ABSTRACT
Over the past generation, scholars have increasingly come to recognize that intelligence shaped British diplomacy during the 1930s, the period of Robert Vansittart’s tenure as Permanent Under Secretary (PUS) to the Foreign Office and Chief Diplomatic Advisor to His Majesty’s Government. Most recent works on appeasement and virtually all on Vansittart refer to his use of intelligence. Often they assert its significance. Thus David Dilks, the leading student of intelligence and appeasement, has emphasized that “Vansittart had his own sources of intelligence, outside the official machine, together with special skill in reading the signs”. Dilks held that this intelligence and its interpretation caused Vansittart’s differences with the Cabinet, his “incessant admonitions” to ministers and his ultimate decline in influence. These are major claims. Christopher Andrew, Donald Graeme Boadle, Norman Rose, Wesley Wark and D.C. Watt have also treated Vansittart and intelligence as being a significant part of appeasement and its study.3 This article will address that issue from a different perspective, a biographical one. It will treat Vansittart, intelligence and appeasement as a single and coherent topic. This paper will define his experiences with intelligence before he became PUS, and examine how this shaped his actions of the 1930s. It will consider how Vansittart used intelligence, how well he did so, and how his usage mattered. It will argue that this did matter-that one can reconstruct the logic behind decisions only by examining the data considered by decision makers, that one man’s experience with intelligence can illuminate his times. The intelligence record-what Vansittart’s successor as PUS,
Alexander Cadogan, called the “missing dimension” of diplomatic historycan illuminate the minds of the appeasers and of their opponents, the nature of their policies and the rationale for them.4
