Director of The Intelligence Divisions
His seagoing career cut short by ill-health, Hall was appointed Director of the Intelligence Division (DID) by the Admiralty in October 1914, replacing Captain Henry Oliver. According to Oliver, Hall's wife wrote to him on behalf of her husband requesting that he replace Oliver in the Intelligence Division. Hall served as DID (the title eventually reverted to the pre-1911 "DNI") until January 1919 when he retired from active duty. It turned out to be a fortunate appointment, for he was responsible for building up the naval intelligence organization during the war, encouraged codebreaking and radio-intercept efforts and provided the fleet with good intelligence, making the NID the pre-eminent British intelligence agency during the war. He also encouraged cooperation with other British intelligence organizations, such as MI5 (under Vernon Kell), MI6 (under Mansfield Smith-Cumming) and the Special Branch of Scotland Yard (under Basil Thomson).
Read more about this topic: William Reginald Hall
Famous quotes containing the words director of, director, intelligence and/or divisions:
“When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country’s ready to let go. You heard of that market crash in ‘29? I predicted that.... I was nursing a director of General Motors. Kidney ailment, they said; nerves, I said. Then I asked myself, “What’s General Motors got to be nervous about?” “Overproduction,” I says. “Collapse.””
—John Michael Hayes (b. 1919)
“The director is simply the audience. So the terrible burden of the director is to take the place of that yawning vacuum, to be the audience and to select from what happens during the day which movement shall be a disaster and which a gala night. His job is to preside over accidents.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1984)
“The middlebrow is the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“Nothing does more to activate Christian divisions than talk about Christian unity.”
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)