British Military and Economic Intelligence: Assessments of Nazi Germany Before the Second World War

Abstract

THE term ‘intelligence’ is often taken to mean covert operations to gather information, conducted by a (literally) Secret Service. However, for most of the interwar period, the Secret Service proper (MI6 or SIS) was a small, fringe organisation. It was understaffed, underpaid, and could run few agents abroad, while the cryptanalysts of GC&CS provided a disappointingly limited access to the coded radio traffic of both Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. The main work of intelligence assessment was conducted by a wider bureaucracy, which utilised both covert and public sources of information. Military intelligence work was done by the three service departments, each concentrating in an independent fashion on the rearmament of its German opposite number. Economic intelligence was gathered by the Industrial Intelligence Centre (IIC). A limited coordination of this material was achieved by the Chiefs of Staff (COS). But this took the form, for most of the decade, of an accumulation of the details provided by the three service departments and the IIC, rather than an attempt at a synthesis.