I wondered whether, as an intelligence officer of the old school, he [Menzies] was quite the right choice to deal with the changed face of espionage and the multitude of new men and tasks which must be met.
H. Montgomery Hyde Secret Intelligence Agent1 The SIS that emerged out of the inter-war period was an organization that was designed primarily as an intermediary between intelligence consumers on the wider, overt machinery of government and whatever intelligence sources might be available. This role of screen or cut-out was certainly the original raison d’être for the Secret Service Bureau in 1909, and the subsequent 1921 arrangement (or, as Judd would have it, the 1917 MacDonogh reforms) created a series of formal structures that reinforced that basic relationship. The 1921 arrangement also created a headquarters infrastructure based more on horizontal communication between producers in the Group Sections and consumers represented by the Circulating Sections than on a direct, vertical chain of command under C. Both the centrality of consumer influence and the tendency towards what organization theorists call a ‘flat’ and ‘wide’ structure would prove crucial to the fits and starts of organizational development in the SIS during the new crisis in Europe and the Second World War.
The wartime development of the SIS can be broadly divided into three main trends. The first trend was the foreseen, planned (albeit more in theory than in practice) expansion of the organization under wartime mobilization. This involved adapting its operational side to meet both increased intelligence demand from consumers and the operational circumstances that emerged out of the first months and
year of the war. The rapid German advance in Europe swept away most of the agency’s resident presence on the Continent, and forced it to find new ways of penetrating Axis and occupied territory. The emergence of large-scale, sustained campaigns in the Middle East and North Africa (and later the Far East) forced SIS HQ, by noir at the Broadway Buildings, to devolve much of its work and control to theatre-level commands. Grand’s sabotage and subversion Section D and Richard Gambier-Parry’s radio and cipher Section VIII that had existed to varying degrees on a theoretical or skeletal basis rapidly became sizeable concerns with responsibilities well beyond their original, narrowly visualized briefs. Unsurprisingly, just as increased consumer demand involved expanding the operational side, so it also required an expansion of the consumer liaison side to cope in part with an anticipated flood of wartime material from the mobilized group side and in part with an anticipated diversification of secret functions, such as escape and evasion and covert political operations.
Much of the first trend involved coping with setbacks from the way the early stages of the war developed. The second trend was adapting new and emerging opportunities for intelligence work. The most significant such opportunity was almost certainly the successful attacks on the German Enigma codes by the Government Code and Cipher School (GC & CS), then still under the control of C. This source of intelligence, generally known as ULTRA (although there were a variety of different systems broken under different code names during the course of the war), affected many aspects of the SIS’s internal organization, as well as the structure and process of GC & CS.
The SIS found itself responsible for providing a secure wireless system for conveying ULTRA to theatre commands abroad, and the Abwehr ULTRA and hand-cipher breaks, collectively known as ISOS, opened the door to a vast range of counter-espionage human intelligence better known operations abroad run by the SIS in concert with the side of the domestic ‘Double-Cross’ campaign headed by MI5. The SIS also found itself mounting operations in Europe with or through the exiled intelligence services from occupied states such as Czechoslovakia, Poland and France.
The third trend that emerged throughout the wartime period was the failure of the model of a wide, flat internal organization that might have worked with a headquarters staff of 65 at the end of the First World War, and of probably only 25 by the outbreak of the Second World War, but was ill-suited to anything larger. That
intrinsic organizational problem was intensified during the first years of the war by the unenviable combination of rapidly escalating consumer demand and rapidly dwindling capability for production, as Europe collapsed in the first year of the war, and the Pacific empire collapsed under the Japanese onslaught in the second. Of these three trends, it was probably this third one that virtually brought the agency to its knees at the mid-point of the war, and raised serious questions about its future existence afterwards.
MOBILIZATION AND THE OUTBREAK OF WAR
The Second World War began badly for the SIS. Financial constraints between the wars had severely limited its ability to install stay-behind intelligence networks, and installing new networks in an occupied Continent was a difficult and painstaking process, with numerous setbacks. There were major problems that were, to be frank, self-inflicted. One of these was the wholesale compromise and effective collapse of the PCO system even before Continental Europe was overwhelmed by Germany’s blitzkrieg. For reasons which remain entirely unexplained, Sinclair, on the outbreak of war, merged the PCO with Dansey’s Z Organization. The Z Organization had arguably been set up as a backup system just because of the risk that the main organization had been compromised. Admittedly, the Z Organization’s reliance on business contacts and commercial cover meant that its prewar advantage of cover and mobility evaporated with the closure of occupied European borders, but combining the two served to undercut completely any back-up role the Z Organization might have played during the collapse of SIS’s Continental assets. Shortly after the amalgamation of the two systems, both the Hague Head of Station and the former Hague Z officer who had become his deputy were captured by the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst (SD), in the notorious Venlo incident on 9 November 1939.2
If the consolidation of the PCO and the Z Organization escapes easy explanation, so also does the decision in 1940 to divide the chain of command under C, and not merely to divide it but to do so ambiguously. In November 1939, Sir Hugh ‘Quex’ Sinclair died while still in office as C, even as the Venlo incident was coming to a head. At this point, something of a struggle broke out for control of
the SIS. Claude Dansey, who had been running the Z Organization from Geneva, viewed himself as the most senior and best qualified candidate for the post of Chief, and returned to Britain in pursuit of the position. In many ways, Dansey could make a plausible case, since, as we have seen, he had been with the SIS since 1917, and with MI5 before that. However, he had been formally out of the chain of command since the mid-1930s and had departed under something of a cloud (albeit a notional one). The Admiralty supported Rear-Admiral John H. Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI), a stern critic of the SIS, against the War Office’s candidate, Stewart Graham Menzies, head of Section IV and Sinclair’s unofficial deputy.
Perceiving the impossibility of obtaining the succession, Dansey put his support behind Menzies. To complicate matters further, Winston Churchill proposed his own candidate in the form of Captain Gerald Muirhead-Gould, then commanding the HMS Devonshire. However, as David Stafford has observed of these events, ‘even on the most generous interpretation Muirhead-Gould possessed no obvious qualifications for the top job in British intelligence’ apart from flattering Churchill over his stance on rearmament.3 In terms of Whitehall politics, the Admiralty had now provided the Chief twice in succession, in violation of the terms of the 1919 and 1921 Secret Service Committees, and Churchill’s intervention spurred the Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary and Permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office to unite behind Menzies. Menzies clinched the matter by producing a letter written by Sinclair nominating him as the new C.4Despite his efforts to acquire the post of Chief, Menzies then took a series of decisions that were to weaken profoundly his own control of the SIS for the remainder of the war.
In January 1940, Menzies appointed Dansey as his Assistant Chief of Service (AC/SS) and the head of Section V, and Valentine Vivian as Deputy Chief (DC/SS), but, as Robert Cecil has pointed out, ‘without clearly defining duties or precedence’.5 In principle, appointing at least one deputy made considerable sense since the lack of an obvious successor in 1939 had tied up a great deal of senior time and effort in the SIS and its consuming departments for nearly a month.
Moreover, the SIS was due for a rapid expansion as a result of wartime mobilization, and no single senior head of service could possibly run the entire agency single-handed. However, Menzies’s actions had the unanticipated consequence of splitting the chain of command in two, each officer nominally C’s immediate junior, but
each struggling for seniority over the other in a pitched campaign of mutually exclusive empire building. Robert Cecil has suggested that this was because Menzies was not strong enough to keep a tight reign on a ruthless and ambitious Dansey.6 Whatever Menzies’s actual reasoning, the end result was an ongoing round of internecine bureaucratic hostilities.
The result of this undefined arrangement was that the two officers appear to have moved into their vice-chiefdoms with little more than enhanced versions of their original responsibilities. Vivian maintained ultimate responsibility for Section V over its new head, Felix Cowgill. Dansey, however, as an operational officer, held sway over the G Sections and most offensive intelligence collection abroad.7 After a year, Vivian minuted C to the effect that he was becoming increasingly marginalized, complaining that SIS officers fell into three categories: those who treated his position with doubt and reservation, expressing concern that he was almost exclusively tied up with CE work deriving from Section V; those who were under the impression that his authority had been confined to the short-lived evacuation of headquarters personnel to Bletchley Park, the SIS’s
‘War Station’ or ‘Station X’, shortly after the outbreak of war; and, finally, those who were completely unaware of his promotion.8 Vivian further complained that he had virtually no access to the
‘policy, plans, methods or results’ of a number of the group and circulating sections, as ‘I am rapidly losing my touch with SIS policy and performance generally, except in so far as I am kept in the picture by my talks with CSS . . . the Section I Weekly Summaries, the daily bundle of “flimsies”, and the G2, G4, IVa, IVb and Sec. VI papers which those sections sometimes, but not consistently, refer to me.’9 Vivian’s detachment was worsened by the fact that Section V remained housed away from Broadway. After the initial Bletchley Park evacuation, it moved to Prae Wood, St Albans, where the Central Registry had also been moved out of the way of immediate threat from German bombs. It was not until 1943, when Section V moved back to London, to be housed at Ryder Street, that coordination would improve.10
The nature of the conflict was more than merely structural; it was reflected and intensified by the incompatibility of the two personalities. Dansey has been described variously as ‘corrupt, incompetent but with a certain low cunning’,11and as ‘the only real professional in MI6’.12 Philby describes Vivian as being ‘mortally
afraid’ of Dansey,13 but, if so, he was not alone. Philip Johns, variously IIIc, and Head of Station Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro before transfer to the Dutch section of the SOE, recalls that there was ‘a love/hatred feeling for [Dansey] in the organisation, but he was unquestionably a pillar of strength’. Johns’s personal impression was that ‘provided one could tolerate his pungent wit, often deliberately assumed to provoke a subordinate, he could be a most likeable character and a good, helpful friend.’14 James Langley, who headed the escape and evasion networks in Broadway from 1941 onwards, has recounted one incident of Dansey in all his acerbic glory, as he briefed Langley concerning his responsibilities as the SIS liaison for MI9, the joint-Service escape and evasion organization: ‘Just listen to me and don’t ask any silly damned questions. The likes of you in France and Belgium are causing me considerable trouble, which is being made worse by the apparent inability of the RAF to remain airborne over enemy territory. My job, and that of my agents, is to collect information about German intentions and activities, not to act as nursemaids to people who seem totally incapable of doing much to get back on their own.’15 Dansey was no less hostile to counter-espionage (despite starting his secret intelligence career in Kell’s MI5),16one officer recalling that he referred to it contemptuously as
‘ragoût de la concierge’.17
While Dansey proved an aggressive manager, Vivian, whatever his weaknesses, was, according to Philby, a ‘stickler for correct procedure’. Philby further acknowledged that ‘his sermons on the subject told me more about the intricacies of government machinery than I could have learned from the slapdash “result getters” such as Dansey or Cowgill’.18Indeed, it was Vivian who displayed a critical awareness of the weaknesses of the flat, wide and loosely integrated SIS organizational structure in his memorandum to Menzies, arguing that the Deputy Chief’s role should be ‘to form a coordination point, short of CSS himself, for the whole SIS machinery which would (a) save CSS a spate of constant references which he ought never to have to deal with and (b) integrate the present collection of independent units, known as SIS, into an organized and coherent whole’.19 Vivian’s concerns, however, would be ignored throughout the war, until the eventual programme of review and reorganization heralded by the European war’s drawing to a close. In the meantime, however, Menzies did little to resolve the conflict between the two deputies, perhaps because of the enormous pressures upon him with GC & CS
overloaded both on the supply and demand sides20 and customer dissatisfaction with his performance and that of the SIS. Indeed, Menzies took measures to insulate himself further in 1943 by assigning a Principal Staff Officer (PSO/CSS) in the form of the former IIIb, Christopher Arnold-Forster,21who was not technically in the chain of command but whose task, according to one officer from the period, amounted to handling the personnel and administrative
‘dirty work’ that Menzies preferred to avoid.22
With the start of a new general war, the demand for secret intelligence was bound to rise exponentially, as it had in the previous war. Consequently, there had to be alterations and extensions to the 1921 arrangement to meet consumers’ new needs. With the outbreak of war, the Service Branch directorates of intelligence began programmes of expansion and reorganization leading, in turn, to the expansion and reorganization of their liaison sections attached to the SIS HQ. The programme of expansion reflected two different sorts of process: on the one hand, Service intelligence departments were gearing up for an anticipated increased volume of information, while, on the other hand, new functions were being set up and installed in their home departments, and a number of these had implications for the SIS. Air Intelligence (AI) and Naval intelligence both began their expansion programmes before the actual outbreak of war, while the War Office reorganization did not take place until 1940. SIS also had to mobilize and bring in new recruits to handle its wartime operations. Both the SIS’s endogenous expansion and the attachment of newly mobilized officers brought in through the Circulating Sections resulted in a considerable influx of new, young personnel, leading to the now notorious conflict between the old, pre-war
‘professionals’ (some of whom had been in harness for decades) and the new ‘amateurs’ often recruited from or shortly after having graduated from university.23
One of the first C Sections to undergo structural alterations to meet the needs of the new conflict was Section II, Winterbotham’s Air Section. Prior to and at the outbreak of war, the AI liaison had grown from being simply Winterbotham and his personal staff to including the SIS air photographic unit and a scientific intelligence sub-section called IId. Photoreconnaissance was a short-lived undertaking, taken over by the RAF proper in the spring of 1940.24 By comparison, scientific and technical intelligence was to become a permanent feature of SIS infrastructure.
The origins of the SIS scientific intelligence section lay well before the outbreak of war in the creation under Sir Henry Tizard of the Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence in 1935. One of the committee’s conclusions was that Britain’s intelligence departments were ‘obtaining very little information about foreign scientific and technical developments’. What was immediately proposed, therefore, was that ‘a scientist should be attached for a trial period to AI in order to stimulate the flow of information’.25AI reported this intention to the JIC in February 1939, and expressed the hope that other service branches would follow suit, but they did not.26 The scientist in question, R.V. Jones, was attached to Winterbotham’s AI1c/Section II,27wherein Jones bore the title IId.28Although the preparations for a scientific intelligence liaison were announced in February, Treasury resistance to the expenditure implied delayed the actual implementation of the AI plan until September 1939, by which time, of course, war had already broken out.
As noted above, the Circulating Sections were, technically, sections or sub-sections of their respective Service Branch intelligence directorates attached to the SIS HQ in order to direct operations under-taken along the lines of their respective Service Branch requirements.
However, the status of IId and the scientific intelligence section was still more ambiguous than that. The bulk of IId’s brief lay in acting as a channel for scientific intelligence from all sources to the Tizard Committee and the Air Ministry Directorate of Scientific Research, including both SIS HUMINT and GC & CS SIGINT. This diverged from the original 1921 arrangement in that it gave IId a plurality of sources, and a brief for analysis as well as collation and dissemination.
In a 1945 report to the JIC on wartime scientific intelligence, Jones described the ambiguous status of IId as being ‘anomalous’ and a happy ‘accident’. Paradoxically, despite the need for compartmentalization and secrecy, Jones concluded that the ‘“free”
atmosphere of SIS organization, as compared with the “Civil Service”
atmosphere of the normal departmental offices, undoubtedly provided better conditions for Intelligence work. The success of Scientific Intelligence was therefore partly due to the liberality of C in allowing the section to use his accommodation and facilities, and ACAS(i) [Assistant Chief of Air Staff, Intelligence] in allowing one of his sections to spend most of its time outside his offices.’29 The strength of IId’s location was, therefore, the very emphasis on lateral communications
atmosphere of the normal departmental offices, undoubtedly provided better conditions for Intelligence work. The success of Scientific Intelligence was therefore partly due to the liberality of C in allowing the section to use his accommodation and facilities, and ACAS(i) [Assistant Chief of Air Staff, Intelligence] in allowing one of his sections to spend most of its time outside his offices.’29 The strength of IId’s location was, therefore, the very emphasis on lateral communications