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By Root 2589 0

services, consolidated and expanded with Allied governments-in-exile, as well as its exploitation of Vichy sources and the burgeoning Anglo-American relationship, produced enormous intelligence benefits. In neutral countries, and powerfully informed by the benefits of Ultra, SIS gained a stranglehold on the enemy’s intelligence services and it was able to contribute markedly to the Allies’ extremely successful deception operations. While intelligence returns in some areas (for example the Far East) were poor for most of the war, SIS networks made a major contribution to intelligence on V-weapons, to coast-watching in north-west Europe, to train-watching in the Low Countries and to the collection of the intelligence which so abundantly informed the D-Day landings and subsequent advance on Germany. In the Mediterranean theatre, there were significant achievements in Tunisia, and the Bari station was markedly productive over the last two years of the war. All this was underpinned by the admirable technical expertise of Section VIII, providing the secure communications without which both intelligence-gathering and its dissemination would indeed have been (to borrow Trevor-Roper’s words) ‘an irrelevancy’.

During the discussions about the postwar organisation of SIS in the Bland Report and after, Menzies’s contributions reveal him to have had more in common with Cumming than with Sinclair. Writing to Peter Loxley after having been shown an early draft of Bland, Menzies evinced no inclination whatsoever towards the creation of a unified security and intelligence organisation. A ‘complete amalgamation of effort’, he observed, ‘may prove to be neither practicable nor desirable’. In response to Loxley’s concerns about the potential political leanings of the Service, Menzies insisted on a remarkable manifesto of political neutrality being included in the final report. He believed ‘it to be of great importance that the S.I.S. should avoid incurring any suspicion that it is the instrument of any particular political creed in this country’ and that any targeting of political groups, whether ‘Nazis, Communists [or] Anarchists’, should specifically have to be confirmed by SIS’s Foreign Office political masters. A quarter of a century on, there is a clear echo here of Cumming’s concern that the Service might become identified with any one specific political party. Though (as with Cumming) we know nothing of Menzies’s personal political opinions, bearing in mind his own privileged social background and upbringing they are unlikely to have been very left of centre. He would, however, certainly have remembered the trouble Sinclair got into with domestic British intelligence operations, if not also the slightly equivocal political role the Service had played during the Zinoviev Letter affair, and on the evidence had learned from it, like Cumming displaying a commendable and fastidious political judgment.

One of the clear measures of SIS’s success over its first forty years was its sheer institutional survival. This is not a trivial matter. It had to endure in a kind of Whitehall Darwinian jungle, where the survival of the fittest was the order of the day. This constantly varying environment, where priorities, policies, politics and personalities were continually changing, was populated by very clever and ambitious people, as well as by very ambitious and powerful institutions. That SIS (with essential Foreign Office backing) saw off repeated attempts to take it over is testimony at the very least to the absence of any feasible alternative and at the best to a job well done. The nature of SIS’s survival, and its standing, is usefully encapsulated in discussions about the appointment of the fourth Chief in 1949 when the Foreign Office began to think about a possible successor to Menzies.

‘The present incumbent has done well,’ observed William Hayter (head of the Services Liaison Department) in April 1949. ‘But he has held the appointment for about 10 years now, and it is perhaps time that there was a new approach to the questions involved,