21 - A Special London Contribution

Summary

[1998]

I have argued in this collection that when Britain established the post-war intelligence machine in 1945 it under-invested in the professional skills of analysis, assessment and reporting. This is the business of assembling and examining information as well as conveying conclusions, if necessary mixed with persuasion; most of all, it means judging likely outcomes in difficult situations. The postwar Joint Intelligence Bureau (JIB) met part of this requirement, but it was explicitly created to meet the military needs for intelligence in economic, geographic and other supporting fields. JIB and its successor the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) only offered limited careers to attract the potential ‘intelligence professionals’ who were then assumed to be available for the new Assessments Staff when it was created in 1968.

This criticism may not do full justice to the solid contributions by retired service officers in the DIS throughout the Cold War, who faced a range of complex questions about a secretive target. Nevertheless the relative weakness in defence and military assessment remains my considered criticism, if only because of the exceptional impression left by the more capable officers provided by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) for intelligence duties. I revive here an older account of a British naval officer who made an outstanding personal contribution to assessment as head of the DIS's naval section. This is quite the reverse of the general DIS style I have depicted and is a reminder that personal impact on the quality of intelligence was certainly possible within the organisation; just rarely so.

The officer was Michael (Mike) MccGwire, who became a friend while serving at GCHQ after I joined the organisation in 1952. He was born in India in 1924, and after the family moved to Britain he was educated at Dartmouth and had a war at sea from 1942 onwards. He continued with normal naval appointments after the war but these included learning Russian at Cambridge and studying Soviet naval building programmes at GCHQ in 1952–4. (He said in later life that his time in GCHQ introduced him to the standard of rigorous scholarship.) He became Assistant Naval Attaché in Moscow for two years from mid-1956, and after a tour with NATO and other appointments he moved to Whitehall in the naval rank of commander to run the DIS's Russian naval section from 1965 to 1967.