AA Milne May Not Have Liked MI7, But Propaganda Played A Vital Wartime Role -- The Telegraph
We should not condemn the great writers who joined the secret services – the alternative was to leave history to the liars.
Propaganda is probably as old as government itself, and so we shouldn’t be too surprised to read that A A Milne, creator of the immortal Winnie-the-Pooh, was part of MI7B, a secret First World War propaganda outfit. He was by no means the only writer to wield his pen in war.
In those days the MI designation – with us still as MI5 and MI6 – referred to numbered departments in the War Office’s Directorate of Military Intelligence. Not all did secret work – straightforward mapping and recording the orbat (order of battle) of potential enemies were relatively public aspects.
MI5 was the directorate’s fifth department, responsible for security and counter-espionage. What we now know as the Security Service emerged from it, but the designation stuck. MI6 was the department that provided interpreters who helped with interviewing foreign refugees, which the Secret Service – better known now as SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service – found useful both as a source of information and as cover for its officers. Again, the name stuck.
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My Comment: It is not surprising that there is little if any information on this department. Even Wikipedia's coverage is sparse.
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