Kennedy G. Imperial Defence. The Old World Order, 1856-1956

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the best chance of dealing with such matters effectively and without

political and diplomatic inconvenience, should be that the Agents for

this purpose should be employed by the English Police Authorities,

that these Agents should be ordered to keep clear of the Embassy, and

that I should really and truly know nothing of them or their proceed-

ings.

Matters were accordingly settled, & I understand this arrangement

to be still subsisting, and attach very great importance to the

Embassy’s being bona ﬁde entirely clear of all detective proceedings

in France about these matters.

Experience showed that it might have proved very inconvenient if a

statement to this effect could not have been made in Parliament,

although it was not actually made.

This approach was ﬁlled with ambiguities. In 1901, the ambassador in St

Petersburg, Charles Hardinge, ran a secret informant, ‘a high ofﬁcial at the

Miny, for F.A. whose statements have on many occasions invariably proved

correct’, acquiring information through his ‘indiscretion... . He has

however to be managed carefully, and he cannot always be got to speak’.

Hardinge thought the systematic Tsarist attempts to steal documents from

his embassy not merely ‘medieval but ... simply barbarous, and unworthy

of any Government with any pretensions to be treated as that of a civilized

country’.

Yet, Victorians specialised in precisely this form of barbarism,

which matched code-breaking in value. While the whole story is unknown,

Britain commonly stole state papers in Russia and Turkey and occasionally

in Bulgaria and China.

During the negotiations at Paris which ended the

Crimean war, the Foreign Secretary, Clarendon, ran a ‘secret source of

intelligence’, in the Russian mission, able to acquire copies of its corre-

spondence.

A few years later, the Military Attaché at St Petersburg

acquired much material on Russian policy in the Balkans, showing it ‘aims

at the provocation of an insurrection which might possibly extend even to

Constantinople. The formation of a Secret Panslavonic Society & the trans-

mission of arms to Servia are only episodes in the intrigue’.

Between 1874

and 1878, his successor stole documents which illuminated Tsarist policy in

Asia. Such work went on, less spectacularly, in later decades.

From 1880,

many sources gave Britain major documents from the Porte. Ethics rarely

constrained such actions. In 1910, however, when a Military Attaché wished

to bribe ofﬁcials to gain British ﬁrms advance information on Turkish mili-

tary orders, the FO refused: ‘It would be doing work which would properly

be done by the commercial ﬁrms interested themselves, and that it would

tend to encourage them in lack of enterprise and initiative’.

One should

leave such initiative to Vickers and could.

In the Victorian era, ambassadors became disassociated from espionage

and consuls did not, while Military Attachés often became part-time spymas-

ters. Intelligence turned from the eighteenth-century focus on diplomatic

182 J.R. Ferris

intentions, towards one on strategic planning, military capabilities, arms

shipments and, from 1865, contra-espionage against imperial threats based

throughout the world, especially Irish and Indian rebels. Between 1815 and

1914, consuls in Brest, Antwerp and New York remained the standard

source of naval intelligence. In 1828, Wellington referred to ‘my secret

agent at Brest (who is also the King’s consul there)’. Over the next eighty

years, that consulate regularly received £50 per year for intelligence on

France’s main naval base.

In 1855, during the Crimean war, the Antwerp

Legation was ordered to monitor contraband and American ships, and

during the Pendjah crisis of 1885, to provide ‘prompt and timely informa-

tion of any negotiations for the purchase by foreign agents of any British or

other Ocean going Steamers’.

In 1890, Lord Salisbury and his Permanent

Under Secretary (PUS), Philip Currie, ordered all consuls in Black Sea

ports to monitor signs of a Russian strike at Istanbul, through their own

observations or any means they might employ.

Nothing better charac-

terised Victorian intelligence than the fact that a prime minister and PUS

personally directed an espionage network consisting of British ofﬁcials.

Businessmen became a greater source than before. Many consuls were

ofﬁcials, merchants and members of old expatriate communities. The

family of Charles Cattley, Britain’s intelligence chief in the Crimea during

1855, had lived in Russia for a century, while several generations of the

Stephens family served as consuls and spies in Baku. Nor was faith limited

to British businessmen. In 1821, one diplomat noted, ‘The ﬁrst news always

comes to Rothschild’. This family cooperated closely with another ambas-

sador deeply involved in espionage, de Rothesay.

During the war of 1877,

the intelligence authority for the Army, John Simmonds, considered how

to ‘obtain correct information from Russia of the preparations occurring in

the Russian Dockyards in the event of the Consuls being withdrawn’. Prob-

ably British merchants would not do so,

both by a sense of honour towards the Russian authorities and by fear

of compromising their own interests in the event of discovery.... The

most likely mode of getting the information required would be to inter-

est the class of Jewish Bankers who have correspondents all through the

country & are always well informed as to what is being done by the

Government. The matter is one of much difﬁculty and delicacy and

even danger to men who may be sent out at short notice and it is by no

means certain that this last consideration apart those Bankers whose

interests are really identiﬁed with those of the country would be willing

to give information that would be prejudicial to Russia.

British intelligence particularly relied on commercial links between India

and Central Asia. By 1830, the East India Company ordered the Govern-

ment of India to obtain ‘secretly from native merchants information of

every event of political interest that may occur’ in Central Asia. While

Tradition and system 183

serving as commissioner for Sind during the 1850s, Bartle Frere so used

the commercial network of a major merchant.

These sources, friendly

towards Britain or hoping to curry its favour, provided most of India’s

information on Central Asia and the personnel and cover for the central

element of its intelligence system, the only permanent one retained by

Victorian Britain, the ‘newswriters’, Indians abroad reporting news in the

public domain – or bazaar gossip.

From 1870, a new form of human intelligence entered the equation.

Police detectives handled contra-espionage against political crime, some-

times aided by private ones. Pinkertons worked for the Bank of England

against American forgers in the US and the UK. In 1914, it claimed, ‘We

have always done and are doing the work for Scotland Yard’, and also

‘anarchistis sic work for the German, French and Italian Governments’.

This source combined local expertise with uncertain loyalty. During the

Boer War, the New York Consulate noted,

The Customs Authorities treat manifests as conﬁdential documents

and tho’ I am employing Pinkerton & getting a certain amount of

information from them, I do not feel sure that they are not in the pay

of the S.A.R. at the same time. (The Naval Attaché) Captain Ottley

made a suggestion that detectives might be sent out from England; do

you think this would be feasible. There are a certain number who

have a knowledge of New York but they would of course be known to

some of Pinkerton’s people and to some of the New York police. It

might be possible to send some detectives from Canada.

Similar fears dogged British security during 1914–15, when Pinkertons

became fundamental to imperial intelligence in the US.

Between 1815 and 1880, military intelligence followed old models.

Usually without specialised intelligence ofﬁcers or ofﬁces, the RN and the

British and Indian armies collected, synthesised and used data. Field intel-

ligence followed the Peninsular pattern. During 1854–8, in Crimea and

India, commanders integrated information and planning, while a civilian

with local expertise, a consul or district ofﬁcer, with a tiny staff, gathered

and processed data. In peacetime, the collection of strategic data varied

from the sporadic (Crimea) to the systematic (coastal charts). Assessment

and planning occurred only when necessary, when senior ofﬁcers from

the best educated branch of either service correlated intelligence and

strategy, almost as a form of applied mathematics. The Hydrographer’s

Ofﬁce coordinated intelligence and war planning for the RN as two aging

engineers, John Burgoyne and John Simmonds, did for the army in 1854

and 1877, respectively.

Military intelligence often failed in elementary

ways, as with the surprise of the Indian ‘mutiny’ and the failure to take

Sevastapol quickly or prepare for a winter campaign in Crimea, but it also

could become excellent with rare speed.

184 J.R. Ferris

This system worked better than one might expect, but it faced prob-

lems beyond its power as a world political and economic system emerged,

and the railway, steamship and telegraph revolutionised communications.

They knit isolated areas into one world, where any problem affected them

all, and their correlation created new ones. These problems affected no

state more than Britain, the central arch of the world system; none could

gain more from solving them or had to. Departments found hints to solu-

tions from their experiences with the telegraph and information manage-

ment, while Victorian civil services, the German General Staff and the

practice of political statistics provided models of how bureaucracies could

apply data processing to decision making.

These solutions were applied through loosely coordinated steps over a

thirty-year period. No one planned the outcome, but it suited British aims

and means, at some cost. Every agency approached information in an

administratively easy way for itself, which later complicated coordination.

Firms made Britain the centre of world communications and information.

This killed the regionalised structure of strategy and intelligence, and

created a centralised one, worldwide. Statesmen used the system without

knowing it existed and then strove to strengthen it. From 1880, to improve

the collation and collection of information, and its use in real time,

departments established specialist agencies: the Military Intelligence

Department (MID), the Foreign Intelligence Committee (FIC) and the

Indian Intelligence Branch. Characteristically, the latter stemmed from

the belief that, for ‘the rapid commencement and vigorous prosecution of

war in any direction’, the Indian Army needed ‘some organization . . . for

collecting statistics, and for arranging in time of peace, the mass of

important records which doubtless exist in the several ofﬁces of the

Supreme and local Governments’ and a staff ‘able to transfer its functions

to the ﬁeld’.

In this development, old growths constrained new ones.

Only after years of effort, did the FIC take over assessment of coastal

defences and warships from the Hydrographer and Director of Naval Con-

struction. At ﬁrst, its duties were purely factual to

collect, classify and record with a complete index all information

which has a naval character, or which may be of value during Naval

operations.... When recording the source whence information is to

be derived is invariably to be mentioned, so that the evidence may be

weighed, and original documents sent for, when necessary.... The

Committee will not be called upon to express their own opinions, or

to record them, though they may often have to record the opinions of

others; and they are to be careful to distinguish between facts and

matters of opinion.

This change improved collection, estimates and strategy. Around 1885,

the MID and the Naval Intelligence Department (NID, successor to the

Tradition and system 185

FIC) took on the duties of general staffs, including war planning, as states-

men saw the need for a reasoned and imperial strategy. The NID of seven

ofﬁcers and ﬁve clerks was ordered to ‘collect, sift and record and lay

before the Board all information relating to maritime matters likely to be

of use in war’ and develop operational plans. ‘The essence of its work is to

be “Preparation for War” ’.

The MID, a combination of general staff and

assessment bureau, often worked directly for prime ministers and foreign

secretaries, providing a more powerful and integrated system of collection,

estimation and action than any other state of the time possessed, or Britain

would know again until 1942, applied to imperial issues.

After 1902, these

bodies became general and naval staffs. The NID and MID, their other

roles hived off, focused strictly on intelligence. Their inﬂuence in planning

declined, but estimates were incorporated well into strategy, while collec-

tion improved. The Indian Intelligence Branch worked purely on intelli-

gence, while in 1906, the FO was restructured so better to process

information in diplomacy.

Between 1880 and 1900, information processing and strategic decision

making were transformed. Departments maximised the collection and col-

lation of an increased mass of open and ofﬁcial information. Specialist

bureaucracies, rather than engineers or statesmen, assessed information,

which was better circulated. The FO sent consular reports direct to the

Admiralty rather than waiting on covering letters. The NID and MID

entered a ‘semi-ofﬁcial relationship’, ‘to avoid the delay and formality of

ofﬁcial communications, & to facilitate free intercourse’. Yet, when the

MID called for some coordination of collection, the NID noted ‘the mili-

tary authorities will have little or no information to communicate to us

since the enemy being on the water, the military forces will not be in

contact with him’.

Ofﬁcial and open sources were honed but not secret

ones. The NID thought RN ofﬁcers and Naval Attachés its ‘most trustwor-

thy and important’ sources, followed by ‘Consuls who have served in the

Navy’ and newspapers. The closest it sailed to secret sources was when a

Naval Attaché turned a ‘strong glass’ on Russian warships from the

window of the British consulate at Odessa.

The British and Indian armies

used secret sources more, but preferred ofﬁcial and open ones, and

focused on topographical intelligence along imperial frontiers and train-

ing ofﬁcers in ﬁeld intelligence. In 1892, noted the MID, the original idea

behind the Indian Intelligence Branch was ‘that its chief & all its members

would be more or less explorers & provide material to collate’.

‘An

Ofﬁcer should not be sent in any position in which he may be compro-

mised, &. . . if we are to employ spies we should get them from some

other source, than the commissioned ranks of the Army’.

The main

exception to this rule actually illuminates it. The Survey of India did pass

trained agents in and out of Central Asia but not for espionage against

Russia. Rather, a systematic series of explorations between Russian and

British territory were conducted by Indians, the ‘Pundits’, who had special

186 J.R. Ferris

training, worked under cover, and provided geographical data of strategic

moment. Yet, they were not used to collect military intelligence, and the

Survey exchanged its data with Russian geographers.

Britain gained more knowledge by information than any state had ever

done through intelligence and processed and used it better. It developed

information superiority over all other states; this was not lost until 1950.

This success deﬁned the need for intelligence. Open sources answered

most questions, leaving just a few hard and special cases of internal or

external threats. These were handled by the responsible department: the

Admiralty, working direct with consuls; the Foreign Secretary or PUS,

working through the MID; the Irish Special Branch, Home Ofﬁce, Indian

Intelligence Branch or its provincial Special Branches, through detectives.

Rarely did these units act together, except for imperial contra-espionage.

In the 1870s, spies and detectives run by Canada, India, ambassadors and

the Home Ofﬁce monitored Fenian subversion.

In the 1880s, detectives

working for British authorities in Punjab and Egypt, and diplomats in

Paris and St Petersburg, penetrated a farcical effort to rally internal and

external enemies against the empire by Dalip Singh, claimant to the

kingdom of Lahore.

British authorities in many countries watched the

shadows for a Muslim menace, especially Wahabism. The consul in Jeddah

was charged with monitoring ‘the politico-religious movements, which

starting from the head-quarters of Islam may soon reach the

Muhammedans of India’.

Britain addressed these problems case by case. This process, especially

its failures, shaped the rise of intelligence. From 1890, the inability to

detect Russian thrusts on Istanbul and India worried Britain. The attempts

to overcome ignorance took its intelligence to the edge of its competence.

Britain had some success against the ﬁrst case, by making consuls in the

Black Sea monitor Russian shipping, while linking the Mediterranean

Fleet and its embassy in Istanbul by rapid and covert communications but

not against the second.

Simply to increase the number of newswriters

was pointless, since Indian ofﬁcials mistrusted them. Nor could secret

agents easily pass to and from Turkistan. Few native ofﬁcials of the

Government of India could travel secretly through Central Asia, while

Europeans were rather conspicuous in that area. These problems left

Britain uncertain and open to Tsarist blackmail. New ones followed.

Between 1898 and 1902, the European and world systems became one.

A series of crises in Asia and Africa, some blamed on intelligence failures,

triggered fears of danger which echoed until 1914. The threats were real

but overstated. Despite them, Britain’s decline in power and the need to

actively manage Europe so to keep it stable, divided and peaceful, Britain

easily held its own and scored a great run of success in policy. Still, the

tension reduced its tolerance for uncertainty and deﬁnition of menace

and raised its demand for intelligence. Its concerns were unlike those

of any other state, overwhelmingly imperial, whether about external or

Tradition and system 187

internal threats, and maritime, indifferent to European diplomacy.

Against occult and terrorist bodies, ‘not merely the bomb in Calcutta,

Poona, etc., but the little nests of deviltry in Paris, New York and other

centres’, even staunch Liberals advocated a political police.

Fears of an

internal– external threat sparked the origin of MI5, the Indian Criminal

Intelligence Department (CID) and the ‘A’ agency. Old institutions and

attitudes constrained new developments, which stemmed from a desire to

solve known and particular problems, rather than general and unknown

ones. Intelligence easily could tell authorities what they wanted to learn

but not what they did not know they could know. Like Victorians, Edwar-

dians were more willing to use intelligence than to collect it. Still, strategic

problems and intelligence needs overlapped, and agencies created for

one problem could evolve to handle others. Special Branch, initially

focused on Irish revolutionaries, turned to monitor spies and revolution-

aries around 1900. By 1910, it was authorised to work closely with MI5 on

its ‘enquiries regarding the many alleged instances of foreign espionage

and other suspicious incidents which are frequently brought to our

notice’. William Melville, MI5’s ﬁrst operative, had long service as a police

detective. However, a true political police re-emerged only in 1914. Fear

of Tsarist contacts with Indian revolutionaries, and the hope of reading

Russian military trafﬁc in war, underwrote the rise of the Indian code-

breaking agency, but it soon focused on diplomatic trafﬁc.

Intelligence

evolved as a group of loosely connected solutions to particular problems,

deﬁned more by personality than policy, which caused odd general

results. Code-breaking emerged in India but not England and was used

against China but not Germany. India had more intelligence ofﬁcers

abroad for contra-espionage than Britain had for espionage. The MID, the

empire’s premier intelligence agency, the only one with a general

mandate or expertise, had little secret funding of its own. Still, the devel-

opments were powerful.

From 1900, Britain slowly came to collect human intelligence through

specialist bureaus, not well coordinated, staffed by army, navy and police

ofﬁcers and focusing on strategy and security rather than diplomacy. It

began with the ‘A’ agency, an import–export company, based in Antwerp,

run by the MID, working in the arms trade, to monitor potential threats. It

was followed by the establishment of a permanent ﬁeld intelligence service

in India, an outstation in Meshad to improve the monitoring of Russian

Central Asia, a worldwide contra-espionage service by the CID, MI5 in

Britain and a ‘secret service’ [later called MI1c, MI6 and the Secret Intelli-

gence Service (SIS)].

The British Army and Navy began to prepare for

the use of radio intelligence in war. The Indian Army created a code-break-

ing agency, which had success against the diplomatic trafﬁc of Persia and

China, its material widely circulated in the Indian and British governments.

Most of these agencies focused on threats, known or feared, which were

hard to detect, like Indian revolutionaries or German warship construction.

188 J.R. Ferris

Ultimately, they became permanent and general purpose bureaus, but that

effect was not the intent. Sources remained Victorian. When considering an

espionage system for war with Germany, one minister noted,

There are a good many Swedes in business who have married English

wives, especially in Gothenburg where the tone and feeling is quite

English, and there no doubt, among the class of agents and commer-

cial travellers, who do a big business in Germany, some suitable mater-

ial might be found.

A leading source on German warships was the Director of Vickers, Com-

mander Trevor Dawson, working through ‘special agencies’ and his own

observations in war shipbuilding yards. Lloyds advised the Admiralty on

how to monitor naval movements on the Kiel Canal.

Modes of organisa-

tion drew and departed from Victorian forms. In 1903, the MID thought it

obvious that we, from our geographical position, do not require in

peace time elaborate espionage agencies in the interior of any Euro-

pean Country. Our peace requirements in the matter of secret service,

unlike those of Continental nations having extensive land frontiers to

guard, differ much from our War requirements; it is not necessary for

us, as it is for them, to maintain an army of spies in our neighbour’s ter-

ritory to report his slightest movements. . .. We require two distinct

systems, one for peace, and one for war.

In peace, ‘we should be able to obtain all the information and warning we

require’ by the press, ‘a few intelligent observers’ at capitals and seaports

and ‘special agents’ to watch military technology. During war, ‘agencies’

in neutral states, run by two ‘collectors’ (ofﬁcers, perhaps assisted by

diplomats), would control spies and cut-outs in enemy countries, sift their

material and send it to Britain via ‘forwarders’, generally legations. The

MID should establish such a system in advance.

The FO agreed, and

Britain moved on the idea, which aided the expansion of human intelli-

gence from August 1914, so creating the third-party rule – that intelli-

gence ofﬁcers would not operate against their host state.

Intelligence was moving from the Victorian tradition of espionage but

had not broken from it. In particular, the system for diplomatic intelli-

gence of 1914 was weaker than that of 1792 or 1875. This happened

because open sources worked well; gentlemen working as and with gentle-

men could gain most of the information Britain knew it needed. Its intelli-

gence in Europe focused on technical naval matters. Edwardian diplomats

had fewer intelligence triumphs than Victorian ones and less appreciation

of what it could provide; here, Salisbury had no successors. While happy to

use intelligence, diplomats aimed to avoid collecting it, a change in atti-

tude stemming from the professionalisation of intelligence and diplomacy.

Tradition and system 189

Diplomats agreed that consuls could collect intelligence in war, and

through their usual sources, local detectives and businessmen, but many

were reluctant to let them do so in peacetime.

As PUS, even Hardinge

wrote, ‘the paid agents of the Admiralty should do such work’. Comment-

ing on the case of Colonel Redl, the next PUS, Arthur Nicolson, noted ‘the

whole of this spy system is abhorrent, although no doubt it may be neces-

sary to maintain it’.

Edwardians also stole fewer documents from foreign

governments than Victorians had done.

Between 1870 and 1914, British intelligence was mediocre in Europe

and excellent in the rest of the world. It stood in the middle of the pack

on diplomatic matters, where powers under threat did better than leading

ones. It was beneath the standard of Austria and France, which feasted on

its weak codes, while Russia led the world in this practice and political

warfare. In military intelligence and contra-espionage, Britain was strong.

This was the one area of operational staff work where it matched France

and Germany, aided by experience in small wars and the reconstruction of

order of battle, and the creation of capabilities for aerial reconnaissance

and signals intelligence. No state matched it in collecting and assessing

strategic information. British intelligence was useless to policy during the

July crisis, but well prepared for the Great War, its greatest test.

In 1914, modes of intelligence crashed into each other. Acting in the

Victorian tradition, consuls, colonial ofﬁcials and army and navy ofﬁcers

handled most human intelligence, augmented by systems with tangled

lines. India did as it wished in Asia, as soldiers did near every front and the

NID everywhere. Canadian security, MI5, MI1c, the NID and the CID, all

handled intelligence in the US. Ultimately, these problems were sur-

mounted. Never before 1914, had even ﬁfty Britons worked full time in

intelligence at any time. In 1918, 20,000 did so (and perhaps only 60,000

in 1944). Britain built huge intelligence bureaucracies with unprece-

dented power in collection and assessment. It led the world in code-break-

ing, as the world entered the second great age of communications

intelligence. Imperial agencies in the US cooperated to block German

threats and used them to build alliances with American ofﬁcials. William

Wiseman, MI1c’s chief in Washington, became advisor to Woodrow

Wilson. MI5 and the CID walled Britain and India from their enemies.

Strategic intelligence was central to the success of blockade and to polit-

ical warfare, attempted on a heroic scale, with mixed results. Propaganda

aided British policy in the US, as did millions of pounds of secret service

spending in Persia and Arabia. Bribery, however, failed in Bulgaria and

Turkey. The British Army matched anyone in operational intelligence,

while Room 40 multiplied the numerical strength of the RN, aiding stra-

tegic success at sea. British intelligence had failures, especially its inability

to help naval operations, while its enemies exploited their superiority in

the ﬁeld over Russia. Still, Britain beat Germany in their intelligence

struggle. By making blockade work without alienating Washington, and by

190 J.R. Ferris

inﬂuencing American elite and public opinion through censorship, pro-

paganda and the Zimmerman Telegram, intelligence eased, and may have

been essential, to British victory.

Between 1919 and 1939, believing Britain confronted major threats,

statesmen relied far more on intelligence than ever before in peacetime.

Collection and assessment became bureaucratised, uniquely civilian, cen-

tralised and interdepartmental, and harnessed to information processing.

Demand and supply grew. Agencies which had emerged before 1914

became permanent, nailed to each other and the old tradition in a ram-

shackle way, as statesmen tried to combine centralised and decentralised

approaches. The personalised mode of ad hoc organisations collecting

material on a narrow range of issues which went directly to decision

makers at the top was replaced by specialised and general purpose agen-

cies, reporting on everything all the time, especially the Government Code

& Cypher School (GC&CS) and SIS, with perhaps 200 and sixty people,

respectively, in 1938. This material was no longer analysed primarily by

statesman but by military intelligence and the regional sections of the FO.

The latter loosely controlled the SIS and the GC&CS, while the ﬁghting

services had smaller agencies, as did the Dominions and India. Though

they collected more material on Europe than other continents, their

primary focus was imperial security – in 1929, 10 per cent of imperial

secret service funds were allocated to control tribes in Iraq and the North-

west frontier

– closely followed by diplomacy, with military intelligence in

the rear, a costly handicap in 1939–41.

This system worked best with signals intelligence, little practiced before

1914 and without old baggage. The GC&CS and agencies of the Domin-

ions, India, and the military services coordinated interception and crypt-

analysis as well as any other state. In the 1920s, they led the world in

code-breaking and ranked among the best practitioners of 1938. Still,

resources were scarce, mistakes common and code-breaking against cable

trafﬁc became divided from wireless intelligence. These problems caused

dangers in 1939–41, which Britain barely surmounted, aided by Poland

and a remarkable ability to innovate.

Greater problems emerged in human intelligence and security. The SIS

led the former, covered by the Passport Control Service, a consular

branch retained, so passport fees could augment the secret service fund.

Yet, older traditions of intelligence persisted. PUS ran their networks, like

Robert Vansittart’s ‘private detective’ agency. In Persia, Military Attachés

ran spies until 1930; in China, SIS ofﬁcers worked under consular cover.

When seeking sources, ofﬁcers turned to British businesses, forming part-

nerships with some, like the Anglo Petroleum Oil Corporation (APOC).

When contemplating an SIS service in Iraq, an RAF ofﬁcer noted,

I cannot see the difﬁculty about cover, if it does not suit to make one a

Military Attaché and the other an Air Force liaison ofﬁcer or Imperial

Tradition and system 191