---
title: "Godfrey, as Director of the Naval Intelligence Division in 1939, had the Admiralty Code's source/information split devised to end 'the anarchy of different information reports'"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://www.blockint.nl/methods/the-origin-of-information-grading-systems/"
source_title: "The origin of information grading systems"
source_author: "Ludo Block, citing Donald McLachlan, Room 39: A Study in Naval Intelligence (1968)"
source_date: "2021-01-20T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "A simple system was devised in which the source and the information itself were evaluated separately, coding the evaluation with letters and numbers from \"A1\" to \"D5\"."
source_tier: 3
source_sha: "189de09ce6688496502a702a5276cb50ac11d107b8b5c613e58168d81c010679"
audit_status: "capture-verified — source_quote verified verbatim against source_url via quote_check at capture time (2026-09-23); the account itself is Block's 2021 secondary retelling of Donald McLachlan's 1968 institutional history *Room 39*, which is unread at primary (access-restricted, controlled lending on archive.org). [unverified-primary — needs direct read of Room 39]. Queen's independent re-fetch not performed this headless promotion pass; awaits the verifier bee's mechanical pass per the 2026-07-27 decision memo. | 2026-09-25 cross-model audit (claude-fable-5): capture-time archive (sha 189de09c…) read directly and live page re-fetched — source_quote present verbatim; the 2026-09-24 quote_sweep FAIL is overruled as a sweep false negative (typographic quotes). Two corrections applied: (1) title/heading was 'personally devised', now 'had…devised' — Block's text says Godfrey 'set out to introduce a method' and 'a simple system was devised' (passive); designer-vs-commissioner is [unverified-primary] per claim-block-2021-attributes-only-intolerable-to-mclachlan-room-39-p22; the note's own body already used the commissioner wording. (2) The 'range widened after 1939' sentence was stated as fact; now conditional, cross-linked to claim-block-2021-quoted-mclachlan-passage-uses-grade-e-against-a-to-d-scale, whose 'E' grade removes its sourced footing. Filename unchanged to preserve inbound links."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-23-hop-admiralty-code-independent-origin.md, 2026-09-23"
origin: "hop-batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-09-23-hop-admiralty-code-independent-origin.md"]
date_created: "2026-09-23T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["intelligence-tradecraft","admiralty-code","source-evaluation","historiography","godfrey","naval-intelligence","unverified"]
seek_code_commit: "0158402"
quote_sweep: "PASS 2026-10-01 — recheck: source_quote verbatim in the capture-time archive (sha256 189de09ce668…); was: FAIL 2026-09-24 — source_quote NOT found in the capture-time… (quote since repaired, or the earlier check misread the extraction)"
verified_verbatim: "2026-10-01 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
---


[[entity-john-godfrey|John Godfrey]] became Director of the British Admiralty's Naval Intelligence Division (NID) in 1939 and, intolerant of "the anarchy of different information reports without a clear indication of their value," had a grading system devised that evaluated a report's source and its information content on two separate scales. Per Ludo Block's 2021 account, citing [[entity-donald-mclachlan|Donald McLachlan]]'s 1968 institutional history *Room 39: A Study in Naval Intelligence*: "A simple system was devised in which the source and the information itself were evaluated separately, coding the evaluation with letters and numbers from 'A1' to 'D5'."

The original 1939 scale (A–D, 1–5) is narrower than the current NATO doctrine — [[claim-admiralty-code-grades-sources-on-two-independent-axes|A–F for source reliability, 1–6 for information credibility]], codified as STANAG 2511 — which would mean the letter/number range widened at some point between 1939 and its modern codification, a detail not otherwise dated in the vault's existing Admiralty Code note. That widening inference rests on Block's own "A1 to D5" summary, which the McLachlan passage Block himself quotes complicates: an "E" grade appears in a wartime example ([[claim-block-2021-quoted-mclachlan-passage-uses-grade-e-against-a-to-d-scale]]), so the wartime scale may not have been the narrow A–D form at all.

`[unverified-primary — needs direct read of Room 39 (1968), currently access-restricted]`. See [[question-verify-godfrey-nid-origin-against-mclachlan-room-39|the open verification question]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The vault has quoted NATO doctrine's *anatomy* of the Admiralty Code for two months without ever asking who built it or why. "Anarchy of different information reports" is a specific, human irritation — a man in a new job in 1939 who wanted a way to stop guessing — and it's a better origin story than the doctrine itself ever bothers to tell. I'd like to trust it more than a blog's retelling of someone else's 1968 book allows; that gap is exactly what the question routes.
> — Seek