At Her Majestys Secret Service

The Chiefs of Britains Intelligence Service, MI6

Nigel West

• Publisher: Frontline Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781848328952
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Intelligence & Espionage
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In August 1909, a kindly, balding, figure named Mansfield Smith-Cumming was summoned to London by Admiral Alexander Bethell, Director of Naval Intelligence. He was to assume the inaugural position of Chief – more famously known as 'C – of what has become

Chapter I

Mansfield Smith-Cumming

1909–1923

‘I have no use for the usual channels except in the early morning.’

Mansfield Smith-Cumming¹

The first Chief of the SIS was appointed in August 1909 as head of the Foreign Section of the Secret Service Bureau, and it is directly to him that much of the Service’s mystique and tradition is due. He signed his correspondence with the single letter ‘C’, in green ink, a tradition that survives to the present day, as does his unique sobriquet of ‘Chief’.

When Mansfield Smith, as he was born on April Fool’s Day 1859, was summoned to London in August 1909 by the Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI), Admiral the Honourable Alexander Bethell, he was fifty years old and had come to the end of a not very distinguished naval career that had been handicapped by chronic seasickness. His Royal Navy service record, although believed by many including his biographer to be lost but in fact can be inspected in The National Archives, records that in the opinion of Captain Walter Hunt-Grubbe he was ‘a clever officer with great taste for electricity. Has a knowledge of photography’ but had been stricken with severe seasickness while serving in the Straits of Malacca on operations against Malay pirates. He was obliged to take sick leave, and was invalided off HMS Magnificent. In 1883 his ill-health had forced him back to England to recover, but when he was appointed Transport Officer on an Indian troopship, the Pembroke Castle, he succumbed again. Finally, after he had transferred to another troopship, the Malabar, he was declared unfit for further service and in 1886 his name was added to the Retired List with the rank of lieutenant-commander, with an annual pay of £109. 10s. His personal file is entirely unremarkable, chronicling his services as ADC to Captain Buller in 1876 during operations of the Naval Brigade against Malay pirates, his knowledge of French, his ability to draw, and the acquisition of a Royal Aero Club flying licence in 1913.²

Smith’s change of surname from Smith to Smith-Cumming occurred in 1889, following his marriage to his second wife, the heiress Leslie Valiant, in order to preserve her maternal grandfather’s name, but he did not drop the hyphenated Smith until 1917. His enthusiasm for his adopted name is reflected in the bookplates he had printed for his library, which is the impressive coat of arms granted to the Cumming family in 1781.

Already a wealthy man, Smith-Cumming received a considerable settlement from his wife who had inherited a substantial property at Logie, in Morayshire. Following his retirement, to a houseboat at Bursledon on the Hamble, Smith-Cumming attended an Admiralty torpedo course, and later became an expert on boom defences, working at HMS Australia and HMS Venus, both shore establishments on Southampton Water where his research was greatly valued. Precisely why he was selected by Bethell to join the Secret Service Bureau is unknown, but the choice was inspired. As well as his knowledge of French, his interest in electricity and photography, and his skill as a draughtsman, he kept fast motor boats (among them the Command, Communicator, Competitor and the Comedy) at a boatshed on Badnam Creek, loved the new sport of motoring, and even learned to fly. As can be seen from his naval record, he was seriously injured in a car accident in France soon after the outbreak of war, breaking both legs. What the file does not show is the death of the driver, his only son Alastair, who was a 24-year-old subaltern in the Seaforth Highlanders. C had driven his Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost to GHQ where Alastair had been seconded to the Intelligence Corps, and picked him up for ten days of leave in Paris. At about nine in the evening on 1 October, driving at sixty miles an hour, they had hit an unlit farm cart and then careered into a tree, to lie there undiscovered for the next nine hours. Reportedly Smith-Cumming was trapped under the vehicle and cut off his own crushed left foot with a pen-knife so as to be able to reach Alastair who was dying. When he was found, C was rushed to Meaux hospital and operated on, before being taken to Neuilly for further surgery. This is the version retailed in part by Somerset Maugham and has been generally accepted, but whatever the truth of the circumstances of the crash, thereafter Smith-Cumming often disconcerted his visitors by absent-mindedly stabbing his wooden leg with a paper knife. According to one witness, C did this deliberately while interviewing candidates recommended for SIS posts, and rejected those that winced at his performance.

When Smith-Cumming joined the Secret Service Bureau it was accommodated in a small office in Victoria Street opposite the Army & Navy Stores, and shared with Captain Vernon Kell of the South Staffordshire Regiment who was to head the Home Section, the forerunner of the Security Service. While relations between the two men were to remain cordial for many years Smith-Cumming disliked commuting from Bursledon and resented the fact that the only other member of staff, William Melville, a retired Special Branch detective, really worked full-time for Kell. Accordingly he quickly lobbied for, and obtained permission to rent a flat nearby at his own expense and use part of it as his office. The first flat he found was in Ashley Gardens, where he installed a typewriter and a safe and set about the business of espionage by approaching retired military men living abroad to act as agents. His relative success can be judged by the very first SIS intelligence report, dated 18 January 1910, based on a message from ‘WK’ who described German naval developments and the construction of submarines. Cumming had taken no time at all to adopt the now standard tradecraft of concealing the names of individuals and places by codenames, holding clandestine meetings with his sources away from his office, and even referring to his Secret Service activities in correspondence as ‘C.C. work’.

Cumming did not establish his first overseas station, in the British Consulate General in Rotterdam under Richard Tinsley, until the autumn of 1913 and the early development of his organisation was handicapped by its lack of funds and facilities, to the point that he complained he was unable to take a break away from his work because of the necessity of maintaining contact with his handful of sources, with whom he corresponded by the regular mail. Smith-Cumming’s first sponsored mission abroad using British personnel, ended in disaster with the arrest of Lieutenant Vivian Brandon RN and Captain Bernard Trench RM by the German police while undertaking a survey of the forts in Heligoland in August 1910. Brandon and Trench had already completed one mission, to Kiel, the previous year, but on this occasion their photography, of the fortifications on the island of Wangerooge attracted the attention of the sentries and Brandon was taken into custody. The British government immediately denied knowledge of his ‘movements, which were entirely unauthorised’³ but the seizure of pictures of the Kaiser Wilhelm canal, Borkum and Wilhelmshaven sealed the fate of the two officers at their trial in Leipzig in December 1910, and they were sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. Although they only admitted to having been in contact with a naval intelligence officer named ‘Reggie’ (actually Naval Intelligence Division’s Captain Cyril Regnart), Brandon and Trench were truly Cummings’ agents, codenamed respectively BONFIRE and COUNTERSCARP, and their arrest caused ‘rather a panic’ at the War Office.⁴ The DNI, Admiral Bethell, decreed that the Whitehall line would be complete disavowal. ‘We had ascertained that the two unfortunately were not military men, not connected in any way with any C.C. work. We knew nothing at all about them’,⁵ thereby establishing a position intended to protect the government from the embarrassment of association with officially-sponsored espionage, and maybe offer the two defendants an opportunity to portray themselves a hapless, harmless tourists. In the event both men were convicted and served their sentences in the fortresses of Konigstein in Saxony and Glatz in Silesia, respectively, but were released in an amnesty to celebrate the marriage of the Kaiser’s daughter to Prince Ernst Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland. Also freed was another of Smith-Cumming’s agents, Bertrand Stewart, an Old Etonian, lawyer and Territorial Army officer who had been arrested in Bremen early in August 1911. Unlike Brandon and Trench, who were C’s men but had been run jointly with the Naval Intelligence Division (NID), Stewart seems to have been an enthusiastic amateur whose services, originally volunteered to the War Office, had been accepted by C with some reluctance. While Brandon and Trench resumed their normal duties upon their return home, apparently accepting that their imprisonment had been an occupational hazard, Stewart demanded huge compensation, complaining that he had been betrayed by a double agent who had planted a codebook on him to incriminate him, and that the avoidable debacle had been everyone else’s fault except his own. C insisted that ‘he has never done anything for us which merits even the barest thanks’⁶ but, undeterred, Stewart visited the new DNI, Captain Jackson, and then tried to see the First Sea Lord, Lord Fisher. Finally he made representations to Colonel George MacDonogh, the Director of Military Intelligence (DMI) at the War Office, and engaged a lawyer to demand £10,000, repayment of his trial costs in Germany and a testimonial letter in recognition of his valuable services from C addressed to the King, the Secretary of State for War and the First Sea Lord. Smith-Cumming not only refused to participate in this, but objected strongly to the criticism directed at him. ‘I urged in vain that this man might do me a great deal of harm if allowed to go round to my superiors and tell a one-sided story, and that I should like to be allowed to meet him and answer any charges he had to make.’⁷ The dispute was resolved finally when Stewart went to France with his Territorial regiment and was killed, whereupon his widow received £10,000 in compensation.

The outbreak of war did not result in any dramatic escalation in the size of C’s office, and in December 1914 he noted, for the War Office, that his staff consisted of three other officers, four clerks, two typists, a messenger and two outside men, one of whom, Ernest Bailey, acted as his chauffeur. His monthly expenditure was estimated at £4,310, almost a quarter of which was allocated to his Dutch organisation which ran agents in German-occupied territory. Early in the new year C made a list of his agents, which amounted to twenty-three, run at an annual cost of £6,500, a figure that exceeded the limit set by the Foreign Office by £1,500. Only gradually did C’s staff increase, and in 1915 consisted of an actor, Guy Standing, a mining engineer named Cockerell, the office manager T.F. Laycock, a mining engineer from Colombia named Newnun, and Sub-Lieutenant Jolly who had joined from the Tatler.

In 1916, with the reorganisation of the War Office, Kell’s Home Section adopted the military intelligence designation MI5 and moved into large premises in Charles Street, Haymarket, while C’s office became MI1(c) and operated from a flat on the seventh floor of 2 Whitehall Court, a large Victorian mansion block overlooking the embankment next to the National Liberal Club and the Author’s Club. Later he was to expand the office space and acquire more accommodation at 4 Whitehall Court, with a separate Air Section at 11 Park Mansions, Vauxhall Bridge Road.

C’s office was typically labyrinthine and ramshackle, being a maze of corridors, steps and walkways on the roof of the building, a veritable rabbit warren on two levels which were accessed by a private lift, operated by C’s man, and described by various visitors, among them Valentine Williams, Paul Dukes and George Hill. Compton Mackenzie recalls an interview with C in Whitehall Court at which he was presented with a swordstick that Smith-Cumming claimed he had carried ‘on spying expeditions in time of peace. ‘That’s when this business was really amusing,’ he said. ‘After the war is over we’ll do some amusing secret service work together. Its capital sport.’⁸ C’s offer to dine his staff at the Savoy was characteristic. His deputy, appointed in 1916 but without the formal title of Vice Chief, was Colonel Freddie Browning, an Oxford-educated Grenadier from the War Office’s Trade Intelligence Department, who was a director of the hotel and, according to Sam Hoare, ‘the friend of more people in the world than anyone I ever knew’.⁹ Horrified that the secretaries only had buns for lunch, the ever-hospitable and generous Browning built a canteen on the roof of Whitehall Court for the staff, installed a chef and had him buy the food through the hotel. He was independently wealthy, being chairman of the family firm of Twiss, Browning and Hallowes, and at the outbreak of war had been appointed ADC to Field Marshal Lord Roberts VC. Exceptionally well-connected, he was an inveterate partygoer with a long list of beauties from the stage, provided by his lifelong friend Rupert D’Oyly-Carte, willing to act as his escort. In 1932, when George Hill named the late Freddie Browning as a senior SIS officer in his memoirs Go Spy The Land, both Smith-Cumming and Browning were dead, yet he omitted to identify the Chief, saying only that ‘I had not the least idea that Colonel Browning, an old acquaintance of mine, was in the secret service, and our meeting was a most happy one’.¹⁰

In terms of operations. C was fortunate to recruit one source, Dr Otto Kreuger, who was to ‘pay the rent’ for SIS for more than two decades. Codenamed TR-16, Kreuger was a marine engineer from Godesberg who had made the mistake of striking a brother officer, who happened to be related to the Kaiser. He was court-martialled, and in November 1914, when he offered his services to Tinsley at the British legation in The Hague, was still embittered. Aged thirty-nine, Kreuger proved to be an exceptional agent, with access to all the German naval bases, Zeppelin sheds and construction yards, and with the professional skill to know precisely what he was looking at. He possessed a phenomenal memory and made regular trips to Holland to report to Tinsley without the necessity of carrying any notes over the frontier. He was also sufficiently adept to escape any suspicion, even being elected as a director of the Federation of German Industries, until 1939 when he was finally trapped by the Gestapo and beheaded.

Within Whitehall, C’s organisation was regarded as a strange hybrid, apparently created jointly by the War Office and the Admiralty, but paid for by the Foreign Office. This bureaucratic anomaly left C very exposed, but he evidently used his considerable skills to play each of his masters off against the others, and thereby neatly avoided the oft-threatened perils of amalgamation. While he always maintained cordial relations with Kell, known as ‘K’, there were several attempts to expand MI5’s role beyond the United Kingdom, and eventually a division of responsibilities was agreed that allowed MI5 to play a role within the Empire, with the exception of Malta and Gibraltar, and to share Hong Kong, but to limit their activities to security, and emphatically not the collection of intelligence. C’s role was initially defined by the Permanent Under-Secretary (PUS), Sir Arthur Nicholson, in a memorandum to the War Office in November 1915, and referred to him for the first time in any official document as ‘the Chief of the Secret Service’, and this was later confirmed in what amounted to a charter, entitled ‘Cabinet Orders with regard to this Special Intelligence Service of the British government’. This guaranteed C a measure of independence, called upon other government departments to cooperate, ensured that SIS personnel were not disadvantaged in their career by service with SIS, and required the Foreign office to provide ‘one nominal acting or supernumerary post’ for SIS at each overseas diplomatic mission. In fact, of course, SIS had precious few representatives abroad, as can be seen from this list prepared by C in October 1916, following the recruitment of a baronet, Lieutenant-Colonel Sir William Wiseman, who had been gassed at Hooge and invalided out of the army, to go to New York for SIS.

Staff and agents: Headquarters 60; Aviation 11; Holland 10; 240; Norway 10; Sweden 10; Denmark 80; Russia 12; Alexandria 300? Athens 100; Roumania 30; Salonika 40; Malta 8; New York 8; South America?; Switzerland 15; France 20; Italy 8; South Africa 3; Spain about 50; Portugal 2; odds and sods? Total 1,024.¹¹

Initially C had structured his organisation into geographical regions, which had a superficial logical appeal, but thus arrangement caused dissatisfaction, especially with the DNI, Admiral ‘Blinker’ Hall, who complained about the poor quality of SIS’s intelligence product. Initially, according to an early recruit, Commander Frank Stagg RN, C had assigned Newnun to Greece and the Mediterranean; Cockerell, Belgium and Holland; Guy Standing all the Americas, leaving Stagg in charge of NID liaison, Scandinavia, the Baltic and Russia. The solution was to separate requirements from production and to bring in officers from the individual services to head sub-divisions, so Claude Dansey was seconded to join Colonel Rhys Sampson (formerly C’s man in Athens) to head an army section, H.E. Crowther Smith to be in charge of the Air Section, Browning to run Economics, and Captain Somerville the Naval Requir...