The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [441]
The discussion about a possible new Chief reveals how, after forty years of existence, senior politicians and officials viewed SIS in its wider governmental context. No one contradicted Hayter’s assertion that the job was ‘the most important post in the whole intelligence organisation’ and even though Hayter had also noted that GCHQ was ‘now for all practical purposes entirely independent of the Secret Service’, there was not the slightest suggestion (even in the aftermath of its immense wartime achievements) that signals intelligence had priority over SIS’s human intelligence responsibilities. Bevin’s determination that the armed services should not continue to have a monopoly of the top job reflected a widely held Foreign Office opinion that the Service was an interdepartmental organisation. It also perhaps embodied a desire for SIS to be primarily a civilian service, and certainly under overall Foreign Office control. Having from the very beginning beaten off successive armed service department attempts to take over SIS, the Foreign Office was not now going to relax its hold on the appointment of the Chief.
Over its first forty years, at least so far as the Directors of Naval and Military Intelligence were concerned, the Service moved from being an integrated, though publicly deniable, part of their empires (and one staffed by serving or retired members of the armed services) to its recognisably modern situation as a distinctly civilian and autonomous agency under the overall supervision of the Foreign Office. Indeed, the transition from a naval and military agency to a civilian one is illustrated by the fact that the first four Chiefs were all serving officers at the time of their appointment - two sailors and two soldiers in turn - but all the Chiefs thereafter (though they may have spent time in the armed services) have been civilians. In 1949, moreover, the involvement of the Prime Minister in the discussions also reflected the high national importance of SIS and its leadership. It was evidently not a decision the Foreign Secretary could take unilaterally. And Attlee’s suggestion for yet another review, revealing a concern that matters could still be improved in the intelligence community, further emphasises the crucial significance which the government at the highest level invested in the intelligence function as a whole. This was particularly so in the postwar years when economic weakness, relative military decline and the rise of significant superpower challenges from the USA and USSR put a special premium on intelligence performance - one area, perhaps, where the United Kingdom might still yet lead the world. Central to this was the Secret Intelligence Service, which by 1949 had become a valued and permanent British institution.
Menzies was fond of reminding his Foreign Office masters that both Colonel Walter Nicolai (Germany’s First World War Military Intelligence chief ) and Vladimir Orloff of Russia, ‘who in the past were considered the two greatest authorities on secret service work’, both ‘demanded forty years as the minimum period required for the establishment of a really efficient secret intelligence service’.28 So it appears to have been for SIS. In 1949 Sir Stewart Menzies, with a staff of over two thousand at home and overseas,29 had come a long way from Commander Mansfield Cumming sitting alone in his new office in October 1909 wondering what he might do. But the task facing them was essentially the same: Cumming, Sinclair, Menzies, and their colleagues, had the duty, indeed the privilege, of covertly and discreetly informing the British government about the threats