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FAMILY TIES IN THE MAKING OF MODERN INTELLIGENCE
| By Tammy M. Proctor |
Wittenberg University |
"These are our crowd... They've been vetted an' we're putting 'em through their paces."
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| —Rudyard Kipling, 1904 |
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Good intelligence officials know that one of the most important things they can do is recruit competent, reliable, and loyal personnel to staff their agencies. As with foreign service and diplomatic personnel, intelligence workers need to be "known" entities, whose discretion and background can be checked and assured. This process of subjecting prospects to an examination in order to separate likely candidates from unsuitable ones is often known today as "vetting." The word itself is a colloquialism that emerged from the veterinary exam given to animals ready for sale—these animals were given a reputation through a veterinarian's recommendation. Just as thoroughbreds are vetted before a sale, then, prospective secrets workers must also be "put through their paces" and have their bloodlines, readiness, and capabilities assured. In today's high-tech intelligence community, elaborate background and security checks yield mounds of details about a prospect's life and history, but in the formative years of British intelligence, vetting procedures were only just emerging. |
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This paper explores the cultural practice of vetting in the British intelligence community during its first ten years of official existence from 1909–1919. Not only did vetting of prospective British- and foreign-born personnel take place, but also these examinations had a distinctly class bias. Most of the early secret service officers had elite backgrounds and hailed from wealthy British families with deep government, military, and commercial connections. Being from the right sort of family was often a determining factor in hiring British men for intelligence work, as it had been previously for other sensitive state work in the Foreign Office, Colonial Office and the Diplomatic Service. |
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Nationality also played a key role in the shaping of British recruitment practices for its secrets industry. While British men could be assessed in part by their occupational history and official positions, foreign nationals hired in large numbers for human intelligence work during the First World War were a different matter. Human intelligence, or the hard work of tapping into a "petty economy of information" at the local level, listening and gathering important information, and then conveying the intelligence to the proper authorities, was a task that often fell to insiders within a country, forcing recruitment of foreigners for this delicate work.1 Although British intelligence did not hesitate to use information from rascals motivated by greed, they looked for more steady and reliable agents to run their long-term intelligence services. These foreign men and women found themselves subject to additional "checks" and often needed a British citizen to vouch for them before they were even considered for intelligence work. More importantly, however, British officials relied heavily on familial networks of agents, perhaps considering these individuals to be more reliable and loyal since more than their own lives were at stake. |
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