The Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI) was a department of the British War Office.[1]
Over its lifetime the Directorate underwent a number of organisational changes, absorbing and shedding sections over time.
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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]
When the War Office was subsumed into the Ministry of Defence in 1964, the DMI was absorbed into the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS), with some functions divested elsewhere in the MoD.
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 officially titled as such since the late 1920s.
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.
| Name | Details |
|---|---|
| MI1 | Codes and cyphers. Later merged with other code-breaking agencies and became Government Code and Cypher School (now known as Government Communications Headquarters). |
| MI2 | Information on Middle and Far East, Scandinavia, USA, USSR, Central and South America. |
| MI3 | Information on Eastern 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 Secret Intelligence Service and Foreign Office. |
| 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 (also: enemy PoW interrogation until 1941). |
| MI10 | Technical Intelligence worldwide. |
| 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 the Spring of 1943, aerial photography moved to the Air Ministry and MI15 became air defence intelligence. |
| MI16 | Scientific Intelligence (formed 1945).[4] |
| MI17 | Secretariat for Director of Military Intelligence from April 1943. |
| MI18 | Used only in fiction. |
| MI19 | Enemy PoW interrogation (formed from MI9 in December 1941). |
| MI (JIS) | Axis planning staff. |
| MI L(R) | Russian Liaison. |
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