Hugh Sinclair Article Index for
Hugh Sinclair
Articles about
Hugh Sinclair
Website Links For
Hugh
 

Information About

Hugh Sinclair




Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair ( 1873November 4 1939 ), nicknamed '''Quex''', was a British intelligence officer. Between 1919 and 1921, he was Director Of British Naval Intelligence , and helped to set up the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, commonly MI6) before the Second World War .

Sinclair joined the Royal Navy in 1883, aged thirteen, and entered the Naval Intelligence Division at the beginning of the First World War . He became Director of the Division in February 1919, and later head of the Submarine Service . He became the second director, or 'C', of SIS in 1923.

Beginning in 1919 he attempted to absorb the counter-intelligence service MI5 into the SIS to strengthen Britain's efforts against Bolshevism . When this idea was finally rejected in 1925, he set up his own Counter-Espionage (CE) section. In 1935 he set up the Z Organization , a section of SIS operating in Europe, intended to carry on working independently should SIS itself become compromised. In 1938, with a second war looming, Sinclair set up Section D, dedicated to Sabotage . In Spring 1938, using his own money, he bought Bletchley Park to be a wartime intelligence station.Michael Smith, Station X, Channel 4 Books, 1998. ISBN 0-330-41929-3, p. 20

According to records released on March 31 2005 to the National Archives at Kew , Sinclair was asked in December 1938 to prepare a dossier on Adolf Hitler , for the attention of Lord Halifax , the Foreign Secretary, and Neville Chamberlain , the Prime Minister. In the dossier, which was received poorly by Sir George Mounsey , the Foreign Office assistant under-secretary - who believed that it did not gel with Britain's contemporary policy of Appeasement - Sinclair described Hitler as possessing the characteristics of "''fanaticism, mysticism, ruthlessness, cunning, vanity, moods of exaltation and depression, fits of bitter and self-righteous resentment; and what can only be termed a streak of madness; but with it all there is a great tenacity of purpose, which has often been combined with extraordinary clarity of vision.''" {Link without Title}


REFERENCES



  Before Sir Mansfield Cumming
  Title Head Of SIS
  Years 1923–1939
  After Stewart Menzies