Sir Francis Walsingham: Elizabethan Spymaster
&

John Thurloe: Cromwell's Master Spy
 

John Wallis & Edward Willes

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Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Best Jervis,
Bombay Engineer Corps, Indian Army (1796-1857).
A renowned geographer, he was the founder and first
superintendent (1855-57) of the Topographical and
Statistical Department of the War Office.

Throughout 1854, Major Jervis petitioned the government to establish a topographical department. In a letter to the secretary of war in July 1854, Jervis wrote candidly:

     " The fact is palpable and notorious, that this great, intelligent, powerful commercial country....is entirely dependent for good maps on the Continent for German, French,
        and other maps. What else we have are, in truth, but school atlases. We have an admirable hydrographical office for nautical surveys and charts, and another for the
        Tithe Commissioners' surveys; but for our colonial, commercial, or war purposes we have no resource but foreign information."

The enthusiasm which his Crimean map generated in the field among British and French officers, as well as the high-level recognition of his work - Emperor Napoleon III invited Jervis to Paris and presented him with a massive gold snuff box - helped Major Jervis  move the British government to action. What satisfaction he must have felt when a letter arrived in February 1855 from the War Department, telling him of the Treasury's approval of the creation of a Topographical and Statistical Department in the War Department and offering him the post of superintendent. If judged by the cramped physical environment in which its offices were first established, the beginnings of the Topographical and Statistical Department in March 1855 were hardly impressive, except for the fact that it was situated close to the center of power. The department initially was housed in converted stables and a coach house at 9 Adelphi Terrace in Whitehall.

After little more than a year it was moved to a more suitable location. Under its newly promoted chief, Lieutenant Colonel Jervis, the T&S Department produced several books and some excellent maps in its first two years. An even brighter and more productive future appeared to be in store when, in 1856, Jervis won the support of one of his superiors, namely Lord Panmure, the secretary of state for war, for a plan to send a small team of soldiers and civilians to the Middle East to engage in "scientific geographical exploration." Much has been made of the creation of the T&S Department in 1855. In an unpublished historical paper written to help commemorate "the centenary year of Military Intelligence in the British Army, 1955," Lt. Col. W.V.R. Isaac states, matter-of-factly, "this event has always been regarded as the beginning of the service of intelligence in the British Army." Brian Bond, a leading authority on the British Army in the latter half of the nineteenth century, feels that it was "the first tentative step towards a future British general staff," and he is not alone in this opinion. Lt. Col. B.AH. Parritt sees an "unbroken line" from the T&S Department of 1855 to the Joint Service Directorate of Intelligence in the British Ministry of Defence today. An even bolder claim is asserted by Jock Haswell, a retired British Army major employed for many years as an author at Britain's School for Service Intelligence. Haswell finds in the T&S Department the origins of both the British General Staff and the Joint Service Directorate of Intelligence. Did the establishment of the T&S Department in 1855 represent, as Isaac, Parritt, and Haswell suggest, the birth of a permanent intelligence department at the War Office? The acceptance of this idea has led some to the conclusion that the Crimean War was the primary cause of the emergence of such an organization in Great Britain. After all, it was the Crimean War experience which brought about a great wave of reform in the British Army. More specifically, it was the war that made possible the personal triumph of Thomas Jervis in winning official support for his national topographical depot in 1855. But can an "unbroken line" be traced from the T&S Department of 1855 to the Intelligence Branch of the 1870s and its successors? From its earliest days under Thomas Jervis, until 1870, the T&S Department was heavily oriented toward the "topgraphical" as opposed to the "statistical" side of its title. Its first director was, after all, a geographer by training and experience, and his principal objective in petitioning various government officials before 1855 had been to create a map depot or topographical department. Why Lord Panmure decided to add "statistical" to the title of the new organization he placed under Jervis in 1855 is not clear. He may have been influenced by the historical precedent of the defunct Depot of Military Knowledge, or perhaps he aimed at setting up an organization along the lines of the Dépôt de la Guerre in France, which had been a repository for both topographical and statistical information. Then, too, early nineteenth-century geographers like Thomas Jervis were both mapmakers and statisticians. Prior to his transfer to the general staff in 1833, Helmuth Karl von Moltke (the Elder) spent a number of years in the Prussian Topographical Bureau, where his talent for drawing was fully exploited. Moltke's first studies involved both topography and statistics. Letters written by Thomas Jervis during the years 1854-56 show his admiration for the Dépôt de la Guerre and his understanding of the statistical function of the T&S Department. Writing to the secretary for war in March 1854, Jervis pointed out that no other major European nation was so illinformed as Great Britain, not only in the area of geographical information, but also in

         statistical information which we ought by rights to possess, when we might have been expected from the habitual tastes of the people for
                                adventure, commerce, and exploration to have accumulated the largest and most valuable stores of such information....

Now that the country was at war, Jervis added, the demand grew daily for information about the military and naval forces of the enemy as well as of the geography and climate of the theater of war.

         The public, the legislature, and very Ministers themselves, and the Sovereign, above all, desire to be perfectly informed with respect to the
                                 minutest details of the statistics and geography of the seat of war...

But did the T&S Department, especially in its first two years under Thomas Jervis, accomplish much useful work outside the area of cartography? The answer appears to have been no, despite the director's professed interest in "statistics." Considering that twenty-six of the twenty-eight men who worked in the T&S Department under Jervis in 1855-56 were civilian lithographers, it is not surprising that the principal product of the office was maps. The excellent reputation that the T&S Department enjoyed during the Crimeran War was based entirely upon the high quality and usefulness of these maps and on the immense personal achievements of its widely acclaimed founder, Thomas Jervis, the geographer. In fact, the Depot of Military Knowledge of 1803 bore a much greater resemblance to the Intelligence Branch of 1873 than did the T&S Department of 1855-57. Unlike the T&S Department, both the depot and the Intelligence Branch were organized and manned to collect and process information about foreign armies as well as to produce maps. Also overlooked, or at least downplayed, by those who consider 1855 to be the great watershed in the history of British military intelligence, is the decline and near collapse of the T&S Department in the thirteen years between 1857 and 1870. This development, even more than the topographical bias of the Department in the Jervis years, weakens the argument for continuity between 1855 and 1873. Soon after the death of Thomas Jervis in 1857, the secretary for war, Lord Panmure, appointed a committee to look into the efficiency of the T&S Department and its relationship to other government agencies. The recommendations of this committee were followed, almost to the letter, by Panmure. To unify all government mapmaking agencies and save money, he placed the Ordnance Survey and the Topographic Depot of the QMG (the surviving remnant of the Depot of Military Knowledge) under the T&S Department. This enlarged T&S Department was directed to maintain close relations with topographical agencies of the self-governing colonies and to coordinate the mapping of the Crown colonies and other dependencies. Rather than breathing life into the "statistical" half of the T&S Department, these changes served to reinforce the already near-total dominance of the "topographical" side. The new director of the Department, Lt. Col. Henry James of the Royal Engineers, a veteran of many years in the Ordnance Survey, had little interest in military intelligence. As in the first several years under Jervis, the efforts of theT&S Department "seem to have been devoted to studying the topography of foreign countries. The nature and strength of their armies were treated as minor matters, relegated to the background." By the mid-1860s, even the topographical mission was being slighted, and the Department was being assigned such odd and sundry tasks as producing the illustrations for the dress regulations, compiling a volume on the organization and composition of the British Army, and publishing "that portion of the army equipment series relating to the Royal Artillery." Here was a situation analogous to that of the Depot of Military Knowledge after 1815. Sir George Aston's description seems particularly apt:

                                                                        ....the department enjoyed a long slumber from the time when the memory of the Crimean scandals
                                                                        faded into the past until a certain amount of public interest was awakened by the conspicuous
                                                                       successes of the German Army against Austria in 1866 and against France in 1870.

An even more damning indictment of the T&S Department was contained in the initial report of a young officer who replaced Colonel James as director in April 1870. Capt. Charles W. Wilson prepared a memorandum decrying the unsatisfactory condition of the department which soon reached the desk of Secretary for War Cardwell. According to Wilson's firsthand assessment, the map collection of foreign countries was "very incomplete," there was a shameful lack of information on hand about foreign armies, and there were "no means for keeping the office supplied with information from abroad." In retrospect, Wilson was not entirely correct on the third point, but there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of the first two. Thirteen years after the death of Jervis, the T&S Department had reached an all-time low in usefulness, even in its traditionally strong topographical function. Beginning early in 1871, however, and continuing for several years until it was absorbed by the newly established Intelligence Branch in April 1873, the T&S Department underwent a remarkable transformation. So complete was its metamorphosis that the T&S Department of June 1871 appeared to be only distantly related to the Department of 1855-70. It was during this eventful two-year period that the T&S Department began to pay attention to its neglected statistical function. Information about foreign armies was collected, processed, and reported. On the topographical side, the emphasis returned to the production of maps useful in strategic planning and overseas military operations. Just as Thomas Jervis deserves much of the credit for the birth of the T&S Department in 1855, so one man played a decisive role in reviving and transforming it, a matter which will receive more attention in the next chapter. Once again, as in both 1803 and 1855, war or the threat of war provided a powerful incentive for improving national military intelligence. This time, however, Great Britain was not a participant. As Sir George Aston correctly observed, the T&S Department and, he might have added, the entire War Office, were rudely awakened from their peacetime complacency by the spectacular victories of the Prussian Army against Austria in 1866 and France in 1870-71. A third significant factor which may be counted among immediate causes of the 1871-73 transformation was discussed at the outset of the chapter: the atmosphere of reform which descended on the War Office with the arrival Edward Cardwell in 1868 and which continued until his departure in 1874. But the individual efforts of Charles Wilson, the rise of German military power evident in the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian Wars, and the encouragement given by Cardwell to War Office reform do not account entirely for the reconstruction of the T&S Department and the birth of the Intelligence Branch.
from pages 21-25 in British Military Intelligence, 1870-1914: The Development of a Modern Intelligence Organization by Thomas G. Fergusson, London: Arms and Armour Press, 1984

During the Napoleonic Wars the Quarter Master General's Department at Horse Guards on Whitehall had acquired a rudimentary responsibility for strategic intelligence. As well as continuing his traditional duties of moving and quartering troops, the Quarter Master General established in 1803 a Depot of Military Knowledge to collect, mostly from overt sources, maps and information on the military resources and topography of foreign powers. But during the forty years of comparative European peace which followed the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, the Depot, like much else in the British Army, withered away. Renamed the Topographical Department, it became a neglected appendage of the run-down Quarter Master General's Department, doing little either to collect military information or produce new maps. Military manuals ignored strategic intelligence and confined themselves to problems of tactical or field intelligence such as cavalry reconnaissance. During 'the long peace' the British Army as a whole concerned itself with tactics rather than with stategy. As the army became for the first time in its history largely a colonial army, fighting far-flung campaigns in Southern Africa, India, Burma, Malaya, China and New Zealand, it had to contend with an often chronic shortage of intelligence from the War Office on its theatres of operations and the native forces ranged against it. The commander-in-chief at the Horse Guards had no authority over the colonial troops or expeditionary forces fighting at the frontiers of the Empire. The Duke of Wellington, during his final term as commander-in-chief from 1842 to 1852, claimed to rely on the newspapers on the progress of colonial conflicts. He wrote sourly in 1851, when asked by the secretary of state for war and colonies for advice on the conduct of the Kaffir War:

                                                                                                  I have never had any information of the causes of the War in the Cape Colonies,
                                                                                                 or the objects of the Government in carrying it on, or the views of the Government
                                                                                                 in relation to a frontier at its termination.

The improbable progenitor of strategic intelligence in the Victorian War Office was Thomas Best Jervis, a retired major from the Bombay Sappers and Miners. Jervis's devoted son was deeply impressed by the 'resemblance between the well-ordered heads and noble foreheads' of his father and 'the immortal Cicero':

                                                                                                  Thomas Best Jervis also had a head of large dimensions, moulded with exquisite
                                                                                                  symmetry - all the better seen since he was bald - scantily ornamented behind
                                                                                                  with a few locks of curly, silkily gray hair, a capacious forehead, an open count-
                                                                                                  enance, bespeaking genuine candour, and illuminated by far-sighted, limpid, gray-
                                                                                                  ish-blue Saxon eyes, unmistakably revealing sincerity and a warm, loving soul of
                                                                                                  the most expansive nature, no less than a lucid mathematical and linguistic mind
                                                                                                  of exceptional beauty.

Jervis made less of an impression on the Bombay Sappers and Miners. Handicapped by what his son considered a 'great humility of disposition' (which must sometimes have seemed a tedious moral earnestness to his fellow sappers), Jervis took seven and a half years to rise from ensign to lieutenant. Though not a distinguished soldier, he made a reputation as cartographer and topographer which led to his selection in 1837 as the next surveyor-general of India to succeed Colonel Everest (who gave his name to the world's highest mountain). But by 1841 Jervis had grown tired of waiting for the ailing Everest to retire, resigned his post in India and returned to England. Back home, he threw himself into a wide range of scholarly and philanthropic pursuits. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Astronomical, Royal Geographical, Royal Geological, Royal Asiatic and Royal Societies. He was active also in the British and Foreign Bible Society, the Association for the Discouragement of Duelling, the Evangelical Alliance, and many other worthy British and Indian causes. Jervis bombarded the government and East India Company with advice and exhortation on an extraordinary variety of topics; among them native education, 'moral destitution' on emigrant ships, the use of dromedaries, the introduction of silkworms, slate roofing and Chinese labour. By far his most influential lobbying, however, was on the subject of cartography. In 1846 he wrote to Lord Aberdeen, the foreign secretary, to complain of the 'acknowledged want of geographical information in many well-known and recent cases' ranging from Borneo to South America. This want, said Jervis, could 'now be supplied' and, his letter clearly implied, he was the man to do it. The Foreign Office was not convinced. The beginning of the Crimean War against Tsarist Russia in 1854 quickly proved Jervis's point. The British commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Lord Raglan, left for the Crimea without not merely secret intelligence on the enemy but also much basic information. He complained when setting out for Sebastopol that it was as much a mystery to him as to Jason and the Argonauts two and a half millennia before. Once in the Crimea British commanders frequently also lacked elementary tactical intelligence. After the charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava, Lord Lucan, the commander of the ill-fated Light Brigade, was brought the brief, urgent message: 'Attack and prevent the enemy carrying away the guns'. But Lucan had no scouts posted, no idea what lay beyond the surrounding hills, and could only reply in bewilderment: 'Attack, Sir? Attack what? What guns, Sir?' The early débâcles of the war gave Jervis a new opportunity to urge his case. On the outbreak of war he managed to obtain in Belgium both a map of the Crimea prepared by the Russian general staff and a twenty-one sheet Austrian military map of Turkey in Europe. As soon as he returned to England a friend gained him an audience with the secretary of state for war, the Duke of Newcastle. Although, according to Jervis's son, 'it then transpired that the Government had no knowledge whatever of the maps, which did not exist in the great public or military libraries', Newcastle remained unwilling to disturb War Office routine by setting up a map-making department. But he told Jervis that if he were willing to prepare suitable maps at his own expense, 'the Government were willing to purchase of him as many copies as they might feel it desirable to obtain'. Jervis lost no time in producing a ten-sheet map of the Crimea: probably the first printed in England to delineate marine contours in blue, the hills in brown, and the rest in black. Simultaneously, according to his son, he assailed 'all the leading men of the day' with demands for 'an efficient department for the construction of maps', basing his case not merely on the lack of maps but also on the general shortage of Russian intelligence resulting from 'our overweening presumption, inattention to due precautions, sheer ignorance and contempt of an enemy by no means contemptible'. On 2 February 1885 Lord Panmure, the Duke of Newcastle's successor at the War Office, finally wilted under the pressure and announced the creation of the Topographical and Statistical Department (T & S) under the direction of Jervis who was shortly afterwards promoted lieutenant-colonel. T & S eventually developed into the War Office's first intelligence department. But its progress was painfully slow. During the Crimea War it was mainly occupied by preparing maps. After the war ended in 1856 and Jervis died in the following year even its cartography declined. By the mid-1860s T & S was being given such trivial tasks as preparing illustrations for army dress regulations. When Captain (later Major-General Sir) Charles Wilson became director of the department on 1 April 1870 he reported that its foreign map collection was 'very incomplete', its intelligence on foreign armies shamefully deficient, and the 'means for keeping the office supplied with information from abroad' non-existent. On the last point Wilson overstated his case. Since the Crimean War military attachés had been posted for the first time at Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg, Turin and Vienna (together with a solitary naval attaché in Paris). But the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870 provided further evidence of the general poverty of British military intelligence. 'Had any complications arisen with France....and had we been asked for information', Wilson later told a friend, 'we should have had to translate a German work on the French army as giving a better account of it than we could prepare ourselves'. Though Wilson had a much larger vision of military intelligence than Thomas Jervis, he had a good deal in common with him. Like Jervis, he was a devout, scholarly man, who had made a reputation as cartographer and topographer, and had been elected a Fellow of both the Royal and Royal Geographical Societies. Wilson helped to found the Palestine Exploration Fund in 1865 and retained a life-long passion for the excavation and survey of the Holy Land, above all for Jerusalem which he believed not even 'any infidel or any atheist could view without emotion'. He was not, however, an ideal propagandist for an enlarged T & S Department. Wilson had a taciturn manner and, as his official biographer tactfully puts it, was 'not what he called a society man'. But he had the great advantage of the active support of Edward Cardwell, Gladstone's reforming secretary of state for war. Shortly after Wilson became director of the T & S Department, Cardwell asked him for a report analysing its main weaknesses and proposing remedies. Wilson's report was submitted to a committee which included himself as secretary and Lord Northbrook, under-secretary for war, as chairman. The Northbrook committee's findings, published on 24 January 1871 and formally approved by Cardwell only two days later, endorsed Wilson's report virtually in its entirety and gave a scathing analysis of the cumbrous bureaucracy to which T & S was subject:

                                                                                     Captain Wilson prepares a minute requesting that a map may be purchased. This passes to the
                                                                                     Chief Clerk, who, after approving it, forwards the request to 'C' Division in which a demand on
                                                                                     the Stationary Office is made out. The Stationery Office order the map from the mapseller, who
                                                                                     send it to 'C' Division who forward it to the Chief Clerk who passes it to Captain Wilson.

As a result of the Northbrook report, military intelligence ceased at last to be regarded as an offshoot of map-making. The T & S was divided into two sections, one topographical, the other statistical. The Topographical Section remained responsible for collecting foreign military maps and plans (as well as photographs, when available), but its work was simplified by the removal of the Ordnance Survey to the Office of Works. The Statistical Section was made responsible for gathering and collating intelligence on foreign armed forces, and divided into three subsections responsible for different geographic areas. Its officers were required to know at least two foreign languages and were equipped with an improved library. The military intelligence with which they dealt was, however, scarcely secret intelligence. Their two main sources were foreign publications and the reports of military attachés with whom, for the first time, they were authorised to correspond directly. The only reference to covert (or almost covert) intelligence collection was a recommendation that 'soldiers should be encouraged to obtain plans of foreign fortresses and that sailors should be encouraged to do sketches of foreign ports'. Limited funds were allocated to the department to support such semi-covert activities by its officers abroad 'on condition that the officer worked and made a useful report'. In June 1871 Sir Edward Lugard, the permanent under-secretary at the War Office, gave the reorganised and strengthened T & S a statement of its duties which for the first time approximated to those of a modern military intelligence department:

                                                                                    to collect and classify all possible information relating to the strength, organisation, etc., of foreign
                                                                                    armies; to keep themselves acquainted with the progress made by foreign countries in military art
                                                                                    and science, and to preserve the information in such a form that it can readily be consulted, and
                                                                                    made available for any purposes for which it may be required.

In 1872, at Cardwell's request, Wilson submitted a second report on the T & S, proposed a further expansion of its work, and modestly proposed that, in order to emphasise its importance, he be replaced as director by 'an officer of high rank and position'. In February 1873 Cardwell announced the transformation of T & S into 'a real Intelligence Department' to be known as the Intelligence Branch (IB) and directed by Major-General Sir Patrick MacDougall, formerly first commandant of the Staff College at Camberley, with 'that most excellent officer Captain Wilson' as his deputy. The new IB was formally instituted on April Fools Day 1873 with a staff of 27 (15 more than the old T & S). Its founders intended it not merely as an intelligence department but as the embryo of a British General Staff along the lines pioneered in Prussia (and not finally established in Britain until 1904).
from pages 7-11 in Her Majesty's Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community by Christopher Andrew, New York: Viking Penguin, 1986
 

The Crimean War, in many other respects also one of the most shameful in British military history, represented the nadir of British military Intelligence; with no relevant information available from London's Depot of Military Knowledge and with no Intelligence organization under the hand of the commander in the field, his comment quoted above was more than justified. In fact, had it not been for the fortuitous discovery by a prematurely retired major of the Bombay Engineers, Major Thomas Best Jervis, while on holiday in Belgium, of a copy of a Russian General Staff map of the Crimea and another of an Austrian military map of Turkey in twenty-one large sheets, the British commander would have had no better idea of the geography of the Crimea than could be gleaned from an atlas. War having just been declared, Jervis realized the value of his find and hurried back to London, where he managed to obtain an audience with the Secretary of State for War. Although his budget would not permit the reproduction of the maps by the Army, the Secretary of State was sufficiently impressed with their value to assure Jervis that, if he would reproduce them himself, the Government would purchase from him as many as might be required for issue to commanders in the field. Jervis agreed to undertake the task and, with the help of an officer and a clerk on loan from the Board of Ordnance, produced within a few weeks an English version of the Crimea map in ten sheets. This was well received and demand for copies was great; copies were passed to Britain's ally France and they so impressed the French Emperor that he invited Jervis to France and presented him with a large gold snuff box. Jervis had been pestering the government throughout 1854 to establish an Intelligence organization in London similar to the French Depôt de la Guerre; his success with the maps led the government eventually to acquiesce, and to authorize, on 2 February 1855, the establishment, under the aegis of the War Department, of a Statistical and Topographical Office with Jervis, now promoted to lieutenant-colonel, as Director. With a staff of two officers, a military clerk and twenty-six civilian lithographers, the new Department started work in a tumble-down coach-house and stable off Whitehall a few weeks later, moving to more suitable accommodation in No. 4 New Street, Spring Gardens, a site now occupied by the Admiralty, on 1 August 1856. They remained there until January 1874. Jervis was a tireless, determined and imaginative Intelligence officer, who saw before his contemporaries the need for a central store of Intelligence in London. A similar idea had been the Depot of Military Knowledge, founded in 1801 but by 1854 almost dead; Jervis picked up the threads again and was instrumental in establishing what many people now see as the first step towards the creation of a British General Staff, and the direct ancestor of the Joint Service Directorate of Intelligence in the present Ministry of Defence. Unfortunately, very little of Jervis's enthusiasm or product reached the field army training to win a war in the Crimea. Here, the general reaction to collecting information about the enemy was summed up by the statement in the official history of the Crimean War that: 'The gathering of knowledge by clandestine means was repulsive to the feelings of an English Gentleman.'....The resulting Roebuck Committee sat for several months, examining the causes of administrative failure, and eventually produced a three-volume report, the final conclusion of which was that the blame lay with the complete unpreparedness of the authorities, both political and military, for the waging of a sustained European war. This committee was followed by several others, each examining specific aspects of military life; not unnaturally, one of these was the Topographical and Statistical Department in London, created by Colonel Jervis, which had been unable, by virtue of the lateness of its creation, to furnish much in the way of Intelligence to assist the campaign. The report concluded that: 'The Department was organized in a hurry and under severe pressure....No very definite instructions appear to have been given to Colonel Jervis with respect to the objects in view and the mode of pursuing them.' The War Department acted quickly on this report, and in October 1857, the Department was reorganized to include the Ordnance Survey under a new Director, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry James of the Royal Engineers, and was made a separate department of the War Office. Intelligence and maps go naturally together, and, as the Royal Engineers have always been responsible for survey, it would seem obvious that a Royal Engineers officer should be chosen to head the responsible department; unfortunately, however, Colonel James was interested mainly in the comparatively new art of reproducing maps by photography and not at all in other aspects of Intelligence. The Department became fully occupied with the production of maps and other art-work, such as the plates for the illustrations to a new issue of Dress Regulations and a series of illustrations of army equipment relating to the Royal Artillery, to the exclusion of Intelligence relating to the composition and characteristics of foreign armies. By 1869, only twelve years after its much publicized re-birth, the Topographical and Statistical Department had reverted to the insignificance of its predecessors prior to the Crimean War, and once again there was nobody employed in Britain on the collection and collation of military Intelligence. If it seems that undue emphasis has been placed on the Crimean War in this account, it is because this period marked the low point of British military Intelligence and it is from the mistakes made in, and prior to, this campaign that the subsequent and eventually highly successful Intelligence organizations of later wars were evolved. In addition, the Crimean War marked the beginning of the ever-increasing rate of change in the development of weapon range and capability, communications and mobility; the introduction of the rifled gun, the steam tractor, the telegraph, the Morse code, the heliograph and photography at this time affected profoundly and irreversibly the whole spectrum of strategic, tactical and counter-Intelligence. As usual, however, the lessons were not immediately learned despite the reorganization resulting from the recommendations of the Roebuck Committee. By 1870 the very existence of the Topographical and Statistical Department was in jeopardy; funds had been cut and staff reduced, with the result that its Intelligence value to the Army was non-existent. However, the siege of Paris by the Prussian Army made the British Government again look to its defences and a spirit of reform again swept through the War Office, this time in the person of Mr. Edward Cardwell, the Secretary of State for War. As Prussian victory followed Prussian victory, the Prime Minister began to press the War Office for current assessments of the Prussian Army; the Topographical and Statistical Department, however, was unable to supply this information, being fully occupied with the production of maps, illustrations for Dress Regulations and other lithographs. Luckily for the Army and the T. and S. Department, the right man appeared at the right time. Captain Charles Wilson, also of the Royal Engineers, was posted to the Department as Executive Officer of the Topographical Section. Wilson had led an adventurous career in the Army, having spent four years delimiting the frontier between Canada and the United States and a further year surveying the city of Jerusalem, and it was by virtue of this experience that he was so dismayed by what he found when he arrived in the T. and S. Department. After only a few months in the appointment, Wilson submitted a strongly worded memorandum complaining that the recommendations of the Roebuck Committee had not been implemented and that the working of the Department was being seriously hampered by lack of funds. As a result of this memorandum, Cardwell set up a strong committee under Lord Northbrook, his Under-Secretary of State, to investigate the T. and S. Department. Wilson was appointed secretary and charged with drafting the Committee's report; he presented his report on 30 April 1870, and, although only two pages long, this paper, written by a junior officer of exceptional ability and foresight, marks a significant point in the development of military Intelligence. Cardwell adopted it almost in its entirety, and it is the foundation upon which the present Defence Intelligence Staff has been built. He recommended that:

1. The Ordnance Survey should be split from the Topographical Section and
should be a charge upon the Civil rather than the Army vote.
2. The Department should be divided into two sections, a Topographical
Section and a Statistical Section.
3. The Topographical Section should produce maps, and should collect maps
and photographs of all foreign countries.
4. The Statistical Section should be divided into three sub-sections:
       Section 'A' covering Austria, Russia, Sweden, Norway, Turkey, Greece
       and Asia.
       Section 'B' covering Prussia, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Spain and
       Denmark.
       Section 'C' covering France, Great Britain, Belgium, The Netherlands and
       America.
       All three sub-sections would have 'the task of collecting and classifying
information, rendering such information generally useful and translating such
foreign works as may be deemed desirable'.
5. A sum of money, say £250, should be inserted in the Estimates each year for
the purchase of foreign books and newspapers.
6. All confidential and other War Office reports, the printed orders and circulars
of all Departments of the Army and all Parliamentary reports on Army matters
should be sent to the Topographical Department as a matter of course.
7. All military attaché reports should be sent to the Topographical Department,
and officers of the Department should be allowed to communicate with them in
a semi-official manner. Attachés should send, every quarter, notices of new
books and maps published in their country and collect all foreign army circulars
and orders relating to equipment and organization. Attachés should also be
encouraged to criticize the working of foreign army systems, and should be
selected from officers who have passed through the Topographical Department
or Staff College or who belong to the Artillery or Engineers.
8. Officers of the Topographical Department should be encouraged to travel and
attend the Autumn manoeuvres on the Continent.
9. Information collected by the Sections should be made useful not only to the
Secretary of State but also to the Army as a whole by publishing quarterly a
list of all maps and books added to the Library during the quarter, and
translation of interesting articles, on military matters in foreign periodicals.
Secondly, a series of pamphlets descriptive of foreign armies and similar to
those prepared by the Prussian Topographical Department should be
prepared.

This report has been reproduced virtually in its entirety as it sets out clearly the basic requirements of an Intelligence organization; the recommendations were accepted almost without change by a further committee under Lord Northbrook in January 1871, and thus laid the foundation for the Ministry of Defence Intelligence organization as it is known today. Wilson was promoted to be Director of the reorganized Topographical and Statistical Department, with three officers to help him and tasked to: '.....collect and classify all possible information relating to the strength, organization and equipment of foreign armies, to keep themselves acquainted with the progress made by foreign countries in military art and science and to preserve the information in such a form that it can readily be consulted and made available for any purpose for which it may be required'. This brief is almost identical with that in current use in the Ministry of Defence. Wilson, however, was not satisfied, and after a year's experience of the appointment submitted another report to Cardwell, suggesting the need to have an officer of General rank to represent Intelligence interests and to present the Intelligence contribution; this officer to be relieved of all command duties and to be free to study the military defence of the Empire and the preparation of the Army for war. This was the first time that the complementary nature of Operations and Intelligence had been recognized, and formed the basis of the concept of the General Staff (Intelligence) chain of command which later became standard in the British Army. Cardwell again accepted Wilson's recommendation, and on 24 February 1873 announced in the House of Commons the intention of the Government to: '.....establish an Intelligence Department with a Deputy Adjutant-General and to amalgamate with it the Topographical Department under the most excellent officer Captain Wilson'. On 1April 1873, Major-General Sir Patrick MacDougall was appointed to head a new organization called the Intelligence Branch, which, in addition to himself, was to consist of one major, five captains, one attached officer, nine military and ten civilian clerks. Wilson was promoted into the major's post.

Thus it was that, some two hundred years after the birth of the regular British Army, Intelligence was recognized as being of sufficient importance both to have a function in time of peace and to become a separate branch of the Army command. 1 April 1873 is therefore a memorable date in the history of British military Intelligence, and, since that date, there has always been an Intelligence organization in the British Army; of varying capability and influence, dependent upon funds and personalities, but nevertheless in place and there to be built on, as and when required. The existence of an Intelligence Branch in London, however, did nothing for Wolseley in the Ashanti campaign of 1873, Chelmsford and Wolseley in the Zulu wars, or for other commanders in the various campaigns carried out in other parts of the world from 1873 to 1885; in each case, necessity dictated the formation and development of an Intelligence system which finally comprised field Intelligence units under the direct control of an Intelligence officer on the staff of the field force commander. As his Head of Intelligence for the Ashanti campaign Wolseley had appointed the young and dashing Captain Redvers Buller of the Rifle Brigade who quickly organized, from scratch, a highly successful network of agents and guides. In Zululand in 1878, however, Intelligence did not do so well; Lord Chelmsford took no Intelligence officer on his staff, relying instead upon a number of political officers attached to each column to act as interpreters, employ guides and control spies. Being civilians, the political officers were given scant recognition by the Army commanders and Chelmsford's first campaign, in January and February 1879, was an ignominious failure. For his second campaign in March and April of that year Chelmsford had the sense to appoint two Intelligence officers designated as such; with a well-organized field Intelligence service his second campaign was successful, thanks to timely and accurate information from these two. In 1874, the Intelligence Branch in London had been removed from the Adjutant-General's department of the War Office to that of the Quartermaster-General, a return to the practice of the 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries and, as such, a retrograde step. In January of the same year, the Branch had moved from its cramped accommodation in Spring Gardens to Adair House in St. Jame's Square, to be nearer to the War Office, then located in Pall Mall. By 1882 the concept of the Intelligence Branch in London had become accepted and its contribution both to the War Office and to the government had been recognized; in 1884 the Branch moved again, to 16 and 18 Queen Anne's Gate, two 'fine old houses' giving considerably more room than Adair House and which were to remain the home of War Office Intelligence until 1901. From its establishment in 1873 until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the Intelligence Branch's lowest point in terms of efficacy, prestige and morale was reached in 1885. This was due partly to a certain loss of direction after the departure of General Sir Patrick MacDougall for Canada in 1878 and his replacement by Major-General Sir Archibald Allison, and partly due to the practice then prevalent of taking officers from the Intelligence Branch when overseas campaigns started; when fighting broke out in the Middle East, Allison and four of the majors then serving in the Branch left for Egypt and the Branch was left to deal with its first large-scale conflict under a gallant but not outstanding second in command. His staff officers were constantly leaving for operational service, and, in the last Suakin expedition in 1885, four out of six of his majors were sent out to form the Intelligence Department for the expedition. The withdrawal of troops from the Sudan, however, marked a significant turning-point for the Branch because, for the first time, several officers who had previously served in the Branch were posted back to it; foremost among these was Major-General Henry Brackenbury, who filled the vacant post as Head of Intelligence. In the five years during which General Brackenbury headed the Branch, it matured and developed to become once more an intregal and important part of the War Office; on 1 June 1887 his title of  'Deputy Quarter-Master General for Intelligence' was changed to Director of Military Intelligence, abbreviated to DMI, a title which was to remain unchanged until 1901. At the same time, the Intelligence Branch was returned to the Adjutant-General's Department where the product of the Intelligence staff could more easily be linked with the operational requirement. When Brackenbury was promoted to Lieutenant-General in 1888 the status of the Branch was raised and it became the Intelligence Division, reorganized as follows:

                             DMI Lieutenant-General Brackenbury
                             DMI's Staff (two warrant officers and one confidential clerk)
                             Sections A to E, inclusive. Country Sections, each of one major, one captain
                                 and one military clerk.
                             Sections F, with same staff as other Sections, dealing with compilation and
                                 preparation of maps.
                             Library, with librarian and two military clerks.
                             Map Room, with Curator and Assistant Curator.
                             Drawing Office, with seven draughtsmen and three printers.
                             Stores, with one warrant officer and one military clerk.

This reorganization expanded on that instigated by Wilson, in 1873, retaining the division into 'country sections' but rationalizing the allocation of countries to Sections and expanding the number of Sections; that this system was sound in principle is shown by the fact that it was retained in the Directorate of Military Intelligence until 1965. As well as reorganizing the Division, General Brackenbury took great care in selecting the officers who were to staff the Division; a majority had already served successfully in at least one Intelligence appointment, as had Brackenbury himself, and it was because the Intelligence Division was so well commanded and staffed that it became increasingly a source of advice not only to the Commander-in-Chief but also to the Foreign Office. Brackenbury had, in addition, established a close liaison with the Director of Naval Intelligence, had established an interchange of information with the Colonial, India and Foreign Offices and tentatively also with the Cabinet and had been instrumental in getting Intelligence officers established on the staffs of Generals commanding overseas garrisons; in addition, he had begun the practice, suggested by Charles Wilson many years previously, of circulating foreign military information to other departments of the War Office and had established the principle that the Director of Military Intelligence should be consulted on all military matters concerning foreign countries. Brackenbury finished his five-year tour as DMI in 1891, and left behind him an efficient and highly respected military Intelligence machine; under his successor, however, the Division again entered the doldrums for a time.
from pages 21-30 in Military Intelligence: The British Story by Peter Gudgin, London: Arms and Armour Press, 1989

At length, in 1886, Major-General Henry Brackenbury, who had been one of Wolseley's select 'ring' of brilliant young officers, and Military Secretary during the Ashanti campaign and Chief of Staff in the Zulu Wars, took over the lapsed appointment of Head of the Intelligence Branch. He was exactly the right man for the job and set about reorganizing and developing it with the help of the officers who had now returned from their divertissement in the Sudan. This in itself was an event of some moment in the history of military intelligence because, for the first time, ex-members of the Branch were posted back to it - in higher ranks - after a tour of duty on active service. Brackenbury, like others before him, rapidly came to the conclusion that the functions of the intelligence staff must be more closely linked with operational needs, and since, as the Franco-Prussian War had shown, the greatest threat to Britain lay in the quick concentration of a mobile, aggressive continental army, intelligence and mobilization must be combined under the same roof to safeguard against any such emergency. He recommended the creation of a new, senior appointment in the Branch, and arranged for his former colleague and old friend, Colonel Ardagh, to fill it. On 1 June 1887, the old title of 'Deputy Quartermaster-General for Intelligence' was changed, and Brackenbury became the first Director of Military IIIntelligence - always known as the 'DMI' - a designation which remained until Army intelligence merged with that of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force to become, in 1965, a joint Defence Intelligence Staff. At the end of the year, Colonel Ardagh arrived and set up a sub-branch dealing with mobilization and home defence, but only three months later Brackenbury realized - as had his less powerful predecessors - that he had been mistaken in thinking that intelligence could or should ever assume responsibility for matters so outside his sphere. In February 1888 the new department of 'Mobilization' moved away to the main War Office building in Pall Mall and joined the staff of the Adjutant-General. In the following year Brackenbury was promoted to Lieutenant-General and his Branch was raised in status to become the Intelligence Division. He himself was now working direct to the Commander-in-Chief, and his influence and the value of his services increased to the point where, as DMI, he was allowed to correspond direct with the Foreign Office and the Private Under-Secretary for the Colonies without going through his own Secretary of State. By the year 1891, when Brackenbury completed his five-year tour at the head of the Intelligence Division and left for India to become Deputy Adjutant-General and Director of the Indian Intelligence Department, he had established the firm principle that the DMI must be consulted on all military matters concerning foreign countries. Intelligence had at last won the stamp of official approval, consulted at War Office staff level and accepted in the field, but, only a few years later, the Division Brackenbury had established and developed with such care was deemed to be a total failure and became the target of vilification and abuse from politicians, Press and people throughout the country.
from pages 45-46 in British Military Intelligence by Jock Haswell, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973

The Division had moved from Queen Anne's Gate to Winchester House, St. Jame's Square in 1901, in order to be nearer to the offices of the Commander-in-Chief in Pall Mall. When the war finally ended, the standard of British military Intelligence, both in the field Army in South Africa and at the War Office in London, had reached an all-time high, but this state had not been reached easily; the organization in the field had been built up piecemeal, both as a reaction to various threats as they arose and also in order to exploit new sources of Intelligence as they were thought of. However, in its final form the basic organization was sound and functional, and it has served as a model for all British field armies since the First World War. The British Army had finally had to acknowledge that Intelligence staffs are essential parts of field armies and their component formations and units, as well as of the headquarter staff in London, in peacetime as well as in war. The Intelligence Division in London, however, although functioning well, was staffed almost entirely by reserve officers, as most regular officers were serving 6,000 miles away in South Africa; the South Africa War had absorbed not only the whole of the Regular Army but also most of the Volunteer Army as well, leaving Great Britain denuded of troops in the face of an increasingly hostile, aggressive and well-armed Europe. A series of high-level committees was appointed, with the aims of reviewing the permanent establishment of the Mobilization and Intelligence Department and of analysing very critically the good and bad points arising out of the recent war in order to avoid repitition of the mistakes made and to be the better prepared for war in Europe should it occur. The two main recommendations of Lord Esher's committee, when it issued its report in 1904, were immediately accepted and implemented; they were, first, that the office of Commander-in-Chief, for so long and so frustratingly occupied by the Duke of Cambridge, should be abolished, after nearly two and a half centuries. The second recommendation was for the formation, at long last, of a General Staff; in this new organization, the Mobilization and Intelligence Department would again be split into its component parts, Intelligence to become part of the Military Operations Directorate and Mobilization to come under the Director of Military Training. It was also decided that the Intelligence function should be advisary only, the executive decisions being the perogative of the General Staff. This was the last major reorganization resulting from the Boer War, although within the Military Operations (MO) Directorate itself there was a continual reorganization of Sections. Initially there were four, each headed by a Colonel:

                              MO 1 Strategic, covering Imperial defence and the stategical distribution
                                         of the Army.
                              MO 2 Foreign Intelligence.
                              MO 3 Administration and Special Duties, such as counter-Intelligence and
                                         censorship.
                              MO 4 Topographical Section

In 1907, two new sections were formed; MO 5 took over the functions of 'Special Duties' from MO 3, and MO 6 was created to collect and collate medical Intelligence. It will be remembered that, prior to the reorganization of 1904, 'Special Duties' had been the responsibility of Section H of the Intelligence Division. In November 1906, the MO Directorate moved from Winchester House, St. James's Square, to the new War Office building (now known as the Old War Office Building, or OWOB) in Whitehall. In the final reorganization of the MO Directorate before the outbreak of war in August 1914, MO 2 assumed responsibility for Intelligence on European countries and MO 3, for Asia, the Americas and the Far East. MO 5 added administration and the General Staff Library to its responsibilities, as well as, in 1909, the Special Intelligence Bureau (later to be known as MI5 and 6), consisting of a Home Section (later MI5) under Captain Vernon Kell, with responsibility for counter-espionage, and a Foreign Section (later SIS, or MI6) with responsibility for espionage overseas. Thus, with responsibility for Intelligence, counter-Intelligence and operational planning, the DMO had now become a very influential person in Whitehall, and the Intelligence Branch had a direct channel through him to the Chief of the General Staff. Intelligence had at last found its rightful place in the War Office Organization.
from pages 37-38 in Military Intelligence: The British Story by Peter Gudgin, London: Arms and Armour Press, 1989

In June 1901 Major General Sir John Ardagh finished his tempestuous tour as Director of Military Intelligence and was succeeded by Lieutenant General Sir William Nicholson. At the same time the Mobilisation Division which had been separated from the Intelligence Division in 1888 was brought back, and Nicholson became Director General of Mobilization and Military Intelligence (DGMI). This raised the standing of the Division to that of a Department and gave Nicholson a seat on the Army Board equal with the Adjutant General Quarter Master General and the Director General of Ordnance.*
                                                                                              ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*The remainder of the War Office must have regarded the new Department with some suspicion, for in the 1901 War Office List there is a delightfully pointed afternote "The DGMI is authorised to correspond semi-officially with other Departments of the State on all subjects connected with his duties, in such correspondence however, he will not give information or express opinions which may be interpreted as pledging any other section of the War Office without the specific concurrence of the section concerned."
                                                                                               ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
He was also made a member of the Committee of Imperial Defence and was now required to report direct to the Commander in Chief. After two months in office General Nicholson decided what he had to do, and overnight abolished all the existing sections. He replaced them with only three. Colonel Altham was put in charge of one, Colonel Trotter another and as head of the third he chose a staff captain, William Robertson. Thus in one bound, to the chagrin of his more senior colleagues, and his own amazement, he moved from being the junior officer in a section of two, to chief of a section of nine. But Robertson was not over impressed.

"On taking over the new duties I found that, chiefly owing to an inadequate staff, imperfect organisation and lack of clear direction there was not a single up-to-date statement giving a comprehensive and considered estimate of the military resources of any foreign country."

Since 1899 the Intelligence Division had been run by reserve officers and it was to this quiet organisation that 'Willie' Robertson burst like a pike in a tench pond. A close friend has written that in 1901 when he obtained his promotion he adopted his well-known "gruff manner in order to show people who was boss." Certainly this period in the Intelligence Department proved the turning point in Robertson's career and when he left six years later he had won such a reputation that thereafter only key appointments were considered good enough for him - Brigadier General at Aldershot, Commandant of the Staff College, Quarter-Master General of the British Expeditionary Force to France and eventually Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Yet in analysing the results of his tour it is hard to discover any innovations made by Robertson. Handbooks on foreign armies were produced, studies were written on "the principal foreign powers and their resources for waging war", greater attention was paid to the selection of military attachés, language training was re-introduced including for the first time Japanese, the translation fund was increased and the grant to enable intelligence officers to visit other countries was made more generous. But these projects bulldozed through by Robertson are no different to those proposed by Colonel Jervis in the Crimean War; Robertson's exceptional achievement was that he had the ability to distinguish the important from the unimportant, that is to select correctly where the main threats to the British Empire lay, and then concentrate on producing a sound intelligence background to those particular problems. He also had that great advantage, so necessary for the success of any intelligence officer, a troubled environment. War with France, war with Russia, war with Germany all seemed imminent at some stage in his tour and it was against this background that Robertson, supported by Nicholson, was given the opportunity and impetus to reveal his capabilities. An Order in Council in 1901 had condemned the inadequacy of the Intelligence Division and Nicholson now emphasised that without more money and staff the inadequacy would continue. In August the Secretary of State therefore appointed a committee under the Earl of Hardwicke to review the 'Permanent Establishment of the Mobilisation and Intelligence Department'. The Committee sat until March 1903, and as well as reaching agreement on the more professional use of military attachés and closer links between Army and Naval Intelligence, spent a great deal of time discussing the problem of training intelligence staff officers. Following so closely on the sad lessons at 1899 it is quite incredible that there was still doubt as to whether those charged with the responsibility of converting information into intelligence should receive specialised training. General French told the Committee that he had had just one intelligence officer trained in his Division in South Africa and that this officer was "excellent and had an advantage over the rest in knowing from the beginning how to set to work." General Sir T. Kelly-Kenny however, stated that he had had only two good intelligence officers and as neither of these had been intelligence trained he felt "in the peculiar circumstances of South Africa it was not necessary for field intelligence officers to have any special training." General Ian Hamilton had concluded the argument by asserting that he had had a large number of intelligence officers, that none had had previous intelligence training and that in fact the best was Colonel Woolls-Sampson who had received no military training of any kind! The proposition that officers posted to the Intelligence Department should be graded in accordance with other staff appointments, have equal chances of promotion and tours of active service was generally accepted. A Times correspondent's proof that British Generals obviously did not attach sufficient importance to intelligence because they had not sacrificed enough scouts was not accepted. (This newspaperman had informed the Committee that "A General ought to see that a certain number of his scouts get shot every day, as this shows they are in proper touch with the enemy.") But the point which aroused the greatest controversy was the degree of authority that should be given to the Head of Military Intelligence. To review the establishment properly, the Earl of Hardwicke stated "the Committee was bound to secure every possible means of finding whether the staff had adequately performed its proper functions." This of course widened the terms of reference of the Committee quite considerably and they not only interviewed Colonels Altham, Trotter and Robertson, but also the Commander in Chief, Lord Roberts, the Adjutant General, Sir T. Kelly-Kenny and the Director General of Ordnance, General Brackenbury. The former group of officers were still smarting under the criticism that they had failed to warn the country of the dangers of war when in fact, so they protested, these warnings had been given and ignored. They therefore asked for more executive power to implement their own recommendations. The latter and more senior group, while recognising the need for the Head of Military Intelligence to have greater weight in Committee, felt that Intelligence should be an advisory service only, not an executive service. And that when the Director General of Military Intelligence was stated to be responsible for the strategical distribution of troops, it really meant "planning" the strategical disposition of troops, and that it was the Commander in Chief who approved the plans, the Adjutant General who selected and trained the necessary units and it was the Quarter-Master General who got the units to the required area and then maintained them. It is a strange fact that the fundamental responsibilities of the three General Staff Branches of the British Army today, viz 'G' (Operations) 'A' (Personnel) and 'Q' (Logistics) were first clearly defined, and accepted, in a series of sharp memoranda attached to a routine establishment proposal to increase the strength of the Intelligence Department. This extension of the terms of reference caused great fury in the Intelligence Department itself, and General Nicholson who had by now been Head for three years took great exception to some of the remarks made by the senior officers. After reading the draft report he insisted on adding a further note:

"The enquiry, so far as I understand the matter, was whether the increase of establishment, which I had recommended, was needed for the efficient performance of the duties assigned to the Mobilisation and Intelligence Department by the Order in Council, dated 4 November, 1901. The enquiry was not intended to include a consideration of the propriety of such assignment of functions, or of the manner in which I carried out my duties as head of the department. I am responsible for my work to the Commander in Chief and, through him, to the Secretary of State; but I am not responsible for my colleagues, such as the Adjutant General and the Director General of Ordnance, who hold appointments at the War Office equal, but not superior, to mine. I submit, therefore, that it was outside the province of the Committee to ask questions of Sir T. Kelly-Kenny and Sir H. Brackenbury, evoking an expression of their opinion on the above subjects."

Lord Hardwicke was not overawed by this display of pique however, and added his further note justifying the steps the Committee had taken and coming out strongly in favour of Intelligence being only an "Advisory Department". This ruling is still extant today, and although Intelligence is a part of 'G' Branch which has executive control over troop deployments and other major battle decisions, the members of G (Intelligence) still have to convince their colleagues in G (Operations) of the reliability of their advice before action is taken on any intelligence produced. Hardly had Lord Hardwicke's Report been published than a further three-man Committee began its investigations. Lord Esher, Lord Sydenham and Admiral Sir John Fisher made what was to be an extremely exhaustive and very critical examination of all the good and bad points arising from the War. After a comparatively short period of painstaking examination and research they came to two main conclusions, both of which were immediately accepted. First the necessity to abolish, after nearly two and a half centuries, the office of Commander in Chief, and second that there was a need to create a General Staff. It had taken many years of frustrating warfare before the Duke of Cambridge had been removed from office. Perhaps as a reaction to this, no ceremony at all marked the abolition of his old post of Commander in Chief. It happened quite abruptly. It is said that Lord Roberts went down to his office one morning and found not only his appointment gone, but also his chair. The new General Staff was to have only three directorates, Military Operations, Military Training and Staff Duties. The Intelligence and Mobilisation Department was to end its brief life and divide. Intelligence to become part of Military Operations, and Mobilisation part of Military Training. General Nicholson who had actively helped to create the new General Staff and who had hoped to become its first Chief was passed over and selected, quite unexpectedly, to be the Director of Military Operations was Colonel J. Grierson, the Gunner who had treated his friends to "phizz" in 1881, when he had been posted to the Indian Intelligence Department. The careers of many British officers at the turn of the century are truly homeric in flavour but in the face of so much competition, it was necessary to show ability both in action abroad, and at home on the staff in order to gain promotion. It is not surprising therefore, that in spite of the low opinion held by the Army as a whole towards Intelligence, so many officers who had held intelligence appointments did reach the heights of their profession. Grierson was one.*

"I was offered head of the operations section with £1,500 a year and rank of Major General if possible, if not Brigadier General. I said I would do as I was ordered and would come if I was wanted. There is to be a clean sweep at the War Office. I think it will be almost a record to have gone from Captain to Major General in eight years three months."

                                                                               -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*The gallant Count Gleichen was another, who took over from Colonel Robertson as Assistant Director of Operations in 1907, and eventually became a Major General.
                                                                               --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This "clean sweep" of 1904 marked the last major spasm of change engendered by the Boer War although in the Military Operations Directorate itself, a continual reorganisation of sections took place. Initially there were four:

MO 1 - Strategical Section - imperial defence,
             strategical distribution of the Army.
MO 2 - Foreign Intelligence.
MO 3 - Administration and Special Duties.
MO 4 - Topographical Section.

In 1907 two new sections were formed, MO 5 took over the functions of 'special duties', i.e. the controlling of spies and agents from MO 3, and MO 6 was created to deal with medical intelligence, i.e. the gathering of medical data about foreign countries. During the South African War some members of the Field Intelligence Department had worked as spies among the Boer forces. When the war ended these activities virtually ceased although for some years a number of officers were employed in Africa as secret agents. One such young spy, who lived for two years in German South West Africa posing as an oxen-driver, later became a British Field Marshal and Chief of the Imperial General Staff - Captain Edmund Ironside, Royal Field Artillery. Throughout the Boer War the Germans had given both practical and moral support to the Afrikanders and in 1908 the War Office decided it would be a sensible precaution to have a good knowledge of what was happening along their South African borders. Captain Ironside who had taken an Army interpretership in German and had learnt both Cape Dutch and Africaans was therefore tasked to assume the identity of a German-loving Boer and get himself enrolled in the German Army. This he did and thereafter suffered all the mental agonies of spy. On one occasion he nearly revealed himself when he was struck in the face by a German officer because his oxen were misbehaving - a severe test for the six foot four inch Highlander. After two years of espionage work Ironside told the Germans that he wished to return to his family and so impressed had they been with his services that they presented him with the German Military Service Medal. Another souvenir he brought back was a silver thaler, worth a few shillings, which had been given by another officer as a tip to the "humble German Soldier". Ironside wore it for years on a chain round his neck. Richard Meinertzhagen, the famous intelligencer whose exploits during the First World War have been told so well by T. E. Lawrence in his book 'The Seven Pillars of Wisdom', was also carrying out espionage trips at this time. Meinertzhagen as a young officer in the Royal Fusiliers was asked to go to the Crimea to discover the details of a new fort being built by the Russians. At one point on the tour he had left the road to get a good view of his target when he was spotted and two soldiers came running forward to arrest him. Meinertzhagen however, had planned for this crisis:

"Luckily I knew what to do. I rapidly unloosed my trousers and had the satisfaction of squatting down for at least three minutes in full view of the fort, whilst the soldiers appearing to understand my embarrassment, and I suppose appreciating the fact that I was an ignorant foreigner, watched from a respectful distance."

But this type of spy work which was co-ordinated by MO 3 and then MO 5 was not really approved of by the General Staff and in 1909 when the subject of espionage was reviewed officially, General Spencer Ewart, who had replaced General Grierson as Director of Operations, asked that the system be changed. In this year the deterioration in Britain's relations with Berlin and the discovery that Germany was establishing a spy network in England, caused the Government to set up a sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence to consider what improvements could be made in the counter-intelligence system of the United Kingdom. The Committee soon discovered that the laws dealing with espionage were inadequate and that a co-ordinated system to deal with foreign espionage was non-existent. They did not however, confine themselves solely to questions of counter-intelligence, but also looked into Britain's own secret service activities. Colonel J. E. Edmonds who was head of MO 5 (later the official historian of the First World War) explained that "he was in charge of the section of the General Staff employed on secret service", and it was this direct link between the General Staff and espionage activities which was strongly deplored by General Ewart, Ewart explained the system adopted by other countries, and showed that any correspondence between Military Attachés and Secret Service Agents was not carried on direct, but through some intermediary. The General Staff were thus protected against being detected in any dealings with spies. "We have no machinery of this kind" General Ewart continued, "but it could no doubt be organised. We require information regarding espionage in this country so that we may keep suspicious aliens under observation, and be able to lay our hands on them in time of need. We also want to be in touch with foreigners with a view to ascertaining if there are any stores of foreign arms or explosives in this country." As a result of their deliberations the sub-Committee concluded: "That the best method both acquiring information of what is being done by foreign agents in this country and of procuring information from abroad, would be obtained by means of a Secret Service Bureau which should be separate from any of the Departments, but should at the same time be in close touch with the Admiralty, War Office and Home Office. This Bureau would deal both with counter-espionage, and serve as an intermediary between the Admiralty and the War Office on the one hand, and agents that we employ in foreign countries on the other.....the sub-committee consider that the organising of this Bureau should be entrusted to the Director of Military Operations in co-operation with the Admiralty and the Commissioner of Police, and that it should be undertaken without delay." The Committee of Imperial Defence approved the recommendations and at the next meeting of the sub-committee it was decided, after some discussion, that the most junior man in the room should form the new bureau. It was to be called the Special Intelligence Bureau, would be part of MO 5 and be responsible to the Director of Operations. Captain Vernon Kell, South Staffordshire Regiment was the "most junior officer" and on 23 August 1909 he took possession of a tiny office on the first floor of the War Office and began work. For a year he was alone, with no records, no clerk and hardly any furniture. The story of his success is, however, the story of the present Security Service - MI 5. In 1914 Kell was able to round up every single German spy in Britain, less one, and thirty years later when he retired as Director of MI 5, he had seen the organisation grow from one office with limited access to the Director of Military Operations, to the principal Service concerned with maintaining British security, an autonomous department directly answerable to the Prime Minister. But the sub-committee of 1909 did not feel that there was any pressing need to create a bureau to control their own British spies. And it was not until 1912 that the Special Intelligence Section (later MI 6) was formed to co-ordinate the activities of British agents overseas. Commander Mansfield Smith Cumming RN was given the task of raising this section and although a sailor he was also part of the Directorate of Military Operations.
from pages 215-224 in The Intelligencers: The History of British Military Intelligence up to 1914 by B.A.H. Parritt, Ashford, Kent: Intelligence Corps Association, 1983

Winchester House, 21 St. James Square. The newly
formed Mobilization and Military Intelligence Department
moved here from Queen Anne's Gate in November 1901.
War Office Intelligence remained at this location for
exactly five years.

At the War Office, Section H, under Maj. James E. Edmonds, was responsible for cable censorship and the development of ciphers for use in the field. The covert intercept and decoding of international telegraphic communications by British officials was halted when hostilities with the Boers were formally ended in May 1902, and the authorized officer strength of Section H was reduced accordingly. One year later, the Special Duties Section (now I. 3 instead of Section H) was still charged with the "study of cipher, composition and issue of new ciphers, .....Questions of censorship and organisation of censor department for war. Submarine cables....Government telegraph code," and various other duties unrelated to cryptology. When the Directorate of Military Operations was formed in 1904, the Special Duties Section (MO 3) retained responsibility for cryptography and for planning wartime intercept of telegrams. The first head of MO 3, Col. James K. Trotter, was firmly convinced that the staff of his section "must be experts at cipher, and must have a good knowledge....of the cable systems of the world, of Secret Service, and of other matters." Furthermore, a new War Office code was considered "very desirable" and cryptography, "a matter hintherto neglected," needed to be "taken up at once." Trotter's successor as head of MO 3 was none other than the former head of Section H, Lt. Col. James Edmonds (1906-10). In the chapter of his uncompleted memoirs discussing MO 3, Edmonds had a good deal more to say about secret service and counterespionage than about cryptology. He did allow that one of the section's first tasks after his arrival was to devise a special code for communications with the Japanese. Also, the section adopted to a new cipher for use by British Army units in the field. Colonel Edmonds took seriously his responsibility to plan for the "organization of the censor department for war." To insure capable cryptanalysts would be available in wartime, Edmonds assembled a list of "experts in decyphering" and suggested selected junior officers be taught "cipher and other matters" in order to build up "a reserve of officers for intelligence duties in war time." The Special Duties Section was redesignated MO 5 in early 1907. Though its functions basically were unchanged, it was now responsible for "wireless telegraphy" in addition to submarine cables, censorship, and ciphers. MO 5 was authorized two more officers in 1911 in the subsection charged with these responsibilities. The duties of the section relating to cryptology and communications intelligence remained the same from 1907 until 1914. Had there been a peacetime cryptanalytic effort in the British General Staff in the pre-World War I era, it would surely have been conducted by, or under the direction of, MO 5. The available evidence indicates that, although officers of MO5 studied foreign codes and ciphers, they did not engage in an organized code-breaking operation against the encrypted communications of any foreign power before the beginning of the Great War. Until 1911, MO 5 was authorized only two officers: the head of the section and one assistant. Even after three more officers were added that year, the Special Duties Section was still the smallest section in the Directorate of Military Operations, as it had been since the creation of the Directorate in 1904. Yet, this tiny branch of the British General Staff was responsible for espionage, counterespionage, and various administrative duties, in addition to its function in the fields of cryptology and censorship. The significance of the pre-World War I Special Duties Section is perhaps best understood in terms of its future importance. Between 1914 and 1918 it gave birth to two famous British intelligence organizations, MI 5 and MI 6. As mentioned previously, the involvement of MO 5 (MO 3 from 1904 to 1907) in secret service activities may be traced back to its predecessors, Section H (1899-1901) and Section I. 3 (1901-04), during and immediately after the South African War. In 1902 the "secret section," as it was sometimes called, handled the "control and disbursement of secret service funds" and the "arrangements with officers and others employed on special service." Secret agents were hired to obtain the sort of information overseas which Britain's military attachés were unable to collect. Practically all of the section's resources were devoted to South Africa, until the end of the war. Only six months after the Treaty of Vereeniging (May 1902), the head of I. 3 informed the Hardwicke Committee, "the larger part of the expenditure of Secret Service money controlled by the section did not relate to South Africa." Some consideration was given to removing the secret service functions from the Special Duties Section at the end of the South African War. This move was resisted successfully by Trotter, Robertson, and others, but the three temporary officers added to the section to assist in secret service matters during the war were later released back to their regiments. From the summer of 1902 until 1911, the Special Duties Section was insufficiently manned to be able to recruit spies overseas and direct their activities, except on a very limited basis. Instead, it appears most of the secret service funds it controlled were used to finance the travels of officers from the foreign intelligence sections (MO 2 and MO 3) to the Continent and to other areas of interest. The extensive traveling of officers of these sections to collect intelligence is amply documented in the memoirs of William Robertson, Edward Gleichen, James Edmonds, and others. For example, Colonel Gleichen, who took over MO 2 from William Robertson in 1907, recalled "another little spy journey" to Holland in the fall of 1907 with his old friend, George Aston of Naval Intelligence. Their objective was to discover "what sort of resistance the Dutch would be able to put up against the Germans if attacked by them." From Holland, they continued on to Denmark and Sweden before returning to England. During the following year, Gleichen visited Spain, Morocco, and France. The tense situation in the Balkans attracted the DMO's attention in 1909. In the summer of 1909 Colonel Gleichen took a long journey through the Balkans. After an initial stop in Vienna, he proceeded to Belgrade and then along the Danube through Rumania and Bulgaria. Gleichen reached Constantinople via a Black Sea steamer from Constanta, Bulgaria, and then spent ten days in the Turkish capital, "making the acquaintance of numerous Turkish big-wigs and trying to acquire as much information as I could." It was apparent to the head of MO 2 that, in Turkey, "our British star was sinking and the German one beginning to shine brightly." "Spy journeys" of Edward Gleichen and other officers of the foreign intelligence sections aside, the secret service activities of the Special Duties Section remained in decline until at least 1909. When Col. James Edmonds became head of the section in October 1906, he found little resemblance to the bustling hub of wartime clandestine intelligence which Section H had been in 1899-1900. Instead, he discovered that "its activities had been allowed to die down." The Secret Intelligence Service, not MO 5, directed most of Britain's espionage operations on the Continent and elsewhere during these years. The revival of the SIS, which began just prior to the South African War, was due largely to one man, the extraordinary Russian-born spy Sidney Reilly. Between 1902 and 1914, the intrepid Reilly carried out dangerous missions for the SIS in Persia, China, Germany, and Russia. It was not Britain's lack of an espionage organization, but her lack of a counterintelligence agency which enabled Edmonds to inject new life into MO 5. Even before moving to MO 5, he suspected Germany had already established a formidable spy network inside the United Kingdom. As soon as he was appointed head of the Special Duties Section in 1906, he quietly began to collect information regarding the identities and activities of German spies in England and "even found out the channel through which these agents were paid." At first Edmonds encountered skepticism among his superiors on the General Staff and in the War Office, including Richard B. Haldane, the secretary of state for war. Nevertheless, he persisted in reporting German covert intelligence activities.

         Eventually, Mr. Haldane sent for me and told me that he was at last convinced that Germany had an espionage network in this country.
                                          I think what turned the scale was a letter from the Mayor of Canterbury, which related that he had found two Germans wandering in
                                          his park, had talked to them and invited them in to dinner; when, their tongues loosened by his port, they told him they were reconnoi-
                                          tring the country for an advance on London from the ports of Folkestone, Dover, Ramsgate, and Margate.

The discovery of a German spy network in England prompted the government to establish a subcommittee of the Committee of Imperial Defence in 1909 to examine Britain's existing counterintelligence system. The subcommittee, chaired by Haldane, concluded a coordinated system to deal with foreign espionage did not exist and recommended an organization for this purpose be established without delay. The new organization, created in August 1909, was called the Special Intelligence Bureau. Colonel Edmonds nominated a trusted former subordinate, Capt. Vernon Kell, to be its head. The Special Intelligence Bureau was part of MO 5, but Kell answered directly to the DMO. He moved into a tiny office on the first floor of the War Office and, "for a year, he was alone, with no records, no clerk, and hardly any furniture." Kell proved to be a superb choice. His surveillance of German agents was so thorough, all but one of the German spies residing in the United Kingdom were immediately arrested when Britain entered World War I in August 1914. Capt. (later Col. Sir) Vernon Kell served for thirty years as head of the agency, which was renamed MI 5 during World War I, and which has also been known as the Security Service in more recent times. The same 1909 subcommittee also reviewed Britain's own espionage apparatus. Despite the strong desire of General Ewart, the DMO, to eliminate entirely any connection between the General Staff and espionage activities, the subcommittee did not concur with his recommendation that a single bureau be set up to control all British spies. Not until 1912 was the Special Intelligence Section (later MI 6) formed to coordinate the actions of all British agents overseas. Eventually MI 6 absorbed the SIS as well as the espionage machinery of the two fighting services. The government's decision to establish a domestic counterintelligence office in 1909 was indicative of the growing concern for the protection of state secrets - military, naval, and diplomatic - during the years before World War I. Britain's Official Secrets Act was passed in 1911 at the height of the German spy hysteria. At the War Office in 1910, a special committee was created under the chairmanship of General Ewart, the DMO, to review procedures for the handling and control of secret documents. The committee's conclusions included the following:

         The distribution of books marked "Secret" and "Confidential" is at present too wide....The regulations regarding the treatment of "Secret"
                                         and "For official use only" books are at present not sufficiently definite.....The absence in certain cases of proper means of safeguarding
                                         secret books.....involves a serious risk of loss and puts the officer holding them in a false position.

As a result of the committee's recommendations, classified documents were more carefully controlled and disseminated inside and outside of the War Office. Despite the gradually increasing security awareness within the Directorate of Military Operations in the final years before 1914, some of the intelligence products of MO 2 and MO 3 (the foreign intelligence sections) were not classified "secret" or even "for official use only."
from pages 219-223 in British Military Intelligence, 1870-1914: The Development of a Modern Intelligence Organization by Thomas G. Fergusson, London: Arms and Armour Press, 1984

In 1887 Great Britain recognised the importance of intelligence work by creating, for the first time, the posts of Director of Military Intelligence and Director of Naval Intelligence. The Intelligence Branch of the War Office, under the leadership of the DMI, concerned itself with gathering information on foreign armies and also took charge of mobilisation and home defence. Anti-invasion planning stayed with the Admiralty, as it had done since the Napoleonic Wars. Inevitably the Royal Navy's domination of the world's trade routes meant that the Naval Intelligence Department became Britain's best-funded intelligence organisation. After the Boer War the military and naval establishment came under fierce criticism. The post of DMI was abolished in 1904 and responsibility for counter-espionage was placed with the Special Duties Division of the War Office's Military Operations Directorate. This directorate was itself a sub-division of the Intelligence and Mobilisation Department, and experience proved the arrangement to be unsatisfactory. The Foreign Office were less than happy at having to depend on the War Office for information and some intensive lobbying went on in Whitehall. The Cabinet then set up the Committee of Imperial Defence, or CID, which had two important roles. The first was to have direct civilian control over matters of service strategy and policy. The second was to encourage co-ordination between the Services and their various intelligence organisations. Locked away in the minutes of the CID lie the origins of the British Imperial Security Intelligence Service which was later to become known as MO5 and then MI5. The CID was to include the Chiefs of Staff and meet under the chairmanship of the Prime Minister or one of his senior Cabinet colleagues. The important innovation was the granting to the CID of a permanent staff so that decisions taken by the Committee could be pursued in Whitehall. As soon as the CID was established it embarked on a lengthy study of Britain's intelligence arrangements; the need for change was widely recognised and the CID's recommendations were implemented quickly. In 1907 the retiring Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI), Sir Charles Ottley, was appointed Secretary of the CID. His Assistant was a young Marine named Maurice Hankey, a man destined to become one of the most powerful in Britain. In August 1909 Ottley recommended, with the backing of the CID, that a Secret Service Bureau be created to take charge of all matters relating to intelligence gathering.
from pages 33-34 in MI5: British Security Service Operations, 1909-1945 by Nigel West, New York: Stein and Day, 1982

The war-time records of the covert Intelligence agencies MI1(c) and MI5 were very different. Of the two, the counter-espionage efforts of MI5 were undoubtedly very much the more successful; although it attracted little attention or glamour, the Security Service expanded from a strength of a mere nineteen officers, policemen and civilians at the outbreak of war to a total of nearly 850 by the war's end. The heart of its organization and an important contributor to its wartime success against espionage and subversion in Britain was its card index; the basis of this index was Colonel Kell's pre-war register of aliens resident in Britain, rapidly expanded during the war to include suspect British subjects and other nationals. The most important contribution, however, came from cable and postal censorship, particularly of communications to and from neutral countries. MI5, having no powers of arrest, worked closely with the police Special Branch, itself only 114 strong, in arranging for the arrest of the 21 known or suspected German spies in Britain at the outbreak of war and the others detected during the war; after the arrest of seven German agents in June 1915, no further attempts were made by the Germans to establish a resident spy network in Britain, but they relied instead on using neutral nationals visiting the United Kingdom on real or pretended business. This system brought them no more success than its predecessor; thanks to censorship and the all-important card index, MI5 detected all of them and, by mid-1917, Germany appears to have given up her attempts to penetrate the United Kingdom. The Secret Intelligence Service or MI1(c), as it was then known, which had responsibility for collecting secret strategic Intelligence of all categories from all parts of the world, had little success. In France it was really attempting to gather secret tactical Military Intelligence in competition with the already established GHQ military Intelligence organization. In other countries it lacked sources as well as reliable personnel. There were several reasons for this; the Chief, Smith-Cumming or 'C' as he was known, had been out of action for some months early in the war, after a car accident in which the driver, his son, had been killed, and his operations had consequently to be run by MO 5 at the War Office. In addition, SIS had only recently been brought under War Office control from the Admiralty, although funded by the Foreign Office Secret Vote. Finally, Cumming's own life-style bordered on the flamboyant and he tended to recruit men of similar temperament and style into his organization; some of these men were confidence tricksters and fraudsters, several were temperamentally unsound and many had only the most rudimen-
tary idea of security, with the result that they were easily detected by opposing counter-Intelligence services. Nevertheless, the largest and most successful covert tactical Intelligence network in France, known as La Dame Blanche, or White Lady, was run by SIS, and, by the end of the war in 1918, was still operational. During its existence more than a thousand civilians had been recruited and organized into some fifty train-watching posts, of whom only forty-five had been arrested by the Germans and only one executed. In addition, MI1(c) had Directors of Intelligence in all the main theatres of war, the largest establishment being Cairo, as well as representatives in Washington, New York, Russia, Switzerland and Holland. In 1917, MI1(c) had been removed from the War Office to come under the control of the Foreign Office; also in 1917, the Russian Revolution took place, and the alarm with which this was viewed in London caused SIS to change its priorities away from the tactical to the strategic, from the military to the political and from Germany to Russia. With the ending of the 'war to end war', military Intelligence rapidly wound down; Intelligence posts in army units were either left unfilled or their incumbents misused on other tasks, while the Intelligence Corps lasted in greatly reduced size only until the British Army on the Rhine was recalled in 1929. With the changed Intelligence priorities, SIS was now given the exclusive control of British espionage which it still retains and the cryptographers of MI1(b) and (e) were amalgamated with those of the Navy's Room 40 in 1919 to form the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS). Control of GC&CS passed in 1921 to the Foreign Office. As in previous times of peace, the peacetime Intelligence organization was to be starved of both money and affection; no sooner had it been reorganized on to a peacetime basis than it suffered a Treasury economy drive which, from 1919 to 1922, reduced the SIS budget from £240,000 to a mere £90,000. Although responsible for SIS and GC&CS the Foreign Office neglected both, making little attempt to win them adequate budgets a