If Cumming had stood at the windows of his office and watched Gus Agar hurry away across Whitehall Place to catch the afternoon train back to Maldon, he must have thought about how much this brave young officer could never know. The mission that Cumming had outlined was dangerous, almost impossible and that meant there was already far too much weight on such young shoulders. Cumming could not afford to tell Gus that in reality he would be racing to Finland to save not just one agent but quite possibly the entire future of the British Secret Intelligence Service.
Today we think of MI6 as a powerful Whitehall organisation with a budget measured in millions of pounds and intelligence stations in every corner of the world, staffed by hundreds of well-trained men and women. But MI6 in 1919 was very different. For a start it was only ten years old. In 1909, a series of spy scares in leading newspapers had led to a nationwide sense of panic and in response the Government had ordered a review of Britain’s intelligence organisations. As part of that review it had been agreed to set up a ‘Secret Service Bureau’ (SSB), but this was not the significant force we have come to know today.
It would be staffed by just two men: Commander Mansfield Cumming representing the Navy and Captain Vernon Kell for the Army. (There was, of course, no Royal Air Force at that date.) One of the officers would be responsible for searching for German spies within the UK and the British Empire (in other words about a third of the globe), the other would have responsibility for gathering intelligence in the rest of the world – principally continental Europe.
Kell and Cumming were very different men. Kell was 36 years old, a talented linguist who spoke fluent French and German as well as having a working knowledge of Russian and Chinese. He had served in posts around the world, worked for military intelligence at a senior level for many years and was considered by his peers to have a brilliant career ahead of him. On the other hand, Mansfield Cumming was an officer whose career had stagnated so much that he had taken twelve years out of the Navy to be an estate manager in Ireland. He had little experience of working abroad and only spoke a little French. Since his return to duty in 1898, he had spent ten years stuck in a dead-end post devising a boom defence system for the harbour at Southampton. He was now aged 50. He had still not reached the key naval rank of captain and, after a thoroughly unremarkable career, there seemed to be little in store for him except retirement.
These were the two men that the Army and the Navy put forward to be the representatives of the Secret Service Bureau. With Whitehall’s talent for screwing up even the simplest of decisions they put Kell, the man with years of international experience, in charge of counter-espionage operations. Cumming, the man who had not travelled further than short hops across the Channel in the past twenty years, was put in charge of foreign intelligence-gathering. Cumming was so uninterested in this new post that he very nearly refused it altogether and only accepted the appointment provided he could continue on a part-time basis with his boom defence work.
This may seem a little odd, but the Foreign Section of the SSB had not been envisioned as an intelligence network covering the globe as it does now. The Military Intelligence Directorate of the War Office (MID) and Naval Intelligence Department of the Admiralty (NID) already had that job well in hand. The NID had a series of ‘coast watchers’ established at important points in Europe and selected ports elsewhere. Together with intelligence officers on every British warship, they monitored all naval movements by potential enemies. The NID also secretly sponsored voyages by selected agents who would, whilst supposedly on a holiday cruise or scientific expedition, map and photograph naval fortifications and important coastal sites. For the army, the MID also ran agents to places where it required information. Suitable army officers were dispatched on ‘walking holidays’ which just happened to pass new fortifications and other points of interest. Lord Baden-Powell, who later founded the Boy Scout movement, was one such officer and he has left us a detailed account of his methods. Of course, Germany and other nations were doing exactly the same thing and in the pre-war years spies from both sides had been arrested while doing just this sort of work. But it was seen by all nations as simply one of the duties of a military officer – rather like their duty to escape from a POW camp – and those caught were usually let off with a small fine or the lightest of prison sentences.
With all this intelligence already available, Cumming’s foreign section had been established with only one aim in mind. There was another source of intelligence besides these established military methods. Certain dubious individuals offered key intelligence in return for money. There were in Europe professional bureaux of spies, usually retired police detectives but more often conmen. For considerable sums, these individuals and bureaux offered to provide intelligence reports as required. Of course, many of these reports were bogus and the ‘bureaux’ simply scams, but sometimes they did produce valuable information. Whilst coast watching and walking holidays were seen as honourable spying activites, dealing with these men was seen as dirty work, beneath the contempt of a serving British officer. So it was agreed that what was needed was an individual whose activities could be denied. He would go to clandestine meetings in seedy hotels; he would haggle over money with people who were in effect criminals; most importantly, he could be disowned if he embarrassed the British government. That was the new job that Cumming was being offered, not to run the worldwide multimillion-pound empire we see today. It is hardly surprising that he was less than enthusiastic.
From the start Cumming was isolated and sidelined by the Military Intelligence Directorate which was under the control of the Army. He was not even trusted with War Office files. For instance, 7 October 1909 had been Cumming’s first day in his new office at 64 Victoria Street, just next to the Army and Navy Stores. The entry in his personal diary that day told what was to be the story of his first few months: ‘Went to the office and remained there all day, but saw no one, nor was there anything to do there.’ By November he was still writing the same thing: ‘Office all day. Nothing doing.’ and in that month he told his superior officer, Admiral Bethell, the head of the NID, that he: ‘… had done literally nothing up to the present date except sit in the Office and I have only received one letter (containing my pay).’ It was all Cumming could do to get permission from the War Office to purchase a typewriter – and then only if it was a cheap one. On the other hand, Kell, as a fellow army officer, was showered with agents and resources by the War Office. His organisation, which in 1916 was redesignated as MI5, prospered.
Over the next few years Cumming gradually acquired one or two agents from the War Office and an assistant from the Naval Intelligence Department, but he was still considered an irrelevance by most in the intelligence world. He did not open his first overseas station (Brussels) until 1913. The Foreign Office refused to have anything to do with him. They would not allow him either to contact or to use information from consular officers and insisted that he must not gather any intelligence about political developments abroad – that was their job. His role was largely reduced to gathering naval intelligence on the Continent – something the NID was already doing with far greater success.
Cumming was not helped by the fact that he proved to be a singularly inept spy – far from the mastermind he is often portrayed as. For instance, on 26 November 1909 he finally had his first meeting with a foreign agent, a War Office contact code-named ‘B’ who was actually a German named Byzewski who was producing very useful intelligence on German shipbuilding. Byzewski came to London for a debriefing at great personal risk. Since this was principally a matter of naval intelligence Cumming was entrusted with the task, but he made rather a hash of it. Cumming spoke almost no German and he and Byzewski spent the entire meeting with Cumming frantically flicking backwards and forwards in a phrase book. Only at the end of the meeting did he find out that Byzewski also spoke French, a language in which they were both reasonably fluent. Another meeting had to be hastily arranged.
On another occasion Cumming and his assistant, a Royal Marines officer, Major Cyrus Regnart, travelled to Brussels to meet an agent. Looking for somewhere quiet to debrief him they tried to book a room in a local brothel. The madam – faced with two men wanting a private room who said they were not interested in having a woman sent to them because they were waiting for another man – assumed that they were dangerous homosexuals about to take part in a highly illegal act. She threw them out into the street and they had to leave hurriedly before the police arrived.
Cumming even walked straight into the arms of his enemies at one stage. In 1911 an agent code-named ‘TG’, who was unhappy with the way he had been treated by the British government, was blackmailing Cumming. He said that he had compromising letters from the Bureau which he would release to the press or some other foreign government unless he was paid £2,500. The letters cannot have been that incriminating because he eventually agreed to hand them over for just £22, but the story then becomes even more bizarre. ‘TG’ said that he was storing the incriminating letters at his consulate. Astonishingly, Cumming actually went to the consulate to fetch the letters. But when he got there ‘TG’ had already left and the staff of the consulate became suspicious. When Cumming tried to leave they blocked his exit and locked all the doors. He was questioned by the Consul General for fifteen minutes – a considerable period, so they were clearly concerned about his reasons for being there. Cumming seemed surprised by this: ‘… I had taken off my hat as a mark of respect, but his attitude was not very pleasant …’ If they had realised who Cumming was, he would have been in a lot of trouble – the consulate was technically foreign territory. It would have been a disaster for the head of a British intelligence department to have been captured so easily. But Cumming was lucky. He later claimed that he escaped by spinning a story and pretending to not even notice that he was being detained. It is more likely that the consulate’s staff released him because they could not believe that this tubby blunderer really was a British intelligence agent.
Although Cumming later described espionage as ‘capital sport’, he did not even like the people he was forced to work with. He confided to his diary in 1911: ‘All my staff are blackguards – but they are incapable ones, and a man with a little ingenuity and brains would be a change, even if not an agreeable one.’
So why has this picture of Cumming as a master spy become so prevalent? The main reason is that MI6’s records are jealously guarded – more so than the records of any other intelligence service in the world. Most people imagine that this is because the service is so effective. In fact, it is because the opposite is true: even today it is believed that it is better to preserve the myth of British intelligence rather than to allow the public (and the organisation’s opponents) to know just how bad things are. Against this background of secrecy, only a few books were written by those who knew Cumming and these were heavily censored. It is hardly surprising that they paint a rosy picture of him. Much of the impression of Cumming as a master spy was created by the former agent Sidney Reilly whose ‘experiences’ are almost complete fiction.
It is rare that anyone in a senior enough position to resist the censors was able to tell the true story. Someone who could was Sir Samuel Hoare, an MP who was the head of station in Petrograd from May 1916 until May 1917 and later rose to be Foreign Secretary. He described Mansfield Cumming in the following terms: ‘… jovial and very human, bluff and plain speaking, outwardly at least, a very simple man … In all respects, physical and mental, he was the very antithesis of the spy king of popular fiction.’ The mistaken assumption that those engaged at the very highest levels of espionage must be masterminds is an error which has continued to this day – despite all the evidence.
So, by the end of its first five years of existence, the Secret Service Bureau was in danger of being viewed as something of an irrelevance. Other departments had better organisations and produced better intelligence. The majority of historians who have studied the period have concluded that Cumming was pretty ineffective and when Winston Churchill arrived as First Lord of the Admiralty he came to the same conclusion, as one of his biographers notes: ‘But what light could British spies throw on German intentions, and specifically on plans to invade or carry out raids? What was the naval, or foreign, section of the new Secret Service Bureau under Mansfield Cumming doing in the interests of national security? Churchill had to admit that the answer was “not much”.’
Fortunately the First World War brought a change in Cumming’s fortunes – as it did for all the intelligence organisations. At the start of the war, MI6 had a headquarters staff of just eleven people (a figure which included four clerks, two typists and two doormen) and one foreign station operating out of a furniture shop in Brussels. Four years later, the newly promoted Captain Cumming could boast an organisation of over 1,000 staff and agents with stations throughout the world including posts as far away as Tokyo and Buenos Aries. He had also established liaisons with the intelligence departments of every Allied country. At one point he was even offered an unlimited budget. He turned it down on the grounds that ‘… the supply of such a sum would probably lead us into great mistakes …’
But now the war was over. Faced with massive debt and the need to provide employment for hundreds of thousands of returning troops, Prime Minister Lloyd George was looking to make savings wherever possible in order to create the ‘land fit for heroes’ which his election slogan had promised. That meant cuts throughout Whitehall, including the world of intelligence.
As every intelligence department fought to justify its continued existence, the future of MI6 seemed highly doubtful because Cumming had not had a good war. Both the Naval Intelligence Department (NID) and the War Office Secret Service (WOSS) had outperformed him. The NID had provided a superb decryption service working out of Room 40 in the Admiralty: it had cracked vital German codes and provided excellent intelligence. That organisation later provided the basis for GCHQ. The War Office had run over 6,000 agents, many of them in train-watching networks which gave an extremely accurate picture of the movement of German forces behind the Front. MI6 also ran a well-known train-watching network under the code name La Dame Blanche, but although La Dame Blanche was probably the largest and most successful of these networks it had actually been formed by Belgian patriots without any lead or assistance from MI6. In the one train-watching network that MI6 did initiate – in August 1917 – everyone had been arrested by March 1918.
Another problem was that Cumming’s organisation was an orphan – both the NID and the War Office Secret Service had powerful government departments backing them. Additionally, although Cumming had finally achieved the rank of Captain, he was still far outranked by the head of the NID (a Rear Admiral) and the head of the War Office Secret Service (a Major General). The difference in ranks accurately reflects the relative worth of each organisation.
No one wanted MI6, except possibly as part of their own empire. Even the Foreign Office, which was nominally in charge of funding for Cumming’s department, would have been quite happy to see it disappear – as long as no one else controlled it. In their opinion, secret agents were far too likely to cause some sort of diplomatic embarrassment and the Foreign Office believed that intelligence about foreign matters was far better collected by professional diplomats working quietly behind the scenes than by some sort of John Buchan-style adventurer.
In October 1918 Major General Sir William Thwaites, the Director of Military Intelligence, proposed that all the various intelligence departments – MI5, MI6, MI8, MI9, the various cryptographic departments of the Admiralty and Cumming’s organisation – should all be amalgamated into one body, which would be placed under War Office control. He pointed out that this arrangement would be more cost-effective, more efficient and far more suited to a peacetime organisation. Since the NID would be left intact the Admiralty had no objection. Winston Churchill was among a number of influential figures who supported the idea of an amalgamated intelligence service. At the end of the First World War it seemed that MI6 was doomed and that the only post left for Cumming was a quiet retirement.
However, although no government department wanted ownership of MI6 none of them wanted to see it controlled by any of the others, either. The Foreign Office suggested that the precise allocation of intelligence resources and funding should be left until after the Paris Peace Conference in June 1919 when government intelligence requirements would be known more clearly. Thwaites’s plans were shelved and MI6 survived for just a little longer. Cumming had just a few short months to secure a spectacular intelligence coup which would convince Whitehall that MI6 was an organisation worth saving. From somewhere in the world he had to produce intelligence which no one else could get – not even the War Office Secret Service and the NID with their extensive network of military facilities. By the autumn of 1918, there was only one place where Cumming could find such intelligence – Bolshevik Russia. No other British organisation was there. In fact, no intelligence service from any Allied nation was there.
Gathering intelligence from Bolshevik Russia had been Cumming’s best chance of saving the organisation he had created. But now his only agent, ST-25, was trapped. Unless Agar could rescue ST-25 and recover the intelligence, MI6 itself was probably finished.
But it would be two weeks before Agar could even reach Russia to launch his rescue attempt.
And in the meantime Cumming did not even know if ST-25 was still alive.