MI6 and the Machinery of Spying by Davies Philip H. J

Author:Davies, Philip H. J.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-135-76000-7
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2016-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

The war, therefore, had created the circumstances for secure diplomatic radio to acquire a substantial degree of legitimacy, if only through precedent and the force of circumstances. There were even debates within the Foreign Office concerning whether or not British firms abroad should be allowed use of diplomatic wireless to communicate with their head offices in London.49 Although run primarily by the Foreign Office for communication with its missions abroad, the DWS remained nonetheless the medium for secure wireless communications with SIS stations abroad, and with human agents using clandestine transceivers. The DWS also operated a factory at Boreham Wood that manufactured radio equipment for overt and covert communications purposes. The Boreham Wood factory was managed on the same basis as the Royal Ordnance Factories; that is, although run by the Foreign Office and producing communications equipment for the Foreign Office and intelligence and security agencies, it was carried on the budget of the Ministry of Supply.50

Under the new arrangements, R8 was reduced to two functions: liaison with GCHQ, and overseeing the continuing work of Section N.51 As GCHQ liaison, R8 received GCHQ intercepts required by the SIS for its operations, while passing to GCHQ cryptomaterials acquired by that agency from its human sources or local technical operations. A single officer, R8, was expected to act as ‘GCHQ's man in the building’, much as were the Service Branch representatives R2, R3 and R4, although, unlike these secondments, R8 was an SIS officer.52 R8's work routine consisted of a weekly meeting on Tuesdays at GCHQ's London offices on Palmer Street, with a monthly meeting at GCHQ headquarters (in due course in Cheltenham).53 Section N's work went on in the post-war world much as it had before and during the Second World War, although the section had also acquired the minor additional task of processing the product of MI5 taps on foreign embassies for any information of operational intelligence value rather than counter-intelligence interest.54 However, as fewer and fewer countries felt the need to rely on the Foreign Office to transport their diplomatic bags, Section N's work progressively dwindled in the 1960s until eventually it petered out completely.55

The other side of the 1921 arrangement, SIS operational organization, was one of the areas most in need of streamlining and clarification. Under the 1946 reorganization, this was tidied up, and the P Sections were resorted, numbered more or less consecutively and grouped under regional Controllers, who in turn answered to a single Director of Production (D/P). D/P was Z Organization alumnus Kenneth Cohen. His task was to act as what one officer interviewed described as a ‘global controller’, overseeing, in the first instance, the wartime area controllerates, Controller Northern Area (C/NA), (Scandinavia and The Netherlands), Controller Western Area (C/WA), (Belgium, France, Italy, and the Iberian Peninsula), Controller Eastern Area (C/EA), (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), Controller Eastern Europe (C/EE), and new controllerates for the Middle East (C/ME) and Far East (C/FE).56 C/EE was to prove shortlived as the Soviet occupation forces closed down access to Eastern Europe.

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