ABSTRACT
By the start of 1947 there was no doubt that the Soviet Union represented the primary threat to the United Kingdom. The cementing of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War fronts would have surprised few. For the JIC there was a serious and practical issue: prior to the outbreak of war in 1939 intelligence on Nazi Germany had been seriously lacking and the JIC was adamant that a similar situation should not occur again. But it faced a major hurdle in the shape of the Soviet Union. The problem was penetration – how could accurate, timely and reliable intelligence be procured against such an inaccessible target? As Churchill famously had stated in 1939, Russia was a ‘riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’.
