COMMITTEE OF IMPERIAL DEFENCE• 105oners were kept in the elephant stables. In November 1944 CSDIC
established a base in the medieval fortress of Diest, but this was ab-
sorbed in November 1945 byBad Nenndorf.COMINTERN.The Communist International (Comintern) was con-
sidered an important target for British Intelligence throughout its
existence, and between 1932 and 1934GCHQsucceeded in inter-
cepting and decrypting some of its international wireless traffic,
which was distributed under the code namemask. Later, more of the
messages were read under a World War II project codenamediscot.
COMMITTEE OF IMPERIAL DEFENCE (CID).As a Cabinet
subcommittee, the CID supervised the activities of British Intelli-
gence and at the end of theBoer Warcommissioned ColonelJames
Edmondsto examine the causes of perceived recent intelligence fail-
ures. Edmonds’s report led to the CID recommending the creation in
August 1909 of the Secret Service Bureau. The CID’s assistant secre-
tary and then secretary from 1908 to 1938 was Sir Maurice (later
Lord) Hankey who, probably more than any other single person, ex-
ercised considerable influence over the development of British Intel-
ligence during the first half of the 20th century.
The prime minister decided in March 1909 that a CID subcommit-
tee comprised of Lord Haldane, Mr. McKenna, Sir Charles Hardinge,
three Service representatives, and Sir Edward Henry, the commis-
sioner ofthe Metropolitan Police, should make a brief review of the
nature and scale of foreign espionage and report on whether it would
be desirable to establish an official link between the Admiralty and
the War Office on the one hand and the police, postal, and Customs
authorities on the other, with the aim of ensuring appropriate surveil-
lance of the activities of foreigners suspected of espionage or of
being secret agents. The subcommittee was also asked to propose
measures to expand the powers required to investigate suspected
spies and to report on the collection of intelligence from overseas by
the Admiralty and War Office.
The CID was presented with information on a large number of
cases in 1908 and the first quarter of 1909 in which Germans had
been suspected of espionage. Certain German officers had let slip in-
advertently that they had been assigned an area of Britain for intelli-