Becomes Chief of MI6
In 1939, when Admiral Sinclair died, Menzies was appointed Chief of SIS. He expanded wartime intelligence and counterintelligence departments and supervised codebreaking efforts at Bletchley Park. Before World War II, the SIS had been a relatively minor and uninfluential branch of the British government; budgetary pressures after World War I and during the 1930s years of the Great Depression were the main reasons for this.
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“The necessary has never been man’s top priority. The passionate pursuit of the nonessential and the extravagant is one of the chief traits of human uniqueness. Unlike other forms of life, man’s greatest exertions are made in the pursuit not of necessities but of superfluities.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)