Family Ties in the Making of Modern Intelligence

Abstract

In today's intelligence community, elaborate background checks yield mounds of details about a prospect's life and history, but in the formative years of British intelligence between 1909-1919, these procedures were only just emerging. As with diplomatic personnel, intelligence workers needed to be entities, whose discretion and background could be assured. This process of subjecting prospects to an examination in order to separate likely candidates from unsuitable ones is known today as vetting. This paper explores the cultural practice of vetting and the ways in which twentieth-century British intelligence not only depended upon and exploited familial connections in order to gain recommendations for personnel, but more importantly, used the notion of family loyalty to shape the assumptions and realities of such intelligence work. Certainly intelligence workers were not without considerable skills, often in languages, yet other considerations such as class background, family connections, gender, and nationality were the real filters used to vet personnel.