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

Many years ago in the United Kingdom a popular television advertisement presented one of the car breakdown services 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 follows hot on the heels of official accounts of Britain's primary intelligence agencies, the British Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service, as well as the official history of the Joint Intelligence Committee, together with an unofficial history of the UK's Government Communications Headquarters. In a sense Dylan's account completes the story of British intelligence in the postwar period by looking at the twenty-year history of the Joint Intelligence Bureau (JIB). Created out of the ashes of the Second World War, it was replaced two decades later by the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS). The JIB and DIS were Britain's defense intelligence agencies, both 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 actually became. Its 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 structure: its staff brought together civilian officials 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) sit. 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 its ties to the Ministry of Defence, was not to be beholden to it.

The JIB, as Dylan demonstrates in detail, was born 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 disparate wartime outfits and, as the Cold War got into full swing, ably repositioned itself. Dylan is unashamedly a fan of the JIB's only director, Major General Kenneth Strong. In an unusual way to start a book Dylan 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 maintained control of the bureau 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, 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, the lack of prior serious study of the JIB is surprising. The book breaks new ground and raises the bar extremely high for any future study. The painstaking research that went into the book is patently clear from the footnotes. Indeed, 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 documents been poorly catalogued; a great many of them were stored in a Whitehall basement that was infected with asbestos. In short, the book is based on the "limited, often muddled, and frequently retained materials...