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Troy. Patrick Salmon and his colleagues at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office have been of continuing help, as have members of the Security Service, the Historian of GCHQ, the staff of the Intelligence Corps Museum and Malcolm Llewellyn-Jones (Naval Historical Branch). To my great benefit, the late Baroness Park shared memories of the Service in the late 1940s, and I treasure conversations on wartime and post-war matters I had with the late Tony and Lena Brooks. While I have been working on this history I have encountered tremendous enthusiasm within SIS for the project, and invaluable help from many people on all sides of the Service. Necessarily, they must remain anonymous, though I can name Sir John Scarlett, whose inspiration and drive underpinned the project from the start. He has taken a close interest in the research and writing and has offered much valuable advice and criticism, while always assuring me that the balance of the narrative and the final judgments in the book must be mine alone.

Bill Hamilton of A. M. Heath & Co., Literary Agents, has been a cheerful tower of strength, as has his United States associate Michael Carlisle. Michael Fishwick at Bloomsbury and Eamon Dolan at Penguin USA companionably improved the final version and a marvellous team of professionals including Anna Simpson, Peter James, Catherine Best and Christopher Phipps helped me safely through the publication process.

My colleagues and students in the School of History and Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast have been gratifyingly accommodating about my constant absences from Belfast. The Head of School, David Hayton, has been unstintingly supportive from the start and colleagues, especially on the MA programme (in particular Paul Corthorn, Peter Gray, Andrew Holmes, Sean O’Connell and Emma Reisz),uncomplainingly shouldered extra burdens on my behalf. Many other friends have helped along the way, including Christopher Andrew, Tamsin and Guy Beach, Robert Blyth, Griselda Brook, Colin Cohen, John Dancy, John Fox, Nathalie Genet-Rouffiac, John Gooch, Peter Hennessy, Nicholas Hiley, Peter Martland, Alan Megahey, Eunan O’Halpin, David Robarge, Wesley Wark, and Eva and Charles Woollcombe. At a late stage in the project I got superb care from many in the National Health Service, especially Dr Seamus McAleer, Mr Harry Lewis and Mr Kieran McManus. My closest friends and family, above all Sally, Ben and Alex, should know how much I have appreciated their loving support and understanding, especially over the past year or so, but it does no harm to acknowledge again that most utterly unrepayable of all the many debts I have incurred in the research and writing of this history.

K.J., May 2010

List of Abbreviations

PART ONE

EARLY DAYS

1

The beginnings of the Service

SIS began in a curiously understated way. On 7 October 1909 Commander Mansfield Cumming, the founding Chief of the Service, spent his first full day at work. ‘Went to the office’, he wrote in his diary, ‘and remained all day, but saw no one, nor was there anything to do there.’1 Indeed, for about a month Cumming had little to do, until he and Captain Vernon Kell, who together had been appointed to run a Secret Service Bureau, were able to sort out the duties of their new organisation. Part of the delay in getting started stemmed from the very novelty of the enterprise. Its interdepartmental nature also held things up, entailing some delicate manoeuvres over the relative roles of the sponsoring departments - Foreign Office, Admiralty and War Office - a problem which was intermittently to recur during SIS’s first forty years. The profound secrecy of the new Bureau - another continuing feature - also made it difficult for Cumming to get going as quickly as he wished. By the end of 1909, nevertheless, he had successfully established an embryonic organisation devoted to the clandestine collection of foreign intelligence, which in form and function was recognisably the forebear of the Secret Intelligence Service, as it was eventually to become known.

Foreign threats,