The Official History of the Joint Intelligence Committee

Volume I: From the Approach of the Second World War to the Suez Crisis

Michael S. Goodman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134715848
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Volume One of the Official History of the Joint Intelligence Committee draws upon a range of released and classified papers to produce the first, authoritative account of the way in which intelligence was used to inform policy.

For almost 80 years the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) has been a central player in the secret machinery of the British Government, providing a co-ordinated intelligence service to policy makers, drawing upon the work of the intelligence agencies and Whitehall departments. Since its creation, reports from the JIC have contributed to almost every key foreign policy decision taken by the British Government. This volume covers the evolution of the JIC since 1936 and culminates with its role in the events of Suez in 1956.

This book will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, British politics, international diplomacy, security studies and International Relations in general.

Dr Michael S. Goodman is Reader in Intelligence and International Affairs in the Department of War Studies, King's College London. He is author or editor of five previous books, including the Routledge Companion to Intelligence Studies (2013).

Part One

Origins, 1936–1939

1 Why Joint Intelligence?

The Need for Central Intelligence

On Tuesday 7 July 1936, a few weeks before the spectacular opening by Adolf Hitler of the Berlin Olympics, seven men sat around a large ornate table in a four storey building just opposite the entrance to Downing Street to discuss what was known of the growing military challenge that Germany posed for the British Empire. Six of the men were officers representing the intelligence staffs of the Royal Navy, Army and Royal Air Force. The seventh was a shadowy civilian whose background was in an organisation that had then no official existence, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) or MI6. The building in which the meeting was taking place, No. 2 Whitehall Gardens, had made history before when an earlier occupant, Benjamin Disraeli, had held meetings of his Cabinet there.¹ Outside the front entrance the trees were the last remaining remnant of the Privy Garden of the Old Palace of Westminster.² Now the large ornate rooms, modelled in the French style similar to the interior of the Palace at Versailles, housed the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) and the Chiefs of Staff (COS) Committee and it was at their direction that the key figures in British intelligence were meeting formally in committee for the first time. Outside the storm clouds gathered overhead and as the clock chimed 11 o’clock in the Secretary’s Room on the first floor the chairman, a Brigadier in the East Yorkshire Regiment, opened proceedings.³ The Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) had come into being.

No. 2 Whitehall Gardens has long been demolished and the present Ministry of Defence stands on its site; the CID disappeared with the end of Empire and decolonisation. While the military threat from Germany and the Axis was eventually defeated, followed by the demise of the Soviet Union after the long Cold War, threats to the UK and its interests remain but now come from diverse sources, including terrorists, proliferators and international criminal gangs. Throughout each of the last 78 years the JIC has, however, continued to meet in Whitehall, within a stone’s throw of its original meeting place, to provide Ministers and other policymakers, diplomats, and military commanders with the best assessment of the intelligence available to the British authorities.

The machinery of British intelligence has one of the longest histories of any modern intelligence system. William Burghley and Francis Walsingham set up the first intelligence gathering machinery in Elizabethan times but it was not until 1909 that the modern British intelligence establishment was founded. In October of that year the Secret Service Bureau (SSB) was formed. This quickly developed into a home branch – what would become the Security Service (MI5) – and a foreign branch – the forerunner to SIS.

In 1936 a decision was made to create a central clearing house for intelligence: the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee (JIC).⁴ Its creation owed something to the origins of the modern British secret service. The rationale in creating the SSB in 1909 was driven by the emergence of an external threat. Though there had existed similar fears before, the perceived German menace was new in the sense that it directly threatened the British mainland itself. Spy fever, fuelled publicly by the novels of William Le Queux, was at its height. The belief that there were upwards of 80,000 German agents secretly working in the British Isles created the need for a two-pronged approach: an internal organisation to guard against such a threat, and an external organisation to watch for an indication of any war which might awaken the agents into action.⁵ In the 1930s a new version of this threat was causing concern but in a different way, with fears over German re-armament confusing views about Hitler’s intentions.

An appreciation of the international situation and the means of dealing with it helps explain why a centralised structure for intelligence was not initiated before 1936. Sir Harry Hinsley, author of the Official History of British Intelligence in the Second World War, suggests that the decision to create the JIC stemmed from the belief that while centralisation was not key, further collaboration between the various Service departments was. In this way, ‘most of the pressures for change in the inter-war years resulted from the fact that increasing professionalisation tended to separate these functions and to call for new, specialised interdepartmental bodies to undertake them.’⁶ Yet the JIC was essentially ineffective in the build-up to the outbreak of war, and the reason for this lies in the nature of British intelligence in the mid-1930s.⁷

Within the British government there were several types of intelligence. Vice Admiral William James, the Deputy Chief of the Naval Staff, referred to them as ‘service’ and ‘special’ intelligence.⁸ Of the ‘service’ variant there existed within the military three different intelligence organisations: one for the Admiralty, another for the War Office, and one for the Air Ministry. These organisations were affected by the perception of an increased German threat. Following Germany’s occupation of the Rhineland in 1936, the post of a separate Director of Military Intelligence was re-established in the War Office. In the Air Ministry, concerns about the expanding German Air Force led to the creation of a Deputy Director of Intelligence.⁹ Finally, in the Admiralty, an Operational Intelligence Centre was resurrected.¹⁰ There was remarkably little discussion or collaboration between them. At a higher level, the CID provided a forum whereby military and civilian personnel met to discuss policy options, but it appears that such discussions only rarely involved intelligence matters. The product of these three Service intelligence organisations was, unsurprisingly, overwhelmingly military in content: it reflected analyses of enemy capabilities with little or no attempt to gauge intentions. Furthermore, each was concerned almost exclusively with the remit of its parent Service, be it the Royal Navy, the Army or the Royal Air Force.

Alongside the military organisations were the civilian or ‘special’ intelligence agencies. Following the investigations into the nature and scope of civilian intelligence in the early 1920s by the Secret Service Committee of the Cabinet, the various agencies had become central components – if undeclared – of government with more clearly defined roles.¹¹ SIS, under its Foreign Office (FO) supervision, was responsible for collecting information outside the British Empire. It was to remain separate from the FO itself, and as such some of its officers were stationed under the guise of ‘Passport Control Officers’, others under business cover.¹² The three Service intelligence branches seconded a number of staff to SIS yet, crucially, SIS was not solely concerned with military matters and could, if required, report on political topics. In addition to its overseas human intelligence operations, SIS had assumed responsibility for the Government Code & Cypher School (GC&CS), which itself had been formed in 1919 from the relevant singleService Sigint organisations and been organised on an inter-departmental level. The Security Service retained a military intelligence designation – MI5 – though it too had a remit extending far beyond military concerns.¹³

The third strand of intelligence, though not explicitly recognised as such, was the political element residing within the FO. Through a mixture of diplomatic reporting and information gathering through private networks the FO had, since the late nineteenth century, collected what would today be described as political intelligence. Up to the end of the First World War this had been mainly ad hoc in nature, and the extent to which ‘intelligence’ was amassed largely reflected the current Permanent Under Secretary’s (PUS) views towards its utility and value.¹⁴ The system became more permanent but it was not until Sir Robert Vansittart’s appointment as PUS in 1930 that it really developed into a sophisticated network. Vansittart was a consummate devourer and user of intelligence and his network was known within Whitehall as his ‘private detective agency’.¹⁵ It was out of this confusion – a disparate number of organisations dealing with intelligence and a resurgent German threat – that the JIC was created.

The First Tentative Steps to Joint Intelligence

The first steps towards an integrated governmental approach to intelligence assessment occurred in December 1923 with industrial and economic intelligence. Although in its early incarnation this was not a truly effective system it would, by 1929, become the model for the subsequent Joint Intelligence Committee. In 1931 the CID’s ‘Industrial Intelligence in Foreign Countries Sub-Committee’ (FCI) had created within it a research body called the ‘Industrial Intelligence Centre’ (IIC). Although the IIC initially had no official terms of reference, its purposes were defined in 1934 as being twofold: firstly, to ensure the best economic intelligence was utilised by the FCI; and secondly, to ensure th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One Origins, 1936–1939
• Part Two War, 1939–1945
• Part Three New Threats, 1945–1957
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index