INTRODUCTION •xxixThe varying talents of philosophers, artists, and reporters were drawn
to British Intelligence in a way unmatched by any other country, and
the result is a rich tapestry of skill, innovation, and improvisation ac-
commodated by an equally diverse set of organizations ranging from
the Admiralty’s Room 40 cryptanalysts of World War I to modern
agent-handlers of the Security Service seeking to penetrate terrorist
groups. In between, MI5, SIS, and GCHQ, the country’s three main
intelligence agencies, have been able to rely on active assistance and
support from their counterparts in Australia, Canada, New Zealand,
Hong Kong, India, Malaya, the Persian Gulf, a score of former colonies
in Africa, and a dozen dependent territories. In addition, they have de-
veloped strong, formal ties with their American allies, to the point that
the CIA station chief in London sits on the JIC as an ex officio member
and GCHQ is fully integrated into the worldwide matrix of National
Security Agency listening posts. Indeed, the need in recent years to
combine against the common foe of terrorism has brought closer coop-
eration with even the Spanish, French, and Russian intelligence and se-
curity services and has seen the creation of dedicated intelligence
exchanges, in Brussels and Bern, where information from delicate
sources can be swapped in conditions of secrecy.
Historically, the scale of British Intelligence has been extraordinary,
ranging from clandestine bodies devoted to propaganda through to the
more familiar covert bodies of today. In 1931 Sir Eric Holt-Wilson ad-
dressed a conference called to consider empire security and boasted that
MI5’s staff of 600 officers, officials, and technical experts could call
upon 7,000 detectives and more than 100,000 police, ‘‘all of whom
were working in instant response to guidance from the headquarters of
the Security Service.’’ In September 1940, when offering his services
to the U.S. Embassy as a security adviser following his dismissal by the
prime minister, Holt-Wilson explained that at the time of his retirement
he could call upon ‘‘some 250 chiefs of Police at home and 50 more in
British Territories overseas.’’ Many of Holt-Wilson’s subordinates had
served what had amounted to an apprenticeship abroad, learning their
craft with the Indian Political Intelligence bureau in Delhi, or with the
Special Branch in Shanghai, and the scale of what they achieved is hard
to underestimate. Certainly for decades a mere handful of expatriate
intelligence experts kept the government of India well informed on the
threat from Communist sedition, and the Combined Intelligence Centre