Hugh Sinclair

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For other people named Hugh Sinclair, see Hugh Sinclair (disambiguation).

Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair (1873 – November 4, 1939), nicknamed 'Quex', was the Director of British Naval Intelligence from 1919 to 1921 and helped to set up the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, commonly 'MI6') before the Second World War.

He joined the Royal Navy in 1883 and entered the Naval Intelligence Division at the beginning of the First World War. He became Director of the Division in February 1919, and later head of the Submarine Service. He became the second director, or 'C', of SIS in 1923.

Beginning in 1919 he attempted to absorb the counter-intelligence service MI5 into the SIS to strengthen Britain's efforts against Bolshevism. When this idea was finally rejected in 1925, he set up his own Counter-Espionage (CE) section. In 1935 he set up the Z Organization, a section of SIS operating in Europe, intended to carry on working independently should SIS itself become compromised. In 1938, with a second war looming, Sinclair set up Section D, dedicated to sabotage. In Spring 1938, using his own money, he bought Bletchley Park to be a wartime intelligence station^[1].

According to records released on March 31, 2005 to the National Archives at Kew, Sinclair was asked in December 1938 to prepare a dossier on Adolf Hitler, for the attention of Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, and Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister. In the dossier, which was received poorly by Sir George Mounsey, the Foreign Office assistant under-secretary - who believed that it did not gel with Britain's contemporary policy of appeasement - Sinclair described Hitler as possessing the characteristics of "fanaticism, mysticism, ruthlessness, cunning, vanity, moods of exaltation and depression, fits of bitter and self-righteous resentment; and what can only be termed a streak of madness; but with it all there is a great tenacity of purpose, which has often been combined with extraordinary clarity of vision."