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 Intelligence Power in
Practice

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 Series Editors: Richard J. Aldrich, Rory Cormac, Michael S. Goodman, Hugh Wilford and
Daniela Richterova
This series explores the full spectrum of spying and secret warfare in a globalised world.
Intelligence has changed. Secret service is no longer just about spying or passively watching
a target. Espionage chiefs now command secret armies and legions of cyber warriors who
can quietly shape international relations itself. Intelligence actively supports diplomacy,
peacekeeping and warfare: the entire spectrum of security activities. As traditional inter-
state wars become more costly, covert action, black propaganda and other forms of secret
interventionism become more important. This ranges from proxy warfare to covert action;
from targeted killing to disruption activity. Meanwhile, surveillance permeates communications
to the point where many feel there is little privacy. Intelligence, and the accelerating technology
that surrounds it, has never been more important for the citizen and the state.
Titles in the Intelligence, Surveillance and Secret Warfare series include:
Published:
The Arab World and Western Intelligence: Analysing the Middle East, 1956–1981
Dina Rezk
The Twilight of the British Empire: British Intelligence and Counter-Subversion in the
Middle East, 1948–63
Chikara Hashimoto
Chile, the CIA and the Cold War: A Transatlantic Perspective
James Lockhart
The Clandestine Lives of Colonel David Smiley: Code Name ‘Grin’
Clive Jones
The Problem of Secret Intelligence
Kjetil Anders Hatlebrekke
Outsourcing US Intelligence: Private Contractors and Government Accountability
Damien Van Puyvelde
The CIA and the Pursuit of Security: History, Documents and Contexts
Huw Dylan, David Gioe and Michael S. Goodman
Cognitive Bias in Intelligence Analysis: Testing the Analysis of Competing Hypotheses Method
Martha Whitesmith
Defector: Revelations of Renegade Intelligence Officers, 1924–1954
Kevin Riehle
Intelligence Power in Practice
Michael Herman with David Schaefer
Forthcoming:
The Snowden Era on Screen: Signals Intelligence and Digital Surveillance
James Smith
Intelligence, Security and the State: Reviewing the British Intelligence Community in the
Twentieth Century
Christopher Murphy and Dan Lomas
Estimative Intelligence in European Foreign Policymaking: Learning Lessons from an Era
of Surprise
Christoph Meyer, Michael S. Goodman, Aviva Guttmann, Nikki Ikani and Eva Michaels
British Security Intelligence in Singapore: Counter-Subversion for Southeast Asia, 1939–1963
Alexander Nicholas Shaw
The President’s Kill List: Assassination and US Foreign Policy since the Cold War
Luca Trenta
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/series-intelligence-surveillance-and-secret-warfare.html

7465_Herman & Schaefer.indd 2 17/02/22 12:38 PM

 Intelligence Power in
Practice

Michael Herman with

David Schaefer

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 Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading
university presses in the UK. We publish academic
books and journals in our selected subject areas across
the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-
edge scholarship with high editorial and production
values to produce academic works of lasting
importance. For more information visit our website:
edinburghuniversitypress.com

© Michael Herman and David Schaefer, 2022

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

The Tun – Holyrood Road
12(2f) Jackson’s Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ

Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by

IDSUK (Dataconnection) Ltd, and
printed and bound in Great Britain.

A CIP record for this book is available from the

British Library

ISBN 978 1 4744 9954 5 (hardback)

ISBN 978 1 4744 9956 9 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 9957 6 (epub)

The right of Michael Herman and David Schaefer

to be identified as the authors of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related
Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

7465_Herman & Schaefer.indd 4 17/02/22 12:38 PM

 Contents

Foreword by Lord Butlervii

Prefaceix

Part 1 Secrecy and Liberal Society

1. Profiles in Intelligence: An Interview with
Michael Herman 3
2. The Rush to Transparency: Releasing Wartime
Codebreaking Secrets 21
3. GCHQ De-unionisation 88
4. Intelligence and Ethical Foreign Policy 101

Part 2 The Cold War

5. Intelligence as Threats and Reassurance 133
6. What Difference Did It Make? 169
7. The Intelligence War: Reflections on Sigint 189
8. National Requirements 197
9. Manual Morse and the Intelligence Gold Standard 205
10. Teufelsberg 212

Part 3 Organisation and Reform

11. 1945 Organisation 223
12. Post-Cold War Issues and Opportunities 254

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 Intelligence Power in Practice

13. Evidence to Butler 304

14. Joint Intelligence and Butler 320
15. Butler Reviewed 334

Part 4 Personalities in British Intelligence

16. Recruitment in 1945 and ‘Peculiar Personal
Characteristics’345
17. Up from the Country: Cabinet Office Impressions
1972–5355
18. The Joint Intelligence Committee 1972–5 373
19. GCHQ Directors 383
20. Harry Burke and Able Archer 394
21. A Special London Contribution 401

Index409

vi

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 Foreword

Coincidentally with my appointment as Cabinet Secretary in 1987,

Michael Herman retired from GCHQ and took up a research fel-
lowship at Nuffield College Oxford.
This marked a transition from Michael’s active involvement
in intelligence work – in addition to his career at GCHQ he had
served in the Cabinet Office as Secretary of the Joint Intelligence
Committee and in the Defence Intelligence Staff – to academic
research into the organisation and use of intelligence. A product
of this research was his highly praised book Intelligence Power
in Peace and War and he has subsequently authored many other
papers on aspects of intelligence, some of which are published in
this book for the first time.
Michael was also the founding director of the Oxford Intel-
ligence Group, which brought together practitioners and academ-
ics to discuss intelligence matters. My post as Cabinet Secretary
carried with it at that time the chairmanship of the Permanent
Secretaries’ Committee on the Intelligence Services and responsi-
bility as Accounting Officer for Government Expenditure on the
Secret Vote. In that role I attended and benefited from several
events organised by Michael and the Oxford Intelligence Group.
After I retired from the Cabinet Office in 1998 my next involve-
ment with Michael was when he gave very valuable evidence to the
Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction, which I
chaired in 2004 following the apparent failure of British intelligence
on Iraqi WMD in the lead-up to the Second Gulf War. Michael had
published his recommendations for the future of the British sys-
tem of intelligence in 1997 and this was a key issue in our review.
Michael’s evidence on the role of assessment and the constitution

vii

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 Intelligence Power in Practice

and functioning of the Joint Intelligence Committee played a key

part in our review’s recommendations, particularly on the develop-
ment of appropriate training. A transcript of his oral evidence to
the committee is published for the first time in this volume.
Michael’s career at GCHQ and his subsequent interests have
concentrated on the organisation and management of the use
of intelligence rather than on the technicalities of collection and
decryption. As my 2004 review showed, intelligence, however
good, is only as valuable as the way in which it is used. Misuse of it
can be disastrously damaging, as illustrated by Stalin’s rejection of
the intelligence on the build-up to the German invasion of Russia
and Freyberg’s scepticism about the intelligence he received before
the German invasion of Crete in the Second World War.
It is generally acknowledged that the British machinery of the
Joint Intelligence Committee and the supporting joint assessment
staffs have served the country well over the years. Yet these institu-
tions are not enough by themselves. The assessment and use of intel-
ligence needs the right balance between expertise and experience, and
between objectivity and policy awareness; and this balance needs to
be recalibrated all the time. It also requires involvement of the right
people with the right training and adequate periods in office.
Intelligence has become increasingly important over recent
years as the means for collecting it has grown exponentially. It is
now generally recognised that future wars, even more than pre-
vious wars, will be wars of intelligence – intelligence about the
strengths of potential enemies and about their vulnerabilities. It is
no good having weapons so accurate that they can land on a post-
age stamp without knowing which postage stamps to hit and mak-
ing the right judgements about them. It is also essential to know
and understand enough about the mindset of potential enemies to
be able to forecast how they are likely to act and react.
As I have reread the papers by Michael Herman in this book, I
have been reminded of the crucial importance of the machinery for
assessing and making decisions based on intelligence. These papers
are a very valuable resource for anyone thinking or teaching about
these issues or anyone organising the government machinery for
dealing with them.
The Rt Hon. The Lord Butler of Brockwell

viii

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 Preface

This book is the product of a lifetime spent practising and studying

the art of intelligence. It should be read as a final contribution to
scholarship by Michael Herman, who died in February 2021 at the
age of 91. Michael is perhaps best known as the author of Intelli-
gence Power in Peace and War, a landmark study that condensed a
wealth of experience and knowledge into what arguably remains –
more than a quarter of a century later – the most comprehensive
account of intelligence and government in the modern world. This
was followed by other publications on secret organisations and
history, which confirmed Michael’s place as the pre-eminent intelli-
gence professional cum academic. When I first met Michael several
years ago, I was therefore surprised to learn that he planned to
write yet another book in his late eighties. As he explained to me,
his earlier writings were necessarily limited by security obligations,
with certain things left unsaid. The steady release of intelligence
archives and the commissioning of authorised and official histories
in the years since offered him a chance to revisit some issues. There
was now greater scope for him to add a few personal impressions
to the historical record, elaborating on his view of intelligence as a
distinctive form of power exercised by governments.
The result is this collection of essays, which draws together
Michael’s most substantive writings with some new historical
research and reflections from his professional life. These are all
shaped by two ‘operational’ experiences of intelligence amid the
high stakes of the Cold War: Michael’s career-long focus at GCHQ
with tracking and understanding its main target, the Soviet Union;
and his engagement with the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC)
as its Secretary from 1972–5, which led to a lifelong interest in

ix

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 Intelligence Power in Practice

the committee and the peculiar service it provides to government.

Even the more recent commentaries are grounded in Michael’s
appreciation of British intelligence as it developed after 1945. In
that sense, this book embodies the ‘British school’ of intelligence
studies, a field centred on historical perspective and inquiry, which
considered Michael to be its leading figure.
In selecting the chapters Michael and I sought to examine the
practice of British intelligence, particularly the form and shape it
developed under the competitive pressure of the Cold War. My
hope is that this offers a balanced view on intelligence power in
action, reflecting insights from the front lines of collection and the
centre of government in Whitehall. We had some regret that we
could not cover another significant aspect of Michael’s career –
his involvement in the UK–US intelligence relationship – but this
features in the background of many chapters, and we have drawn
on relevant scholarship where possible. While perhaps incomplete,
Michael saw the result as a ‘clearing of the decks’ in his late age.
He hoped it would be of interest on those terms, and hopefully
prompt a younger generation of historians to investigate some
issues in more depth than we do here.
Michael originally approached me to provide some research
and writing assistance with one chapter, but this developed into
a wider partnership, as I drafted and edited sections of text, and
advised Michael on some of his newer material. The only part of
this book that remained unfinished at the time of Michael’s death
was this preface. We had disagreed about what to include. Michael
characteristically shied away from the suggestion to include more
personal reminiscences or elaborate on his life story; he preferred a
simple, brief explanation of chapters. His view was that anything
more than this would be an indulgence, and risked distracting from
ideas in this collection which were informed by conversations with
the many unnamed colleagues from his long career. I think it is
fair to say that Michael’s impressive body of scholarship – more
than a dozen articles and books published after his retirement from
GCHQ – suggests he was being unduly modest about the value of
his own contribution.
While respecting Michael’s wishes, I do want to mention one
feature of his personality that will not be apparent to the reader.
Michael had a rare kind of intellectual humility for someone of his

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 Preface

vast learning and experience. Behind the towering reputation was

a generosity of spirit that made him such a warmly regarded pres-
ence at academic forums. Even at an advanced age he displayed
an almost-youthful enthusiasm for the work of others, and this
did much to encourage younger researchers, such as myself, who
would otherwise feel intimidated in his presence. He was a true
gentleman and role model who inspired many in his small acts of
kindness as much as in his pioneering writings. It was thus a great
joy to work with him on this project, and I am consoled that he
knew it was going to be published before he died. As I was tasked
with one final edit of the collection after Michael’s death, any
errors of fact or omissions are my responsibility and mine alone.
The book is divided into four sections. The first section includes
an interview Michael conducted with Mark Phythian from the
Intelligence and National Security journal, which covers the broad
outlines of his career: how he joined GCHQ, and migrated into
academia later in life. This is followed by a historical study which
explores the transition in Britain from the absolute secrecy of
intelligence in the post-war years to greater democratic scrutiny
by the time of his retirement, spurred by the revelations of Enigma
and other codebreaking exploits. There are also two republished
articles: one on GCHQ’s controversial de-unionisation episode,
which forced an unprecedented degree of public exposure on his
employer; and a second on the ethical challenges of intelligence
after the end of the Cold War, as Michael grappled with the new
demands on secret agencies operating in a globalised world.
The second section of this book concentrates on Cold War intel-
ligence. Two republished chapters constitute Michael’s attempt to
answer a question which lingered for many professionals of his gen-
eration: amid the various successes and setbacks for espionage what,
if anything, was the wider effect on the history of the Cold War?
These are followed by four chapters which detail various aspects of
the ‘intelligence war’ which Michael experienced first-hand. These
deal with the unique experience of GCHQ in Western intelligence,
the national system which developed to guide and allocate British
intelligence resources, the post-war craft of radio interception which
predominated in the early years of Cold War signals intelligence,
and the evolving needs and unresolved challenges which led to the
construction of Teufelsberg, a listening station in West Berlin, which

xi

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 Intelligence Power in Practice

remains to this day as a symbol of the intelligence war between East

and West.
The third section addresses the organisational issues which
Michael explored later in life as an academic. It begins with his
republished studies of the 1945 proposals for an intelligence
machine in peacetime Britain, and the British intelligence commu-
nity in the aftermath of the Cold War. Both chapters demonstrate
Michael’s long-standing concern with analytical professionalism
in Britain’s decentralised intelligence community. The need for
more specialised training to enhance national assessment was
made forcefully in his testimony to the Butler inquiry in 2004,
which is declassified for the first time in this book. Michael’s evi-
dence to this inquiry is followed by a republished article of his
examining Butler’s report. The final chapter in this section offers
a reflection on Britain’s assessment machinery ten years after the
Butler reforms, and notes with concern the challenge of continu-
ally nurturing expertise in the centre of government.
The fourth and final section explores the neglected role of per-
sonality in intelligence history. Issues of personnel – recruitment,
training and management – are a recurring theme in this book;
Michael wanted to stress the influence of individual personality on
the performance of British intelligence. Two republished papers
discuss the role of ‘flair’ in GCHQ’s recruitment, and the civil
service professionalism which he encountered during his time as
JIC Secretary in the Cabinet Office. These are followed by three
chapters which offer a portrait of the JIC members in the 1970s
when Michael was its Secretary, the Directors of GCHQ in the first
half of his career, and the contribution of his GCHQ colleague,
Harry Burke, to understanding the Able Archer war scare of 1983.
A final, revised study recounts the influence of Mike MccGwire,
one of Michael’s early friends at GCHQ, who left an outstand-
ing impression on British naval intelligence, and to whom Michael
wanted to pay tribute.
We were assisted by a number of people in assembling this
collection, and I would like to record our thanks to Michael’s
friends and associates who helped him in the last years of his life.
Unfortunately, Michael had only begun to compile a list of names
but I know that he was particularly grateful to Steve Dawes,

xii

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 Preface

Gwilym Hughes and Peter Hennessy. The late Ralph Erskine

helped to expand our study of the history of wartime codebreak-
ing, with expert precision and detailed notes. Lord Butler of
Brockwell provided a most generous foreword for which we are
deeply appreciative. Elliott Finn at Taylor & Francis kindly sup-
ported us in securing permission to republish some of Michael’s
earlier works. Ersev Ersoy at EUP was an enthusiastic recipient
of the book proposal and, together with Sarah Foyle, Joannah
Duncan and Geraldine Lyons, she guided me through the edi-
torial process after Michael passed away. Richard Aldrich was
a source of considerate and generous support, who was always
happy to offer his assistance and feedback. Mike Goodman was,
as usual, a wonderful source of advice: it was Mike’s idea to con-
nect me with Michael as the idea for this book first took shape.
Together Richard and Mike helped to shepherd the manuscript
to press.
The final name on Michael’s list is that of his wife, Ann, who
offered him loving support and sensible counsel for so many
decades. I should like to extend my own gratitude to Ann for her
kindness these last few years. Together with Michael she provided
my wife Jasmina and I with generous hospitality in the early days of
this project. Her encouragement also helped me to finish this book
after the sad news of Michael’s death. I would also like to men-
tion the wonderful support I received from Jasmina. Along with
Ann, she bore with great patience the working routine Michael
and I established: regular, not-so-productive ‘business’ meetings
over lunch, and a long, meandering correspondence about draft
chapters where I took the opportunity to question him at length
about intelligence history. That Michael and I managed to pro-
duce a book in the end is largely because it was a collective effort
between our two families.
Finally, I would like to record my appreciation for Michael as
a co-author, mentor and friend in the twilight of his extraordinary
life. It is with great pride and fond memories that I dedicate this
book to his legacy.
David Schaefer
June 2021

xiii

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7465_Herman & Schaefer.indd 14 17/02/22 12:38 PM
 PART 1

Secrecy and Liberal Society

7465_Herman & Schaefer.indd 1 17/02/22 12:38 PM

 2 The Rush to Transparency: Releasing
Wartime Codebreaking Secrets

Intelligence’s modern legitimacy owes a lot to its increased openness:

it is no longer a sealed Black Chamber permanently closed to pub-
lic gaze. British initiatives have contributed substantially to this
openness, particularly through three decisions in 1969–74 and
their implementation in the rest of the decade. All were related to
the Second World War successes at Bletchley Park in decrypting
German messages enciphered in the ‘Enigma’ machine and other
sophisticated enemy ciphers.1 The first decision, proposed in 1969
and taken in 1971, was to commission an official history that drew
on these successes and became the multi-volume British Intelli-
gence in the Second World War,2 known as the ‘Hinsley histories’
after Sir Harry Hinsley, their editor and principal author.3 The
second decision, in 1974, was to acquiesce in the publication of
the first British book-length account of the Enigma success, writ-
ten by Group Captain Winterbotham and published as The Ultra
Secret.4 The third decision, also in 1974, was for the wholesale
release of these decrypted messages and intelligence reports based
on them, with relatively few exceptions. For convenience they are
all described here as ‘decrypts’ or ‘archives’.
Since then successive British governments have followed the
Hinsley model, of commissioning independent scholars and pro-
viding full access to the archives, for other official intelligence
histories: of the Security Service (2009), the Secret Intelligence
Service (SIS) (2010), the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) (first
volume 2014), and the Government Communication Headquar-
ters (GCHQ) (2020). Australia has published official histories
of its Security Service counterpart.5 A similar formula has been
adopted for intelligence histories in Germany, the Netherlands,

21

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 Intelligence Power in Practice

Norway and Denmark.6 Even a six-volume official history of

Russian intelligence appeared between 1999 and 2006.7 As for
the availability of intelligence archives, Britain’s release of Enigma
decrypts was followed by other pre-1945 intelligence records, a
process which is now almost complete except for those of the SIS.
Some British post-1945 documents have also become available,
and more files are likely to be released following the publication
of GCHQ’s history. Elsewhere in Europe there have been exten-
sive and important documentary releases on the Soviet-dominated
intelligence organisations of the former Warsaw Pact countries,
and some releases elsewhere, though the overall position on archi-
val releases was assessed in 2015 as ‘a rather haphazard process, if
it exists at all’.8 There is no comprehensive American programme
of official histories on quite the British model, but historians have
been assisted in many other ways. The CIA has released docu-
ments in great quantity: it was said in 2012 that by then it had
made some four million declassified documents available at the
US National Archives.9 NSA’s Center for Cryptologic History has
published numerous accounts of that agency’s history, including a
(much redacted) complete account of the Cold War.10 Official his-
tories and documentary releases have become marks of account-
able intelligence in a substantial part of the world, with the British
as pace-setters from the 1970s onwards.11
This historical openness has encouraged academic interest in
intelligence everywhere. Students of international diplomacy and
military studies now recognise the role of intelligence power, par-
ticularly in the study of war and violence, and the inherent conflict
between ease of communication and the need to make it secure.
As put by John Ferris on the land battles of the Second War, ‘Only
a traitor used radio, only a fool did not. Without radio there
was no certainty of command. With it there was no guarantee
of secrecy.’12 As another illustration of modern interest, Sir Hew
Strachan’s volume on the opening year of the Great War contains
sixty-nine entries on ‘intelligence’ in the index.13 All this has fol-
lowed the British moves to openness discussed here.
Yet these pioneering British actions were mainly reactions to
pressures and events, reversals of established policy, more com-
plete than when they began: an unintended rush to transparency.

22

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 The Rush to Transparency

This chapter discusses how it happened. It sets out the background

in the official British histories of the two World Wars; discusses
the influence of Bletchley’s codebreaking on the wider intelligence
secrecy of the Cold War; and describes how the subsequent moves
to openness took place. Richard Aldrich, Christopher Moran and
Brett Lintott have already written on this subject and argued that
the Hinsley histories were (in Lintott’s words) ‘a means through
which the state could regain control of the public narrative about
the secret services’.14 I draw on them for details, as I do for an
unpublished lecture by Lord Hennessy;15 but I add my own recol-
lections from my time as Secretary of the JIC from 1972–5.16 The
assessments of policies and individuals are my own in collabora-
tion with David Schaefer.

First War Official Histories

Histories have long been produced under government patronage.

English accounts of this kind date back to the sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries: the Anglia Historia was published in 1534
and a Historiographer Royal was appointed in 1660. Chinese
dynasties had their official histories, many between the seventh
and fifteenth centuries. Modern equivalents began in continental
Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century as histories of
wars or usually, to be precise, their own sides’ part in them. Official
British studies of the Boer War were already underway when a his-
torical section of the Committee of Imperial Defence was created in
1906 to take them over, with four published volumes the result.17
In August 1915 the Cabinet authorised preparations for an Official
History of the First World War ‘to provide a popular and authorita-
tive account for the general reader; for the purpose of professional
reference and education’; and (in the Cabinet Secretary’s words) ‘to
provide an antidote to the usual unofficial histories’.18 The work
began in 1919 and recorded Britain’s industrial-scale war on an
almost industrial scale itself: including peripheral operations such
as those in Northern Russia in 1919–20, it eventually ran to eighty-
seven volumes, the last published in 1987.19 Despite this scale, its
treatment reflected the interests of the time, with an emphasis on

23

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 Intelligence Power in Practice

land battles rather than grand strategy, supporting arms or the

home front; in modern parlance, accounts of ‘ops’ rather than total
war.20 There were indeed some volumes on supporting arms – one
on transportation on the Western front, twelve on military medi-
cine worldwide and one on the veterinary services – but not many.
The Boer War history was proportionately more generous to such
functions, with a fourth volume of seven factual appendices on
such subjects as ordnance, post office and remounts.
Despite this military concentration the First War series did
extend to some civilian studies, but these were subsidiary parts
of the main enterprise, often produced mainly for future war
planning and in some cases not publicly available.21 Lord Franks
remembered that reading the official history of the Ministry of
Munitions in the First War was his initiation to the Ministry of
Supply in the Second.22 The editor of the whole series, Brigadier-
General Edmonds, was in post almost from beginning to end, and
had little stimulus from academics to broaden his approach. There
was no right of public access to official records before the Public
Records Act of 1958 and the fifty-year rule it established.23
So it is not surprising that intelligence in the official series had
light treatment. In his final volume Edmonds made a tantalising
reference in ‘the great lessons of 1914–18’ to ‘the wonderful suc-
cess in the field of the Intelligence Branch of the General Staff
[that] has been mentioned from time to time’;24 but it was never
discussed explicitly. His military volumes quote the appreciations
of enemy strengths and intentions that underlay command deci-
sions, but usually without identifying them as intelligence inputs,
and without discussion of sources, methods, strengths and weak-
nesses. (An exception was the treatment of codebreaking in the
naval volumes, discussed below.) Intelligence was kept at arm’s
length, and the reader had to work out its contribution and look
elsewhere for how it was accomplished. The result could still be
serious history: in recent years the place of still-sensitive sources
obliged Lawrence Freedman to give intelligence a similar treat-
ment in parts of his official history of the Falklands War.25 But
readers of the First War military histories probably now find them
rather two-dimensional compared to their modern equivalents.26
No doubt this reticence owed something to intelligence’s tra-
ditional aura of secrecy. Edmonds occupied intelligence-related

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 The Rush to Transparency

military posts from 1899 onwards and was associated with the cre-
ation of the Secret Service Bureau in 1909, and this experience may
have strengthened the inclination towards caution over intelligence
history.27 But an equally important influence was probably intel-
ligence’s status at the time as not a particularly significant military
arm. Thoughtful officers respected Clausewitz’s dismissive dictum
that ‘Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more
are false and most are uncertain . . . most intelligence is false, and
the effect of fear is to multiply lies and inaccuracies’.28 By 1914
intelligence had indeed become a recognised staff function, but in
the British case it was still seen as the ‘field intelligence’ of colonial
warfare with reconnaissance on horseback as the main means of
information-gathering. The Boer War history asserted that intel-
ligence’s ‘only certain means of obtaining information’ was through
‘keen-eyed men on good horses’.29 The 1914–18 war revolutionised
the situation, with systematic POW interrogation, air photography,
Sigint and above all the intelligence staffs’ all-source analysis of
all these reports: intelligence became for the first time a matter of
professional study.30 But this had only limited influence on post-
war thinking, perhaps because most of those involved retired to
civilian life. Field Marshal Wavell was an intellectual soldier and
subsequently sought to make good use of intelligence in the first
years of the Second War, but in his prestigious Cambridge lectures
on ‘Generals and Generalship’ in 1939 he made no reference to it.31
To this cautious treatment of intelligence there was a lim-
ited exception for naval codebreaking, particularly the official
accounts of its part in the Battle of Jutland.32 The first official vol-
ume described the Admiralty’s codebreaking centre, Room 40, and
its acquisition of a German codebook, and the subsequent Jutland
volume was explicit that the Admiralty decrypted a proportion
of German radio messages. Later editions went further, and even-
tually (in 1940) included pasted inserts and an appendix with a
complete list of the decrypts that should have been signalled to the
C-in-C Fleet.33 These references were prompted in the 1920s by
the post-Jutland controversies, particularly Churchill’s revelations
in The World Crisis (appearing from 1923 onwards) that ‘without
the cryptographers’ department there would have been no Battle
of Jutland. But for that department, the whole course of the naval
war would have been different.’34 It has been suggested incidentally

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 Intelligence Power in Practice

that this publicity for the weakness of the German naval codes
helped to persuade post-war German authorities to move to the
electro-mechanical Enigma, whose widespread use in the Second
War ironically became a disastrous weakness.35 But these intelli-
gence details in the official First War histories were exceptional.
The three-volume Room 40 history written by its participants gave
a full account of naval Sigint, but it was not available to the public
until the present century.3

Second War Intelligence History

With this naval exception there was little post-war publicity for
First War intelligence. There was an official scare over a lecture in
1927 by the one-time head of Room 40, and a book about it was
published in 1932.37 In another episode the novelist Compton
Mackenzie was prosecuted and fined after publishing accounts in
1931 and 1932 of his war in what became the SIS, and there were
other less spectacular publications;38 but First War intelligence as
a whole had little publicity, a situation that continued under the
Second War’s censorship. There is no indication that intelligence
was considered as a subject when that war’s official history series
was first commissioned in April 1945.39 The volumes as they even-
tually appeared – 148 in all – were more numerous but also more
comprehensive than those on the First War. The twenty-nine cam-
paign histories still predominated, but they were accompanied by
seven volumes on grand strategy, a separate series on wartime
diplomacy, a much fuller treatment of the home front, and his-
tories on military specialisations and supporting arms, including
three army volumes on ‘special weapons’, seven in an RAF series
on ‘signals’, and other subjects. In 1945 Bletchley followed its
Room 40 predecessor by embarking on its own classified war-
time history.40 Given intelligence’s special importance in the war,
a separate volume on it might well have been considered in other
circumstances as one of the supporting arms.
But any thoughts of an official wartime intelligence history must
have been stifled by the special sensitivity of wartime Sigint, and the
intensity with which this was protected afterwards. On the day after

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 The Rush to Transparency

the European War ended Bletchley’s staff were notified that their
wartime obligation of secrecy was to continue for life, and this was
followed by a directive that Bletchley’s ‘Special Intelligence’ was to
be kept completely secret, with no time limit. (‘Special Intelligence’
was used to refer to high-grade decrypts and the resulting analysis
through most of the war: Ultra, the services’ own shorthand for
this term, was still officially a classified codeword used in its second
half).41 Secrecy covered the fact and value of codebreaking successes
as well as the organisation and techniques that made them possible:
it was ‘imperative that the fact that such intelligence was available
should NEVER be disclosed’.42 A political rationale was added,
that the Axis powers had to recognise their defeat by force of arms
and should not receive non-military excuses, as had been offered by
Germany after 1918.43 Official historians were given Special Intel-
ligence briefings and instructed to exclude this material from every-
thing they wrote, and the edict had a wider effect than originally
specified.44 The ban on including Special Intelligence became a
blackout on most wartime Sigint, not just the cryptanalytic prod-
uct, and the same reaction followed any suggestion of private
writing. Secrecy about all wartime intelligence became dominated
by the protection of Ultra, and merged with the concealment of
GCHQ’s post-war functions and the other agencies. The result was
to establish and reinforce a general government policy of ‘no com-
ment’ on intelligence of any kind, past or present.
Ultra was subsequently joined in this position by the Second
War’s big deception secret, also without qualification or time limit.
This was Double Cross, the nickname of the committee that ran
the successful UK–US strategic deception operations which at their
highest point persuaded Hitler to withhold twenty-two of his divi-
sions from the Normandy battles in 1944 to meet the (fictional)
landing of twenty-five non-existent American divisions suggested
for the Pas de Calais. Double Cross was to be treated as a secret on
a par with Ultra, partly (as with Ultra) to prevent it being used as
an excuse for German defeat, but also to conceal the identities of
the double agents involved as well as the support it received from
codebreaking. Ultra was part (though only a part) of the deception
secret, and as one big wartime secret it became entwined with the
other. For both secrets the force of secrecy was conveyed by the

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 Intelligence Power in Practice

mood of ‘NEVER’ revealing them, and its popular label of being

‘carried to the grave’.45 The same force was held to apply to its
support from the Official Secrets Act, later described by Cabinet
Secretary Sir Burke Trend (later Lord Trend)46 as ‘a tremendous
sanction at the back of everything you say and do’, though in real-
ity the sanction turned out to be much less usable.47 All this was
reinforced by the Cold War’s nature as substantially an intelligence
war. Protection of its special secrets gained the force of dogma,
with any relaxation seen as a slippery slope to source betrayal.
This official view was maintained at a time when the nation
was seeing the contradictory process by which, in Moran’s words,
‘the British press, during the Cold War, promoted the public’s
“right to know” and rolled back the frontiers of government
secrecy’.48 But in the press disclosures and ministerial revelations
of the first half of the Cold War intelligence did not loom large.
The official historians excluded Ultra as they had been directed.49
In his official naval histories Captain Roskill with his intelligence
background touched on the role of radio direction-finding in the
Atlantic battles, the British captures of cryptographic material
from German weather ships, and the German breaking of Brit-
ish naval codes; and on this last point he hinted that ‘The reader
should not, of course, assume that we British were meanwhile
idle in achieving the opposite purpose.’50 But he stuck to the
rule about avoiding specific Special Intelligence, if not its wider
interpretation.51 Private authors were on the whole successfully
restrained; Churchill was persuaded to have the successive drafts
of his memoirs vetted; caches of wartime intelligence documents
were reclaimed from other retired hands;52 RAF Marshal Lord
Slessor was by no means alone when he wrote in 1974 that for
twenty years he had tried to get the ban on Ultra lifted, but failed
and had observed the rulings.53 Intelligence was not yet a popu-
lar subject, and military historians as a body remained incuri-
ous or discreet. In his best-seller history in 1952 Chester Wilmot
described the successful deception over the Normandy invasion
but did not mention the ‘turned’ German agents or the code-
breaking support, though he may have been aware of both.54
This protection of Ultra had American collaboration, and the
academic reticence or lack of curiosity over intelligence applied

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 The Rush to Transparency

equally in American studies of the Pacific War. The breaking of

Japanese diplomatic ciphers had been revealed in the post-war
congressional investigations into Pearl Harbor and was discussed
in Roberta Wohlstetter’s important 1962 study of the Japanese
attack,55 but it was the best part of a decade before her work was
followed up on any scale. The vulnerability of German commu-
nications was also briefly raised in these hearings, after the leak
of a confidential letter from General George Marshall referring to
American codebreaking efforts against Germany with British assis-
tance, which was published in Time magazine.56 Nonetheless the
lack of specific details meant that the story was not taken up by
others, and at a formal level British intelligence remained insulated
from public curiosity for a surprisingly long time. As late as the
mid-1970s the JIC still had no official post-war existence; SIS had
no official recognition at all; GCHQ was recognised but with a
misleading declared role until 1983; the armed forces still could
not include their substantial Sigint activities in recruiting literature.
GCHQ had a scare when two Oxford undergraduates wrote in a
student magazine in 1958 about their radio interception of Soviet
targets as conscripts in the navy, but such publicity was rare.57 The
threat to the Double Cross secret was more specific from the deter-
mined establishment figure of Sir John Masterman – Oxford’s for-
mer Vice-Chancellor and Provost of Worcester College – but was
successfully contained until later.58 In a related area – the interroga-
tion of German POWs in the London ‘cage’ – the officer in charge
was successfully dissuaded from publishing his account in the early
1950s.59 For the first half of the Cold War, intelligence as a whole,
and Sigint in particular, was hidden from the public gaze.
By the 1960s, however, the media’s appetite for intelligence was
being stimulated by a succession of Cold War spy cases: John Vas-
sall, the civil servant recruited by Soviet intelligence; the Soviet
Portland spy ring; George Blake’s prosecution as a Soviet spy in
the SIS, and his escape from prison five years later; a Soviet intel-
ligence officer’s appearance in the Profumo affair; Kim Philby’s
exposure as a Soviet agent, followed by his autobiography from
Moscow, its selection by the Book Society in England and the Book
of the Month in America, and the other publications it inspired.60
On legal aspects of intelligence there was the public controversy

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 Intelligence Power in Practice

in 1967 over the peacetime interception of cables, one result of

which was to draw attention to the precise D Notice procedure for
providing government advice on handling sensitive subjects.61 The
voluntary nature of this procedure, quite distinct from proceeding
under the Official Secrets Act, was a background influence in much
of what followed. Inevitably this developing interest in Cold War
intelligence encouraged questions in parallel about its wartime his-
tory, with the blanket ‘NEVER’ approach to secrecy coming under
increasing strain. This also had a direct cause: the government’s
own legislation in 1967 had reduced the statutory withholding of
official archives from fifty to thirty years, and the Public Records
Office (PRO, now the National Archives) was expected to release
wartime records by the early 1970s. Intelligence agencies’ own
records could continue to be exempted, but this would not auto-
matically apply to their reports in the Ministry of Defence (MoD)
archives, formerly those of the three separate armed services. This
and similar issues were first put to the JIC in March 1966,62 and in
late 1968 the Committee recommended the exemption of the agen-
cies’ own records and most of their reports in the MoD, including
the decrypts of Axis communications. On this the appropriate Lord
Chancellor’s action for withholding was subsequently taken.63 This
did not completely end the JIC’s concern, as there were fears that
withholding complete categories of MoD’s intelligence files would
still provoke curiosity. The Committee therefore spent time at the
end of the decade devising a plan to unobtrusively release a ‘trickle’
of selected Ultra documents.64 This idea eventually came to noth-
ing, but the new thirty-year rule meant that those responsible for
protecting intelligence had to consider issues of archives and publi-
cations for the first time, and how to keep the two in balance.
Despite these challenges, intelligence records were of less direct
concern at this stage than the pressure developing outside gov-
ernment for historical accounts of Ultra while those able to write
them could still do so. Computers were changing the face of cryp-
tography: could the breaking of the German electro-mechanical
machines before 1945 still be a worthwhile secret? Their exploita-
tion had been a national triumph which should be recorded and
made known, particularly after intelligence’s bad post-war public-
ity about Soviet penetrations. Those advocating publication were a

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 The Rush to Transparency

mixture of former Bletchley insiders and wartime customers, some

keen to write about it themselves, and professional writers (in the
US as well as the UK) who had got wind of the story and sought to
use it. In no sense were they a mass movement of public opinion
but their arguments were increasingly persuasive, and underlying
them was the liberal assumption that secrecy in peacetime needed
substantial justification. As put by Sir Michael Howard, an author
of one Hinsley volume, in a letter to Masterman, ‘it seems to me
ipso facto desirable that chronicles of the past should be as com-
plete and accurate as human endeavour can make them’;65 espe-
cially, he might have added, for a national triumph.
This pressure increased from the mid-1960s onwards. Master-
man was part of it, though he was concerned only with Double
Cross and had begun much earlier than others. He helped to run
the wartime deception operations and in 1945 had written an
account of them as his last military activity before returning to
Oxford to teach history. He kept a copy, and as early as 1954–5
had raised the idea of publication with his former pupil, Dick
White,66 by then head of the Security Service. After his retirement
in 1961 Masterman wrote that ‘some might say that it [the publi-
cation of the story] had become an obsession’.67 His autobiogra-
phy records exchanges over the next decade with White (by then
head of SIS), and a selection of Ministers and top civil servants,
some of them his former Oxford pupils.68 All were being asked
to authorise his use of what was technically still an official docu-
ment, and doubly secret because it detailed success in deception
and codebreaking. These officials managed to put Masterman off
through the 1960s, but by the end of the decade he was losing
patience and contacted American publishers, though he did not
immediately act with them.69
Ultra’s secrecy did not have such a determined individual critic,
but a list circulated in Whitehall in 1970 illustrated the growing
challenge, citing twenty-six published and unpublished works of
sensitivity.70 Coincidentally the whole interest in Sigint was fuelled
during these years, and well beyond, by the scholarship of David
Kahn, an American journalist-historian whose best-selling history
of codebreaking appeared as The Codebreakers in the US and UK
in 1967. It was warmly received and remains the standard work.

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 Intelligence Power in Practice

Its implications for Ultra were first discussed by the JIC in June
1966 and intermittently thereafter.71 At that stage US authorities
were leaned on to persuade Kahn to remove his few references
to Bletchley,72 and in the first edition Kahn wrote relatively lit-
tle about Ultra,73 though the book was still advertised in 1968
in the UK as containing ‘some sensational revelations which will
draw attention to notable gaps in the official histories’.74 Quite
apart from its revelations, the book encouraged codebreaking as
a respectable subject of historical research, and no longer a geek-
ish speciality.75 The BBC planned a television series based on it
in 1970 and initially refused to have the script vetted, though it
eventually climbed down after a top-level approach and accepted
some changes, including abandoning a live interview with the
author.76 Kahn knew more about Ultra when he produced a popu-
lar edition of the book in 1973, though by that time Sir Leonard
Hooper, Director of GCHQ from 1965, had met him in London
while he was at St Antony’s College Oxford in 1972–4.77 From
Hooper’s influence this edition still had more in it about German
codebreaking and American Pacific successes than about Bletchley,
though it indicated the scale of the British effort and its reading
of U-boats’ traffic.78 With the growing interest in Bletchley and
Ultra, the meeting with Kahn had been by no means Hooper’s only
intervention, and he had other successes in persuading potential
authors to delay publication or publish less.79 His characteristic
energy, persuasiveness and close transatlantic relationships were
substantial assets in holding the line of non-publication.
Nevertheless the wartime revelations were already accumulat-
ing when two new publications appeared close to each other in
1968 and moved Ultra’s exposure to a new level. The first was
a critique of Philby’s autobiography, written by Hugh Trevor-
Roper, Oxford’s Regius Professor of History, and published in
an April 1968 periodical and in a short book immediately after-
wards.80 In a wide-ranging discussion of British intelligence,
Trevor-Roper was brief but explicit about ‘the breaking of the
“Enigma” machine’ – probably the first public reference to its
German name – and his judgement that of the ‘great intelligence
triumphs of the war . . . almost all of them were made practical
by the work at GC & CS [Bletchley]’.81 Since he also mentioned

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 The Rush to Transparency

‘the highly successful deception programme’ controlled by MI5,

he managed to blow both the big wartime secrets in one go. As
a response to Philby’s autobiography the piece had been solic-
ited from within government, and no immediate action was taken
over the indiscretions, though they were apparently remembered
the following year when Hooper wrote that Trevor-Roper would
be unsuitable as an author of the Official History.82
The other important publication was by Donald McLachlan,
editor of The Sunday Telegraph until 1966, who had spent most
of the war in the Admiralty’s Naval Intelligence Division (NID)
and after retirement began an account of its wartime work.
For this he sought access to classified monographs by Admiral
Godfrey, NID’s Director for the first half of the war, and official
clearance to describe Ultra. These requests appeared on the JIC
agenda in the summer of 1966 and McLachlan’s work remained
there regularly until the next year.83 He was eventually given access
to Godfrey’s official memoirs and NID monographs,84 and in the
book he acknowledged naval support from ‘at least two hundred
NID friends’.85 His friends and advisers included Vice-Admiral
Sir Norman Denning, a leading member of the wartime NID and
eventually senior member of the Defence Intelligence Staff until
1965,86 and there were Whitehall grumbles that the navy was giv-
ing McLachlan favoured treatment.87 Explicit revelations about
Ultra remained nevertheless a sticking point with GCHQ, which
removed some passages from the proofs late in the day and kept
them in its custody.88 Despite this, when the book appeared as
Room 39: Naval Intelligence in Action 1939–45 it still included
a full chapter on ‘The Wireless War’89 as well as references to the
German successes against British codes, the naval operations to
capture German cryptographic material, and the role of British
direction finding and traffic analysis.90 McLachlan was follow-
ing Roskill’s example in sailing close to the wind over Ultra with-
out being explicit,91 though he may have got rather the better of
GCHQ in what he managed to publish with his unofficial naval
encouragement.92 The book was a success, and Peter Calvocor-
essi of wartime Bletchley may not have been alone in enquiring
even before it appeared whether he could now write about Ultra.93
McLachlan’s book was in fact an admirable outline of wartime

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 Intelligence Power in Practice

naval intelligence as a whole minus Bletchley, and its combination

with Trevor-Roper’s explicit revelations may have helped to per-
suade officials in early 1969 to move from an out-and-out defence
of Ultra to a more discreet way of handling the story.

The Official Intelligence History

For this they also had the stimulus from outside government for an
official history. In September 1968 McLachlan reviewed Trevor-
Roper’s piece on Philby and, having just had details of Ultra
removed from his own book, he used the professor’s indiscretions
as an excuse for revealing that ‘We learn that the signals of the
German intelligence service were decoded in great volume . . .
Codebreakers at Bletchley mattered far more than SIS.’ He con-
cluded that ‘I can see no reason why a volume of the official his-
tory of the war entitled “intelligence” should not be begun next
week, with the Regius Professor as editor-in-chief and many distin-
guished dons, late of MI5 and MI6, to help him.’94
On 1 February the following year – four months after this sug-
gestion and just before the first official moves – McLachlan sent
Trend a copy of Room 39 and wrote that ‘it is my considered
opinion that a full and valuable history of intelligence during the
war could be written on this kind of semi-official basis while the
participants are still alive’. It was not a job he wanted, but it would
be possible to assemble ‘a small group of first-class historians who
were in the work and could make a safe as well as a good job
of it. Without it, the existing official histories incorporated some
gross deceptions of the public and posterity.’95 Trend replied with
cautious interest, writing that ‘although I think I can see certain
potentially serious snags and difficulties here, I will turn the idea
over in my mind’.96
His Bletchley experience made Hinsley also weigh in for an
official history. In the previous year he had written a favourable
review of McLachlan’s book and guardedly commented that it
revealed enough of the secret world of codes and ciphers ‘to show
readers that they are highly secret because they were crucially
important’.97 Early in 1969, just before McLachlan wrote to Trend,

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 The Rush to Transparency

Hinsley wrote to Denning saying that he had heard about the idea
of an official history from McLachlan and another.98 He suggested
a panel of authors, and put himself forward as one, citing his time
in Bletchley and his professional background there, which in 1945
had included writing the internal naval history. He also speci-
fied his terms: ‘I should be reluctant merely to provide an outside
author with my reminiscences.’99 Apparently, it was some time
before Denning passed this letter to the Cabinet Office, though
this did not prevent Hinsley’s eventual appointment as editor-
in-chief.100 No doubt the idea of a history was already a talking
point among other wartime insiders, within government and out-
side it. But McLachlan was the first to go public about it, and then
proposed it to Trend, and there seems no reason not to credit him
as its main progenitor with support from Hinsley.
This was not quite the end of McLachlan’s appearance on the
JIC’s agenda. In 1970 it discussed his proposal for a book on intel-
ligence’s general relationship with policy and action, and his request
for assistance with aspects of the wartime history.101 The idea caused
alarm, and in a report to Trend the JIC pronounced that ‘The book
proposed by McLachlan is obviously undesirable in so far as it
again draws unwanted public attention to intelligence matters on
which it is Her Majesty’s Government’s policy not to comment.’102
The book was never written: McLachlan and his wife were killed in
a car crash in the following January. Had he lived it might have been
a notable contribution to what became a central issue in academic
intelligence studies as it subsequently developed.
That then was the background in the winter of 1968–9 when
officials moved away from the purely passive defence of Ultra to
exploring limited and inconspicuous releases in some form. At this
stage, they were already considering a controlled trickle of archi-
val releases that would indicate Ultra’s existence without revealing
its scale and importance.103 A senior GCHQ official had written
that although ‘No knowledge would suit GCHQ best’, so many
potential writers were in the wings that ‘it would be wise to take
a lead and arrange at a time and in circumstances for release that
would cause it to make the least impact worldwide’.104 The follow-
ing year Hooper as GCHQ’s Director still believed that a ‘limited
and controlled release policy was likely to be less damaging than

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 Intelligence Power in Practice

a complete withholding of records’.105 Trend had recommended to

the Prime Minister in early 1969 that ‘we should spread releases
over a period so as to generate the minimum public interest’, and
it was briefly seen as an alternative to commissioning an official
history.106 But the idea was eventually abandoned in the autumn
of 1970 after Heath’s critical response as Prime Minister to all
proposals for intelligence openness,107 plus an MoD report shortly
afterwards that it had very few Ultra documents in its records to
be released in this way.108 This turned out to be quite wrong, but
by then Whitehall’s attention had been taken by the idea of an
official history for stemming the flow of Ultra-related publications,
with archival releases put to one side for the moment.109
Inside Whitehall the immediate stimulus for the Official History
was a minute by Denning, who after retirement from the navy had
become secretary of the D Notice Committee in MoD, and in this
role acted as link-man with authors as well as the media.110 He
wrote on 11 February 1969 to Sir James Dunnett, his Permanent
Secretary, about the growing problem of actual and prospective
intelligence authors.111 Dunnett sent the minute to Trend, who con-
vened a meeting for 26 February of agency heads and other JIC
members, including Sir Dick White who had moved to the new
post of Intelligence Coordinator the previous year. The meeting was
set up specifically to discuss the desirability of an intelligence his-
tory to counterbalance unofficial accounts and provide leverage for
containing them, and it recorded support for the idea and invited
White to develop it,112 though later files suggest that the intelligence
community’s support was less than wholehearted.113 My predeces-
sor as JIC Secretary, Brian Stewart, had recently arrived in post and
his recollection to me of one of the meetings was that ‘The whole
tenor of the discussion was negative’, though a positive recommen-
dation emerged from the centre.114 White reported to Trend a few
months later that in the FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office)
and MoD ‘the difficulties in the way are clearly considerable’.115
But in convening the meeting Trend had probably already decided
to press for the history, no doubt after speaking to Dunnett, White
and perhaps Hooper.116
It was not Trend’s first involvement in a project of this kind:
he was already a supporter of official histories. From the Treasury

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 The Rush to Transparency

in his earlier days he had helped to launch an account of opera-

tions in France of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the
wartime organisation established in 1940 to ‘set Europe ablaze’.117
The book was begun by the historian M. R. D. Foot in the early
1960s, formally commissioned in 1964, and published in 1966
as SOE in France. It was a considerable success, but its citing of
participants’ names produced expensive libel threats and action
which the government settled out of court.118 Trend was by then
the Cabinet Secretary, responsible ultimately for the Historical
Section, and – an enthusiast for the secret world – he had wanted
more SOE histories. But a section of Whitehall opinion remained
entrenched against any repetition,119 and when attention turned to
the intelligence history SOE was put on the shelf.120 Nevertheless
Foot’s book was cited by Trend as a useful precedent for an intel-
ligence publication. A practical result of Foot’s bruising experience
was Hinsley’s policy of omitting all personal names, the feature
that produced the criticism of his history that it was ‘written by a
committee, about committees, for committees’.121
But the history itself was still an ambitious project. Despite what
was said about countering private publications there was complete
uncertainty about how it was to handle Ultra itself. The academic
world also had little experience of assessing intelligence on the
scale of what became Hinsley’s ambitious title: British Intelligence
in the Second World War: Its Influence on Strategy and Operations
(though it excluded the Far East). Hinsley pointed out in his first
preface that ‘we venture to point out the novel and exceptional
character of our work. No considered account of the relationship
between intelligence and strategic and operational decisions has
hitherto been possible [. . .] .’122 It was a high wire experiment for
academics as well as for government.
To return to the bureaucratic details: after Trend’s meeting
White produced a lengthy report in June 1969 which was taken by
the JIC and Chiefs of Staff, and Trend put the project to the Prime
Minister (Wilson) on 29 July and received tentative approval sub-
ject to consultation with Ministers and Opposition.123 The military
Chiefs of Staff were unenthusiastic and grumbled about what they
saw as a hasty submission to Ministers.124 There was then some
delay before Wilson wrote to Heath as Leader of the Opposition,

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 Intelligence Power in Practice

who in turn consulted two former Prime Ministers (Macmillan

and Eden) who both followed him in being critical.125 After the
general election and change of government in June 1970 Trend
tried again in November with Heath, now Prime Minister, and
failed,126 and a meeting on 19 February 1971 with Trend, White
and senior Ministers was needed to finally persuade him.127
Heath’s doubts had some justification, given the uncertainty of
what was being proposed, but their effect was to delay the project
by the best part of fifteen months. When the history was eventually
commissioned it was forecast as two main volumes, plus another on
security and counterintelligence, and a fourth on strategic deception.
It was to take two years, costing £10,000 for each of the authors:128
a considerable underestimate. Excluding the specialist volumes,
Hinsley’s history ran nominally to three volumes, really four, since
volume three had two parts, the second over 1,000 pages.129 As origi-
nally put in White’s paper, the purpose included meeting the claims
of history by filling the gaps in the existing official histories and pre-
serving proper knowledge of Bletchley’s wartime contributions, even
if only for officials.130 If the history, or a version of it, were published
it would also de-sensationalise public accounts and pre-empt or at
least correct private authors: an ‘accurate but controlled’ official
history would be better than leaving the field to inaccurate private
recollections.131 Restoring intelligence’s public reputation may have
also been in officials’ minds, but was not part of the submission. In
finally putting the idea to Heath, Trend cited the basic 1945 case
for complete secrecy, though toned down: ‘in the worst case this [a
full history] could lead to a review by some countries of the secu-
rity measures employed against us’.132 He therefore suggested a full-
scale history was out of the question and proposed instead a ‘limited’
version which might be ‘synoptic and illustrative’, perhaps with the
Ultra evidence disguised as ‘communications intelligence’ or ‘special
sources’. A bowdlerised version of an unpublished official history,
or an ‘illustrative’ account of selected episodes, could be used as a
historical training aid.133 He laid weight on a distinction between
‘how’ and ‘what’: between ‘how’ intelligence produced its reports
and ‘what’ effect these had on commanders’ decisions. The history’s
emphasis was to be on the second and not the first, dealing with
Ultra in this way without revealing much about it.

38

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 The Rush to Transparency

This formula now appears geared to overcoming Heath’s

scepticism, with only limited resemblance to what was eventually
published about Bletchley’s codebreaking. Trend had originally put
it to Wilson in 1969 that the history would be written in the hope
if not the expectation of publication and this had been repeated to
Heath, but the approval eventually reported back to the JIC was
for a ‘classified limited official history’, of which ‘publication was
not at present contemplated’.134 As such it got underway in late
1971, with Hinsley as the most experienced historian gradually
assuming responsibility as editor-in-chief of the series, except for
the volume on strategic deception. One guesses that his brief was
to write proper history in some form whatever the eventual deci-
sion about publication; though in this he must have been much
aided in 1974 when Winterbotham’s book changed the situation
so completely.

Private Writers: Masterman and Winterbotham

While the proposal for the history was being refashioned to meet
Heath’s scepticism, reports of sensitive publications continued and
Masterman’s moves for publication came to their climax. His pre-
vious refusals had been accompanied by encouragement about the
future: in a letter from the Cabinet Office in March 1969 White
wrote that neither he nor Martin Furnival Jones (the Security
Service’s Director General)135 would raise security objections to
publication.136 But Masterman was finally turned down by the
Home Secretary (Callaghan) in April 1970, and he picked up his
negotiations in the United States.137 He wrote later that ‘I did not
think the government would prosecute me or that if they did they
would secure a conviction.’138 When his intention became known,
Furnival Jones took a strong line and wrote that ‘I consider your
action is disgraceful and have no doubt that my opinion would
be shared by many with whom you worked during the war.’139
White on the other hand commented in a draft note for Trend that
Masterman’s determination was ‘an indication of the strength of
feeling outside official circles on the subject of our present security
policies’.140 The Prime Minister was informed, and the Attorney

39

7465_Herman & Schaefer.indd 39 17/02/22 12:38 PM

 Intelligence Power in Practice

General and Home and Foreign Secretaries (among Masterman’s

former pupils) became involved. The Attorney General saw
no prospect of a successful prosecution after White’s letter had
affirmed there were no security objections, and in summer 1971
the government caved in. Masterman accepted some deletions to
the text, mainly references to Ultra, and the book was published in
February 1972, with royalties split between him and the govern-
ment. It sold well in English (45,000 hardback copies and 200,000
in paper) and there were agreements for translations into German,
Italian, Portuguese and Swedish.141 Other publications on wartime
deception followed. Despite the government’s deletions, a discern-
ing reader could find hints about the codebreaking support, and
the eventual identification of some double agents may also have
been made slightly easier; but there was no obvious damage and
it is difficult now to see why government took so long to compro-
mise with the author except for the dogma of ‘never reveal’. In
calling the bluff of Heath’s government Masterman had exposed
the Official Secrets Act of the day as a blunt weapon and laid the
ground for the more comprehensive revelations of Winterbotham.
Group Captain F. W. Winterbotham had been a Royal Flying
Corps pilot in the First War and a member of SIS for ten years
before the Second War, when he had a wartime role of organis-
ing and supervising the distribution of Ultra reports to recipients
from Churchill downwards, as well as checking that they were
used without compromising the sources. Bletchley records show,
incidentally, that this involved him in devising the 1945 edict for
their post-war protection.142 This role came from what were still
the SIS Chief’s formal responsibilities for the secure distribution
and use of Sigint reports, and they were indeed important features
of Bletchley’s success. It now seems from the SIS’s official history
that Winterbotham was also involved in other wartime SIS busi-
ness of substance.143 He was appointed CBE in 1943, but his Sigint
role never made him one of Bletchley’s key insiders.
After some post-war years with British Overseas Airways
Corporation and the Colonial Development Corporation he retired
to a smallholding in Devon on his SIS pension, said later to be £90
annually, and in 1969 he published an unsensational account of
his pre-war contacts with Nazi leaders and others in Germany.144

40

7465_Herman & Schaefer.indd 40 17/02/22 12:38 PM

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