The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [6]
As will be apparent from the reference notes, I have also had privileged access to relevant but closed documents held by other British government departments. These have been especially useful in helping place SIS in its wider bureaucratic context. With a very small number of exceptions, all other primary source materials (including some extremely valuable sources in foreign archives) are fully open to the public.
Quotations from documents in closed and open archives are reproduced exactly as originally written with the following exceptions: proper names rendered in most official papers in block capitals have been given in title case, with agent and operation code-names in quotation marks; numbering or lettering of individual paragraphs in cables and other documents has not been reproduced; in communications where names of people, places and organisations were given letter codes (‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’ and so on), the key being transmitted separately, the correct name has been substituted for the code-letter. Queried words in deciphered messages are as in the original (for example, ‘?reliable’). In a few cases punctuation has been silently adjusted for the sake of clarity. Since records from the SIS archive are not released into the public domain, no individual source references are provided to them. In this case I have followed the precedent set by past British official histories. Calculations of current value of historical sums of money are based on the Retail Price Index, as indicated in www.measuringworth.com which has also been used for exchange-rate information.
This account of SIS’s history finishes in 1949, at a moment when the Service had moved from being a tiny, one-man outfit to a recognisably modern and professional organisation. After forty years’ existence, SIS was on the threshold of four decades when the Cold War challenge of Soviet Communism would dominate its activities. But these are matters which I leave to my successor, if there is one.
Acknowledgements
Despite the fact that only one name may appear on the title page, no work of historical scholarship can be entirely the result of individual and solitary endeavour, even though there may have been plenty of that. We all, and I especially, owe debts to those who taught and inspired us (among whom I include Sir Harry Hinsley); to fellow scholars on whose exertions we have depended; to archivists and librarians who help preserve the precious source materials we use; and to friends and family for their support, and often forbearance, in the face of what might sometimes seem to be an all-consuming scholarly obsession.
My first debt is to Christopher Baxter who has worked on the project as a post-doctoral research fellow for four years during which he has sustained me with a remarkable capacity for hard work, meticulous scholarship, wise counsel and great steadiness under fire. Sally Falk, Mark Seaman and Tessa Stirling at the Cabinet Office provided constant welcome support, and I have benefited greatly from the unstinted assistance and advice of Gill Bennett and Duncan Stuart (respectively, former Chief Historian at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and SOE Adviser). Valuable research assistance and advice on particular historical events has been provided by Richard Aldrich, Stacey Barker (Ottawa), Jim Beach, Antony Best, Andrew Cook, John Ferris, M. R. D. Foot, the late Peter Freeman, Elspeth Healey (Austin, Texas), Jaroslav Hrbek (Prague), Peter Jackson, Sarah Kinkel (Yale), Ivar Kraglund (Oslo), Sébastien Laurent (Vincennes), Larry McDonald (College Park), Craig McKay, Judith Milburn and John Barter, Alexander Miller, Emmanuel Pénicaut (Vincennes), Keith Robbins, Alan Sharp, Yigal Sheffy, Richard Stoney (Land Registry), Martin Thomas, Phil Tomaselli and the late Thomas