Directorate of Military Intelligence
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The Directorate of Military Intelligence was a department of the British War Office [1] until that was subsumed into the Ministry of Defence in 1964. The Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI) was at that time absorbed into the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS), with some functions divested elsewhere in the MoD.
Over its lifetime the Directorate underwent a number of organisational changes, absorbing and shedding sections over time. The first instance of an organisation which would later become the DMI was the Department of Topography & Statistics, formed by Major Thomas Best Jervis, late of the Bombay Engineer Corps, in 1854 in the early stages of the Crimean war.[2]
Two section titles, MI5 and MI6, remain in colloquial use in the United Kingdom and elsewhere to refer to the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service, although neither organisation has been titled as such since the late 1920s.
[edit] Sections
During the First World War, British secret services were divided into numbered sections named Military Intelligence, department number x, abbreviated to MIx such as MI1 for information management.
The Branch, Department, Section, and Sub-section numbers varied through the life of the department, however examples include:[3]
- MI1 Administration.
- MI2 Information on Middle and Far East, Scandinavia, USA, USSR, Central and South America.
- MI3 Information on Europe and the Baltic Provinces (plus USSR, Eastern Europe and Scandinavia after Summer 1941).
- MI4 Geographical section - maps (transferred to Military Operations in April 1940).
- MI5 Liaison with Security Service, following the transfer of Security Service to the Home Office in the 1920s.
- MI6 Liaison with SIS,
- MI7 Press and propaganda (transferred to Ministry of Information in May 1940).
- MI8 Signals interception and communications security.
- MI9 Escaped British PoW debriefing, escape and evasion (plus enemy PoW interrogation until December 1941).
- MI10 Technical Intelligence world-wide.
- MI11 Military Security.
- MI12 Liaison with censorship organisations in Ministry of Information, military censorship.
- MI13 Not used (except in fiction).
- MI14 Germany and German-occupied territories (aerial photography until Spring 1943).
- MI15 Aerial photography (in Spring 1943 aerial photography moved to the Air Ministry and MI15 became air defence intelligence).
- MI16 Scientific Intelligence (formed 1945).
- MI17 Secretariat for Director of Military Intelligence (from April 1943).
- MI18 Not Used.
- MI19 Enemy PoW interrogation (formed from MI9 in December 1941).
- MI (JIS) Axis planning staff.
- MI L (R) Russian Liaison.
- MI L Attaches.
[edit] References
- ^ History of the Ministry of Defence
- ^ The Puppet Masters, John Hughes-Wilson, Cassell, London, 2004
- ^ SIS Records - War Office Military Intelligence (MI)Sections in the Second World War
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