Deputy Director (S), was given sole responsibility for all the work at Bletchley Park, subject only to control by Menzies and the Y Board on which Travis himself sat as GC&CS’s representative. In February 1944 Travis was formally appointed Director of GC&CS (including responsibility for diplomatic and commercial work), with Menzies as Director-General.24 From early in the war Menzies had been under sustained pressure to sort out the administration (and thus enhance the productivity) of all the work under his control. While he may not have responded as quickly as some critics desired (especially those in the armed services Directorates of Intelligence), when he did act he did so both decisively and, on the whole, effectively. Menzies’s demotion of Denniston and replacement by Travis reflected an unsentimentality when it came to making tough decisions about the competence of longstanding colleagues, and was of a piece with his treatment of Valentine Vivian, when he was demoted from DCSS to be just a Deputy Director in March 1943, and of Rex Howard in September 1943, when Air Commodore Peake was brought in above him to take over the Service’s administration.
Neither Menzies nor SIS was perfect, but Trevor-Roper’s claim that SIS, which at the end of the war ‘remained totally unreformed’, was ‘unimportant’ and ‘an irrelevancy’ to the Allied war effort25 is simply preposterous. Admittedly starting from a low base, perhaps exemplified above all by the grievous damage and embarrassment of the Venlo incident, SIS made a significant and major contribution to victory in 1945. Menzies’s stewardship of the signals intelligence effort is but one aspect of this. SIS’s prewar liaison contacts with foreign intelligence