but before leaving the royal navy, mccgwire wanted to head up the soviet naval intelligence section in the british defence intelligence staff, which he felt needed serious restructuring. the uk was twenty years into the cold war, yet when he got this job mccgwire was the first head of the section to know the language, to have worked in russia, to have had experience of another agency and to be well acquainted with the americans. he completely reshaped the intelligence effort to ask new questions. his aim was not simply to assess the military threat – how many ships the soviets had – but to understand what the soviet navy was "for".