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in wide use, although it was already a little less than opaque. Its advantage was that the holder of that office was legitimately entitled to make enquiry into the records of visa applicants, and one type of enquiry could lead to another. Its disadvantage was simply that the device had become known. In a later chapter, I will deal with more recent disguises.
    The structure of headquarters in London was based on a division of responsibility for the production and assessment of intelligence. Those who produced the stuff should submit their wares to independent scrutiny before the finished article was sent to government departments. In accordance with this principle, headquarters was divided into two groups of sections, known respectively as “G” Sections and Circulating Sections. The “G” Sections administered overseas stations, and supervised their operations. Each had a regional responsibility; one would manage Spain and Portugal, another the Middle East, a third the Far East and so on. Circulating Sections assessed the intelligence received, and passed it on to interested government departments; they would then pass back to the “G” Sections the judgement of those departments, together with their own. The Circulating Sections were divided, not regionally,but according to subject matter. One would handle political intelligence, others concerned themselves with military, naval, economic and other types of information.
    Section V, to which I found myself attached, was in a peculiar position, in more than one respect. In name, it was a Circulating Section, and its subject matter counter-espionage. But, whereas the other Circulating Sections dealt with regular government departments, such as the Foreign Office, the Admiralty and the rest, whose knowledge of secret operations was marginal, Section V’s main “customer” was itself a secret organization: MI5. This, it might have been thought, should have led to mutual understanding and smoother co-operation. In fact, the reverse was the case, and it was not until the war was nearly over that reasonable harmony between the two organizations was attained. This unhappy situation was partly due to personal factors, which were aggravated by the fog, not to mention the hysteria, of war. But it was also due to basic differences of opinion about the line of jurisdictional demarcation between the two organizations. MI5 argued that counter-espionage was indivisible, and that they were entitled to all information on the subject available to Section V. Cowgill, speaking for Section V, rejected that view, maintaining that MI5 were entitled only to information bearing directly on the security of British territory, with the implicit rider that he himself was sole judge of the relevance of information to British security. He claimed, apparently in all sincerity, that MI5 were planning to set up their own counter-espionage organization in foreign territory, while MI5, in their turn, suspected Cowgill of withholding from them essential information on the pretext of safeguarding the security of SIS sources. These clashes were to put me in a whole series of awkward situations, as my own sympathies in the debate were usually with MI5. To avoid needless trouble, many of my subsequent communications to MI5 had to be made verbally.
    Partly out of this painful situation, there arose a second peculiarity of Section V. In the early days of the war, the demands of the service departments on SIS were urgent and overwhelming. As weshall see, there were also powerful people in SIS who regarded offensive intelligence as the only serious form of intelligence in wartime. As a result of these pressures, SIS stations abroad were concentrating more and more exclusively on getting information required by the armed forces, such as troop movements, naval concentrations, air potential, weaponry and so on. Counter-espionage was starved of resources, and MI5 was justified in complaining, not only that Section V