Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence

PERSONALITY PROFILING• 417

some odd passages in the book, including some rather old-fashioned

phrases that made it unlikely Penkovsky had written them.

Penkovsky delivered to the West vital technical intelligence and,

apart from looting the GRU’s files, he also provided a detailed analy-

sis of the Soviet strategic arsenal at a critical time when Nikita Khru-

shchev was planning to deploy nuclear weapons in Cuba, providing

the documents that enabled the CIA to correctly identify the missile

sites while they were under construction.

PERKINS, HAROLD.The manager of a textile mill in Silesia before
the war, Harold Perkins had graduated from Prague University with
an engineering degree and headed the Polish Section ofSpecial Op-
erations Executive(SOE). He also had responsibility for supervis-
ing SOE’s Czech and Hungarian country sections and appointed
himself British charge ́d’affaires in Prague when the Nazis withdrew.
After the war Perkins served as Fanny Venden Heuvel’s deputy at
theSecret Intelligence Service’s Rome station and ran a sabotage
campaign against refugee ships in the Adriatic, including the S.S.
Pan Crescent, to stem the flow of illegal emigrants toPalestine.

PERMANENT SECRETARIES’ COMMITTEE ON THE INTEL-
LIGENCE SERVICES (PSIS).Within Whitehall, the permanent
secretaries from the Home Office, Foreign Office, Treasury, and Min-
istry of Defence meet under the chairmanship of theCabinet secre-
taryto consider the annual budget forMI5, theSecret Intelligence
Service, andGCHQand to consider senior appointments to those
organizations.

PERSONALITY PROFILING.The technique of developing person-
ality profiles of political leaders and adversaries, as an aid to under-
standing and maybe predicting behavior and reactions, was pioneered
byBritish Security Coordinationduring World War II, and since
then considerable research has been undertaken to develop the skill
into a science. TheSecret Intelligence Servicein particular has ac-
quired an impressive reputation for compiling such profiles, using its
own personnel or contacting outside experts to gather the material,
not all of which comes from classified sources. Occasionally the au-
thors have been allowed to publish sanitized versions of their profiles