The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [5]
But, on the whole, the story of human intelligence is not generally one of fiendishly clever master-spies, or Mata Hari-like seductresses (though in this volume the keen-eyed reader will find one or two possible examples of these types), achieving fantastic, war-winning intelligence coups. It is more like a pointillist painting, containing tiny fragments of information, gathered by many thousands of individual men and women in circumstances fraught with danger, which need to be collected together to provide the big picture. Watchers along the Norwegian coast in the Second World War, for example, provided precious information about enemy ship movements. These individuals had to get to what were inevitably exposed situations; once there they had not only to collect their intelligence unobserved, but also to communicate it quickly back to London; and at each stage of the process the penalty for discovery was almost certain death. In both world wars, ordinary men and women in enemy-occupied Europe ran similar risks, for example train-watching, carefully logging the movements of railway trains and their cargoes and endeavouring to identify the military units they carried. We ought not to pass over in silence the astonishingly brave actions of these numberless, and for the most part nameless, people, few of whom were the kind of spies so beloved of film and fiction, but many of whom contributed to the successes of British intelligence during the first half of the twentieth century.
The material which survives in the SIS archive is more abundant on the process and administration of acquiring intelligence than on the intelligence itself. ‘Sources and methods’, the most sensitive of all aspects of intelligence work, are embedded in this material: names of officers, agents, sources, helpers, organisations, commercial companies, operational techniques, various sorts of technical expertise and the rest. While some of these no longer pose any security risk - for example there seems little danger that national security may now be jeopardised by revealing 1940s wireless technology - documents relating to agents and their activities have the potential to jeopardise them and their families, even long after they may have ceased working for SIS. A typical agent file, for instance, may, without giving very much detail, note that she (or he) produced ‘much valuable intelligence’. The bulk of the documents may thereafter contain details for years afterwards of the agent’s address (say in some foreign city), pension payments and perhaps reports of visits by an SIS welfare officer, bearing a Christmas bottle of whiskey or some other suitable gift. This is exactly the kind of material which the Service rightly believes can never be released.
This history, written as it were from headquarters, reflects the surviving SIS documentation upon which it is primarily based. This means that it has sometimes been difficult to recreate the personal relationships between case-officers and agents which lie at the heart of human intelligence work. Busy case-officers did not often have the time to write reflective notes on their agents’ personalities or motivations, though some hints of these fascinating matters have, happily, survived, and are included in my narrative. I have in general used memoir material very sparingly. Although often revealing on the personal side, the recollection of events and emotions, sometimes many years after, presents critical problems of interpretation and assessment for the historian, particularly in the matter of espionage and other covert activities, which are not infrequently cloaked about with a melodramatic air of secrecy, conspiracy, conjecture and invention. This is not to say that such things do not exist - indeed examples of each might be found in this book - and I have drawn on secondary sources in cases where they seem to