>
> First of all congratulations to Phil on defending his thesis. It's nice to
> know that one of us really knows what he's talking about. I am curious how
> Phil was able to find documentation on the subject especially considering
> the British "Official Secrets Act." Most research on Intelligence
> Services is "journalistic history" which means, in general, that the author
> interviews a lot of people "off the record" and the reader has to blindly
> accept that the author is accurate. A Phd thesis on the other hand, has to
> be well documented.
Now this is an interesting point, and I hope that other members in the
list may be interested in the answer.
The documentation problem was attacked from two different directions. In
the first place, a great deal of new documents have been released into the
Public Record Office since the Major administration's 'open government'
initiative. This is particularly true of the SOE archives, which carry a
lot of incidental SIS correspondence, and carry-overs from Section D, the
SIS unit which formed part of the basis for SOE.
However, even without the SOE papers I was able to develop a strategy for
chasing down the core of SIS' structure, its Circulating Sections
(amalgamated in 1946 as Requirements Directorate -- see my postings to
this list on actual SIS organisation as compared with the Sandbaggers).
The C Sections were originally secondments from the consumer departments
(FO, WO, RAF, Admiralty, Ministry of Economic Warfare) which set
requirements on the one hand and circulated SIS product to their home
departments on the other. Since these were actually War Office,
Admiralty and Air Ministry sections has at Broadway, they appear
occasionally in consuming department papers in the PRO -- but *not* as
SIS, but under their home departmental designations. E.g. the War Office
liaison to SIS was known in the SIS as Section IV but in the Directorate
of Military Intellgence originally as MI 1c, and later as MI 6 (hence the
colloquial name for SIS). One could chase MI 1c and MI 6 down in DMI
records (WO 232) and War Office lists between 1909 and 1946.
For early post-war, a good deal of relevant information appears in JIC
papers held in Cabinet Office papers (CAB series). Mid-Cold War, some SIS
stuff has appeared in DIS papers (not very much), and one journo actually
published a US document from 1981 showing the SIS order of battle in
19798/80.
In addition to archives, it was necessary to incorporate first hand
information from memoirs and a series of interviews with former officers
whose careers spanned from 1935 to 1995. However, the interview and
memoir material was processed through a sociological qualitative
methodology called 'triangulation', in which interview materials are
compared item by item with other primary sources, as well as each other,
to assess the degree of consensus between sources, and the apparent
reliability of individual memoir authors and interviewees. Hence, where
forced to fall back on the same sort of source as the journos,
considerably more methodological rigour (also in semi-structured interview
methods) were employed.
In the end, these methods aren't bug-free, but they do provide a
reasonable 'best guess' picture of structure and process in the 'Office'.
>
> >The next task is, of course, to get the thing published as a book.
>
> I would like to read it.
>
Once I get that sorted I post it to the group.
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*
*Zhaodao hao laoshi bu yi -- zhaodao hao xuesheng geng nan.*
It is hard to find a good teacher but even harder to find a good student.
*
(Kuntao Macan) http://www.rdg.ac.uk/AcaDepts/lw/kt/home.htm
(Security & Intelligence Studies) http:// www.rdg.ac.uk/SecInt/
*
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