Stewart Menzies
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Sir Stewart Graham Menzies, KCB, KCMG, DSO, MC (pronounce "mingis", with a hard 'g') (January 30, 1890 – May 29, 1968) was Chief of MI6, British Secret Intelligence Service, during and after World War II.
Born in London into a wealthy family, Menzies was reputed to be the illegitimate son of the future King Edward VII. He joined the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and later the Grenadier Guards.
During World War I he served in France, was seriously injured in a gas attack in 1915 and was honorably discharged. He joined the counterintelligence section of Field Marshall Douglas Haig. He entered MI6 (later SIS) and became a deputy of its director-general Hugh Sinclair.
When Admiral Sinclair died in 1939, Menzies was appointed Chief of SIS. He expanded wartime intelligence and counterintelligence departments and supervised codebreaking efforts at Bletchley Park. By being responsible for distributing ULTRA material to other arms of the British government, Menzies was able to achieve a position of some power within the British government, which he used shamelessly to aggrandize the power of MI6[citation needed]. Before World War Two, the SIS had been a relatively minor and despised branch of the British government. The chief reason for this was the SIS's consistent inability to produce any useful intelligence. By distributing the ULTRA material collected by the Government Code & Cypher School, for the first time, MI6 became an important branch of the government.
He also supported efforts to contact anti-Nazi resistance, including Wilhelm Canaris, the anti-Nazi head of Abwehr, in Germany but failed to convince Winston Churchill. He also coordinated operations with SOE (although he reputedly considered them "amateurs"), OSS and the Free French Forces.
After the war, Menzies reorganized the SIS for the Cold War. He absorbed most of SOE. He was sometimes at odds with the Labour governments. He also had to weather a scandal inside SIS after revelations that SIS officers Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and, eventually, Kim Philby, were actually Soviet spies.
Menzies resigned in 1952, a major-general, and retired to rural Gloucestershire. Often described as master spy chief, in fact Menzies was a master at bureaucratic warfare[citation needed]. Through competent at espionage, his real forte was bureaucratic intrigue.
[edit] Bibliography
- Anthony Cave Brown, "C": The Secret Life of Sir Stewart Menzies, Spymaster to Winston Churchill (Macmillan Publishing Co., 1987) ISBN 0-02-517390-1
| Military Offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by: Sir Hugh Sinclair |
Head of SIS 1939–1952 |
Succeeded by: Sir John Sinclair |
Categories: Articles with unsourced statements | 1890 births | 1968 deaths | British spies | World War II spies | Cold War spies | British World War II people | British Army generals | Knights Commander of the Order of the Bath | Knights Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George | Companions of the Distinguished Service Order
