When in 1909 a 50-year-old retired naval officer, Mansfield Cumming, was asked to set up what became today’s Secret Intelligence Service — better known as MI6— the suggestion that there might one day be an official history would have been unthinkable.
When in 1909 a 50-year-old retired naval officer, Mansfield Cumming, was asked to set up what became today’s Secret Intelligence Service — better known as MI6— the suggestion that there might one day be an official history would have been unthinkable. Indeed, for the next 85 years, MI6 had no official peacetime existence, let alone any thought of a history. Cumming later remarked that if ever he published an autobiography it would be quarto, bound in vellum and of 400 pages — all blank.
Change began with the Intelligence Services Act of 1994, which put SIS on a statutory footing, and the move to its prominent new headquarters, Vauxhall Cross. This was followed by William Waldegrave’s Open Government initiative, which led ultimately to this book (as well as to Christopher Andrew’s recent history of MI5). The choice of Keith Jeffery as historian was inspired, and the cut-off date — 1949, start of the Cold War — was defensible. The result is that rarity, a definitive history that no one writing on the subject can ignore and which will not be superseded for — at a guess — another half-century.
It reads fluently and easily, but it must have been hard graft. The SIS archive is woefully incomplete — far worse than MI5’s — as a result of disastrous periodic weedings which began in the 1920s and continued into recent decades. Lack of space was the prime reason, rather than any desire to expunge the record, allied with the pressure of present business and an intermittent historical awareness.
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