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Born in London on January 30th 1890 into a wealthy family, but with the reputation of being an illegitimate son of the future King Edward VII. Following Sandhurst military academy, Menzies joined the Grenadier Guards. During World War I, he served in France and was injured in a gas attack in 1915. Unable to serve on the front lines, Menzies joined Field Marshall Haig's counter-intelligence section at Montreuil where he served with distinction. On the strength of this he entered SIS (MI6) in 1918. Later appointed head of the Military liaison department, properly MI6, though this title came to used as a convenient cover name for the entire SIS, he later rose to be Sinclair's deputy.
In July 1939 obtaining one of his outstanding successes, Menzies was to personally travel to Warsaw to negotiate the final arrangements with the Polish Cryptographic Bureau for a copy of the German ENIGMA machine and much top secret information obtained by Polish Intelligence. This was to prove of incalculable value to British intelligence and it has to be said that the outstanding part played by Polish Intelligence, in particular their brilliant code-breaking section, has never been sufficiently and publicly acknowledged. Later in 1939 Menzies was named Chief of the SIS on the death of Admiral Sinclair. In addition to expanding the wartime intelligence and counter-intelligence departments of SIS, Menzies also supervised GC & CS at Bletchley and made astute use of its successes when at times there was little else to offer an ever-impatient Prime Minister. Menzies came to believe strongly that Britain and SIS in particular had made a serious mistake in the pre-war period in not trying harder to make contact with anti-Nazi elements in Germany, and Admiral Canaris in particular. There can be little doubt that Menzies and Canaris were in communication on occasions, even after war broke out. Indeed, it was to be one of Menzies great disappointments that he was unsuccessful in persuading other British intelligence organizations and the Government itself, to make a genuine alliance with Canaris against Hitler. Menzies was later credited with being one of the few intelligence chiefs who could maintain a working relationship with the demanding Churchill, the SOE, the Chiefs of Staff, the OSS and the French. Menzies would be honoured in full by Britain, the USA and many other nations once victory had been ensured. Following the war, Menzies oversaw the reorganization of SIS to face a new enemy with the onset of the Cold War, the absorption of the best of SOE into its ranks and the difficult economic situation under an often hostile Labour Government.
To his great personal distress his position was to be undermined towards the end of tenure as C by internal conflict within SIS over the presumed treacherous activities of a number of officers, but particularly Philby. A clubman who married four times, Menzies lived a rather lonely life with few close friends. He resigned in 1953 to indulge his love of the countryside and field sports in rural Gloucestershire and was to die on May 29th 1968. |
