Defence Intelligence and the Cold War: Britain’s Joint Intelligence Bureau 1945–1964 by Huw Dylan (review)

Many years ago in the United Kingdom there was a popular television advertisement in which one of the car breakdown services depicted itself as the fourth emergency service, after the police, ambulance, and fire service. In this book the reader is presented with an account of Britain’s fourth intelligence agency. This absorbing and meticulous account is the first by Huw Dylan, a lecturer in Intelligence and International Security in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.

The book comes right after the publication of official accounts of Britain’s primary intelligence agencies, MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), as well as the official history of the Joint Intelligence Committee, together with an unofficial history of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). In a sense Dylan’s account completes the story of British intelligence in the post-1945 period by looking at the twenty-year history of the Joint Intelligence Bureau (JIB). Created out of the ashes of the Second World War, the JIB was replaced two decades later by the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS). Both the JIB and the DIS were Britain’s defense intelligence agencies, funded by and effectively answerable to the Ministry of Defence.

What was the JIB? Dylan answers this in several ways, comparing its original 1945 remit with what it became. The bureau’s initial responsibilities were broad and expanded within a few years to include analyzing intelligence and producing reports on economic matters, topographic intelligence (including, fantastically, collecting photographs of beaches), and scientific intelligence. To complete this task, the JIB was to have two important characteristics: first, it was to be an early example of joint work: its staff comprised a fusion of permanent civilians and military figures on a period of rotation from frontline duties. Its second trait was its centralized function. British intelligence, more broadly, has had a central process routed through the Joint Intelligence Committee, on which all agency heads (and leading policy officials) sat. The JIB maintained this tradition via the means by which its requirements were set and its product disseminated; that is, it was to function interdepartmentally and, despite ties to the Ministry of Defence, was not to be beholden to that one ministry.

The JIB, as Dylan demonstrates in detail, emerged out of the intelligence successes of the Second World War and the realization in central government that Britain needed to maintain a first-rate intelligence system in the postwar world. The bureau absorbed several disparate wartime outfits and, as the Cold War got into full swing, ably repositioned itself. Dylan is unashamedly a fan of its director, Major General Kenneth Strong. Indeed, in a novel way to start a book, he devotes the preface to describing “the education of Kenneth Strong.” Strong, whose career was primarily spent on intelligence matters, was the driving force, energy, and zeal behind the JIB. He was its only director and maintained control for all twenty years of its existence. He also steered its transformation into the DIS, becoming its first director-general before finally retiring in 1966.

Dylan’s book is arranged both chronologically and thematically. Chapters focus on the origins of the JIB, on topographical intelligence, economic intelligence, scientific intelligence, the replication of the JIB model abroad, and, finally, how and why the JIB became the DIS. As Dylan notes at the outset, it is somewhat surprising that there has been no serious study of the JIB before. The book breaks new ground and raises the bar extremely high for any future study. The painstaking research that has gone into the book is clear from the footnotes, and, as Dylan recounts, part of the explanation for the lack of a previous account lies in the nature of the JIB’s records. Not only have the records been poorly cataloged, but a great many of them were stored in a Whitehall basement that was infected with asbestos. Thus...