#war office

Spenser Wilkinson, first Chichele Professor of War at Oxford University, compared the War Office's use of their Intelligence Department (ID) during the Boer War (1899-1902) to a man who 'kept a small brain for occasional use in his waistcoat pocket and ran his head by clockwork'.

In Lord Edward Gleichen's account of his early months as Director of Military Operations and Intelligence in 1907, espionage sometimes appears simply as part of his hectic social round. In the autumn of that year he went with his old friend and military-intelligence officer, Sir George Aston, on a 'little spying journey to Holland': "We wanted to see what sort of resistance the Dutch would be able to put up against the Germans if attacked by them... We were not very favourably impressed. And then I went via Copenhagen and the delightful old castle of Aleholm [Alholm], belonging to my excellent friends Count and Countess Raben, to Sweden, where to my delight I was invited by the King to attend some manoeuvres... After a pleasant two days at the end of the manoeuvres at the castle of Tjolöholm  [Trolleholm], near Göteborg, belonging to Count Bonde, the Rodds very kindly put me up at the Legation." Not everyone in the War Office was impressed with Gleichen's mix of a 'little spying' and a lot of high society. 'The only consolation', noted a memorandum in 1907, 'is that every foreign government believes that we already have a thoroughly organised and efficient European Secret Service'.

The success of British wartime deception was also made possible by a degree of interdepartmental cooperation which was unimaginable in any of the other major combatants. The day-to-day selection of information and disinformation to feed to the enemy was entrusted to the imaginatively named Twenty Committee, so called because the Roman numeral for twenty (XX) is a double cross. The Committee, which had representatives from MI5, SIS, the War Office, the three service intelligence departments, GHQ Home Forces and, when necessary, other interested departments, began meeting in January 1941 and thereafter met weekly for the remainder of the war under the inspired leadership of its MI5 chairman, the Oxford history don J.C. Masterman (later knighted). Masterman preceded the first meeting of the Twenty Committee with what he later called 'a small but important decision, to wit that tea and a bun should always be provided for members': 'In days of acute shortage and of rationing the provision of buns was no easy task, yet by hook (and mostly by crook) we never failed to provide them throughout the war years. Was this simple expedience one of the reasons why attendance at the Committee was nearly always a hundred per cent?