Spying on the World

by Richard J Aldrich

  38. The organisation we have in mind would cover the needs of the United Kingdom, India, Burma and the Colonial Empire. It should, however, be possible to make mutually satisfactory arrangements with the Dominions whereby it undertook certain work on their behalf in return for relief in some non-Dominion areas which could conveniently be covered by organisations within the Dominions. It is hoped, shortly, to come to an arrangement with the United States whereby they undertake the principal responsibility for aerial reconnaissance in the Far Eastern war. It would undoubtedly be in the common interest if a similar rationalisation of responsibilities between ourselves and America could be maintained in peace.

  39. While, as we have said, we recognise that the operational control of flying units can hardly be vested in any inter-service committee and must remain with the Royal Air Force, we believe that the Central organisation might well take over such responsibilities as the following:-

  (1) The training of photographic reconnaissance interpreters, pattern makers and model makers.

  (2) The School of Photography and the Photographic Interpretational Wing of the School of Military Intelligence.

  (3) The Photographic Reconnaissance Development Unit and the Army Photographic Research Centre.

  (4) The Technical Organisation required for the selection and installation of photographic equipment in reconnaissance aircraft.

  40. A development of the existing organisation has been that No. 106 Group has undertaken the responsibility for certain high-speed courier air services. This has followed from the need to distribute the product of aerial photographic intelligence without delay to consumers in war theatres. During recent international conferences No. 106 Group has flown urgent despatches between the United Kingdom and the scene of the Conference, e.g ., Moscow and Athens. It is evident that the need for this Service will exist in peace. We understand that the Foreign Office are already considering the advisability of equipping certain of their missions abroad with aircraft. The need for a high-speed courier service, however, is likely to be felt by other Departments, including the Service Departments and the Colonial and Dominions Offices. It is for consideration whether it would not be economical for such a service to remain the responsibility of the organisation charged with the distribution of air photographs and in peace time be directed by the J.I.C. in common with secret telecommunications — with which we deal later.

  IV.— Departments and Organisations not Directed by the J.I.C. which Deal with Intelligence.

  The Political Warfare Executive .

  41. The intelligence organisation of the Political Warfare Executive was started when an intelligence requirement became apparent for the production of leaflets and clandestine broadcasting. The clandestine broadcasts are designed to give the impression of coming from inside enemy or enemy-occupied country. It was therefore necessary to ensure that they should be based on the most accurate intelligence, so as to carry conviction. P.W.E. also undertook on behalf of other organisations responsibility for training certain agents. This created a need for further detailed information. With the growth of P.W.E. it became necessary to provide a considerable volume of intelligence as the background for policy-making and for the output for open, as well as clandestine, broadcasting. In course of time, P.W.E. Intelligence accumulated much detailed information about contemporary administration and political conditions in German Europe. This in turn led to a somewhat anomalous arrangement under which the hand-books on these subjects required by those planning for Civil Affairs tasks were prepared and produced by P.W.E., since P.W.E had the information and it was not so readily available elsewhere. The present P.W.E. intelligence organisation, which is a large one, is designed to carry out the following tasks:—

  (a ) The provision of background intelligence (political and social) in enemy and enemy-occupied countries on which to base political warfare policy and action, for propaganda output.

  (b ) The service of quick information for immediate use in propaganda.

  (c ) The provision of intelligence on governmental and administrative machinery (this relates principally to the requirements of Civil Affairs).

  42. While it is evident that in any future war the technique of political warfare will play a considerable part, it is uncertain how far it will be thought necessary for His Majesty’s Government to engage in open or secret propaganda in time of peace. The tendency will certainly be to close down on these activities. At the same time, it is important that the benefit of the experience gained in this field during the present war should be preserved and that plans should be laid for the creation of an appropriate organisation for war purposes. Here again it is to be hoped that if war comes again it will be possible for political warfare to be conducted under some more closely integrated arrangements with the staffs dealing with other forms of warfare than at present. The only reason why P.W.E. found it necessary to build up the considerable intelligence organisation now in existence was that they could not obtain their needs from any one other source. We have had the advantage of visiting their organisation and studying some of their files. We were impressed by the volume of the material that had been collected and the care that had been taken in collating it. A considerable effort is made to provide other interested organisations with the product of the P.W.E. intelligence, in the form of intelligence summaries made up of extracts from the enemy, enemy-occupied and neutral press, and of summaries of broadcasts, &c. Similarly, a fair volume of material collected by other agencies finds its way to P.W.E., there to be collated and assessed for political warfare purposes.

  43. While the reason for the creation of this organisation is easy to understand, it is, in our opinion, highly regrettable that any such organisation should have been necessary. It provides a vivid example of the expense that results from unco-ordinated effort. The handbooks produced for Civil Affairs cover, in some respects, a rather different type of material to that included in the operational handbooks of I.S.T.D. At the same time, we find it hard to believe that, had it been administratively possible for a single organisation to meet both needs, a considerable economy in man-power and effort would not have resulted.

  44. We think it is useful to record that the P.W.E. intelligence organisation possesses some 7,000 files and records of some 190,000 personalities. The files cover a wide range of subjects, of which the following are examples:-

  (1) Public opinion abroad as to foreign and domestic issues and the organisations or forces moulding it.

  (2) Enemy propaganda output and the policy underlying it.

  (3) Political parties and activities.

  (4) The machinery of Government, central and local.

  (5) Social and cultural organisations and influences.

  (6) Economic information to illustrate living conditions.

  45. While some of the information in this great library is of ephemeral interest, much must be worth preserving. We understand that P.W.E. will shortly be closing down that part of their intelligence organisation which provides material for Civil Affairs handbooks. We think it would be regrettable if these handbooks were not kept up to date and the work of maintaining the files were abandoned. We recommend, therefore, that these records, as a temporary measure be handed over to I.S.T.D. and that, pending the creation of a Central Intelligence Bureau, I.S.T.D. should accept responsibility (and should take over the necessary staff from P.W.E.) for keeping alive such part of this work as it is desired to preserve. It is recognised that, if the files are to be handed over to I.S.T.D., it will be necessary to arrange for the continuation of the flow of material from which they have been built up. Certain of the records of P.W.E. should, we believe, be handed over to other organisations for them to examine and, where necessary, to retain. For example, the personality records should, we suggest, be handed over to S.I.S., and the files relating to social and economic intelligence be accepted by the Enemy Advisory Branch of the Foreign Office.

  Postal and Telegraph Censorship .

  46. The P
ostal and Telegraph Censorship Department is, in its present form, a war-time creation. It is, in our opinion, in many ways a model of what an intelligence collecting and disturbing organisation should be. At the same time, its position in the war machine is as anomalous as that of many of the other organisations with which we have dealt. It is controlled by a Director-General who is responsible to the Minister of Information in his personal capacity, though not to the Ministry of Information. There exists an inter-departmental committee on censorship at the official level. Although its primary functions are the collection of intelligence and the prevention of intelligence from reaching the enemy, the Censorship Department is not represented on the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee, nor is it part of the Chiefs of Staff organisation. In practice, the Department has worked in close contact with the J.I.C. as well as with the Service Departments individually, and owing largely to the efficiency of its administration and the wisdom with which it has been directed, it has given general satisfaction and met with very little criticism.

  47. The Information and Records Branch of the Postal and Telegraph Censorship organisation has aimed at providing for simultaneous distribution of the product of censorship to all interested Departments in accordance with the requirements submitted by and agreed with those Departments. It has been so devised as to operate with great speed and flexibility. The user Departments appoint officers, provided with small staffs who serve within the Censorship organisation and there handle the volume of material and ensure that all divisions within their Departments receive what they require. Censorship Stations in all parts of the globe are provided with what are called “allocation lists,” which are continually revised by an Allocations Committee. Annexed to this report (Annex A) is a detailed description of the method of working of the Information and Records Branch of Imperial Censorship. This method appears to us to provide a simple and speedy method of ensuring that the collectors of intelligence know what to look for and that intelligence received goes to those interested in receiving it. From the Annex it will be seen what a formidable volume of material is dealt with by censorship, and how rapidly it has been found possible to deal with it.

  48. Save for the needs of the Security Service and the police, censorship has no place in the life of this country in peace-time. The complex but remarkably effective system whereby practically no cable traffic in the world escapes the control of our censors could not be maintained in peace. The internal censorship carried out unobtrusively, has revealed much useful information during the war, but since its legal basis was something very like one of those “general warrants” on which the Courts since the days of John Wilkes have frowned so heavily, there can be little likelihood of retaining it in peace. It therefore behoves us to ensure that the records of the Postal and Telegraph Censorship Department are preserved and that machinery be devised which can be rapidly set in motion and expanded in an emergency. We believe that censorship is just as much an instrument of defence intelligence as, for example, C.S.D.I.C., and that the present divorce of the Department from the central defence organisation cannot be justified. The nucleus of the war-time censorship department should in peace have its home in the Central Intelligence Organisation whose establishment we recommend. There would, we believe, be much to be gained by closer integration of censorship with other intelligence producing agencies — and this could be achieved by the method we advocate. Censorship is concerned with the product of intercepted wireless traffic and hence with the activities of the “Y” Services and R.S.S.; with the product of cryptography and hence with the Government Code and Cypher School; with the technique of secret inks, and hence with some of the technical activities of S.I.S.

  The Secret Services .

  49. We understand that other authorities have been or are being made responsible for detailed examination of the working of the two main branches of the Secret Service, and will submit recommendations as to their future. It would therefore, be inappropriate for us to attempt in any way to cover the same ground. There are however, certain general points which have come to our notice and which we feel it useful to record. It is stated in an earlier paragraph that we believe that it should be axiomatic that the Secret Services should not be called upon to provide intelligence that can be obtained by acknowledgeable means. We recognise that there is a certain type of intelligence relating to the internal security of this country itself which is not, and may not become the responsibility of the Defence Organisation. Subject to that, we doubt whether any case can be made for the retention of the present system, under which the responsibility for counter-espionage is divided between two authorities with no better basis for division than that of geography. The work of foreign agents is not limited by political boundaries, and it can only hamper the effectiveness of our machine for such boundaries to determine the means by which we combat the activities of foreign agents.

  50. We think it safe to say that after the end of the present war, by far the most important intelligence requirement for a country such as ours will be accurate information rapidly acquired of scientific and technical developments in other countries. Our geographical position, our enormous commitments and our limited man-power will make it essential for us to obtain a technical lead over the rest of the world in compensation for our weaknesses in other directions. That being so, we will have to husband our resources in intelligence and ensure that the different branches of the Secret Service, if the Secret Service remains divided, shall not bid against each other for the limited amount of technical talent that will be available.

  51. While we do not propose in this report to make specific recommendations for the organisation of liaison between the fighting Services and S.I.S. and the Security Service, we do wish to record our conviction of the importance of careful selection of officers of high quality from the Services before attachment to these bodies. Whether or not the criticism is justified, it is unfortunate that in the early days of this war there existed an impression in Whitehall which came to our notice, that certain of the officers lent to the Secret Services by the Service Departments were officers for whom it was not easy to find employment elsewhere. If that were true, or even appeared to be true, the effect on the prestige of the Secret Services and therefore on the support they enjoy, must have been deplorable.

  The Government Code and Cypher School .

  52. In this war the value of the product of the Government Code and Cypher School has been beyond price. While it is true that we cannot be sure that we will be able in future to retain this great advantage over our competitors in the same field, we have no doubt that it is of high importance that research in cryptography in peace time should be energetically pursued. Here again, however, some pulling together of the strings appears to us to be desirable. We can see no case for the S.I.G.I.N.T. Board, which under C.’s Chairmanship is made up of members of the J.I.C., remaining apart from that organisation. It can only be to the interest of the consumers of intelligence generally, no less than that of the cryptographers, that a single high-level organisation should deal with the policy directing this specialised branch of intelligence as well as all other work in the intelligence field. The School, though it is, and should in our opinion remain, under the direction of “C.”, is not a part of S.I.S. We are not satisfied that there is any valid case for the school continuing to be carried on the Foreign Office vote. By far the greater part of its work in war is carried out for the Defence Services. In peace the proportion of political to military work will shift, but we feel that it would be both logical and advantageous for the expenses of the school to be borne on whatever vote carries the other inter-service and inter-departmental intelligence agencies.

  53. There has been during the war a natural tendency to insist that each cobbler should stick to his last, to refuse to permit S.I.S. to circulate their appreciations of the intelligence they produce or G.C. and C.S. to contribute views on the meaning and importance to be attached to the messages they have decyphered. In view of the rat
her haphazard way in which these various organisations have grown up and of the different authorities to which they are now responsible, this has probably been the right policy. We do believe, however, that it should be possible under a new dispensation to obtain value from the contributions of many outside the Foreign Office and Service Departments in the assessment of intelligence received. The experienced cryptographer can make useful deductions from the cyphering characteristics of the traffic with which he deals, just as R.S.S. have developed a remarkable skill in analysis of signalling characteristics. The telegraph censors, with their unrivalled knowledge of commercial signalling traffic, have also something to contribute to the appreciators, the interceptors and the decoders. We have had the advantage of seeing appreciations written within S.I.S., which under the present rules cannot receive a general circulation, which struck us as being valuable and important.

  54. Apart from the positive value to be obtained from the seeking contributions [sic] from all who offer them, there is advantage in stimulating those working in particular parts of the intelligence machine to an interest in the wider picture to which they are contributing. This would induce a healthy rivalry and should do much to counteract the ill-effects of a mechanical routine. We discount the argument that any such policy would endanger the security of the highly secret material in question. It is not by treating intelligent men and women as robots that security is best assured.

  The “Y” services .