[2011]

A report on post-war organisation of intelligence was presented to the Joint Intelligence Subcommittee of the Chiefs of Staff (the JIC, hereafter ‘the Committee’) on 10 January 1945 and was given the striking subtitle of ‘The Intelligence Machine’, in itself a sign of the new way of thinking about intelligence that had developed during the war. The idea of intelligence as a single entity had some ancestry. Shakespeare wrote of it in the singular, as in ‘Where hath our Intelligence been drunk, where hath it slept?’ in his King John, and the 1945 report followed this antique usage in referring to ‘our Intelligence Service’ and ‘our Secret Service’. But this idea of ‘the intelligence’ as a collective had always been a shadowy one. This report was the first serious British attempt – possibly the first attempt anywhere – to set out a plan for it as a complete, interlocking, peacetime system, perhaps the first recognition of intelligence power as part of the modern state.

The individual intelligence institutions in it were of course older. The British Navy and Army had acquired their intelligence directors and staffs in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but there was no particular thought then about a collective identity or cooperation between them. A wide-ranging investigation of intelligence led to the creation of the Secret Service Bureau in 1909, but the result was to separate covert collection from the naval and army directorates, not bring all the elements together. Though the First World War produced intelligence activity on a quite unprecedented scale, it remained organised mainly in single-service bodies, not joint-service ones. Even before 1914 the offices just established for espionage and counterespionage were developing separately, and from the post-war reviews of 1919 and 1921 they emerged as the separate civilian Security Service (MI5) and Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6), divided roughly between home and foreign targets. (This chapter uses these two organisational titles but otherwise uses ‘service’ and ‘services’ to denote armed forces.) The post-war reviews also established codebreaking in the civilian Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) under C, the head of SIS (the abbreviation ‘C’ for ‘Chief’ dates back to the first occupant of the post and is still used).