Lucifer Rising E-Book

Nicholas Booth

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 825

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Summer 1940. In the desperate fight against Nazi Germany, nothing is considered too outlandish, so the British secret services turn to figures from the occult world to help turn the tide of war. What begins as a mission to understand Hitler's supposed astrological advice soon becomes more bizarre, with often hilarious, unintended consequences. It is a story of misinformation, false predictions and some of the most surreal secret operations of the Second World War. Incredibly, it is all true. Featuring an eccentric cast of characters, including the creator of James Bond, a cross-dressing astrologer, a spymaster who walked around in public with his pet bear and the self-proclaimed 'wickedest man in the world', best-selling author Nicholas Booth weaves together an amazing narrative of spying, sabotage and black propaganda. Using hitherto secret files – many only released in the last few years – Lucifer Rising unravels for the first time the myths surrounding these operations, culminating with perhaps the most curious of all: the arrival by parachute of Rudolf Hess in Scotland in May 1941.

Leseprobe

For Sarah, with all my love.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This book has its origins in my growing up in the seventies and reading all the bestsellers about wartime intelligence (and also, as was mandatory at the time, the James Bond novels). Some sort of spark was clearly ignited. Most – though not all – of those factual books can now be dismissed as fantasy. To be fair, many stories which have taken hold from that time came from people who were trying to remember events that had taken place decades beforehand, invariably without official records or contemporary notes to hand. There were others who were, alas, deliberately telling ridiculous lies or exaggerating the importance of their work. Yet deception, myth and all sorts of rumours were almost inevitable thanks to another peculiarly British obsession – that of secrecy for its own sake.

As a result, much of the historical record has been distorted. Only now, at the start of another century with the unprecedented release of many hitherto secret files, can the story of some of the stranger operations be told. Many files remain classified even today, so parts of it remain incomplete. That said, many official records, though, are often as riveting as watching paint dry. When the first volumes of official histories of British Intelligence came out in the late seventies – without names of relevant participants – they were famously described as ‘written by a committee about a committee to be read by a committee’.

Thankfully, the many thousands of pages which have been released by the British government of virtually all the secret agencies’ wartime records contain much more interesting material. The phrase ‘British Intelligence’ is one of almost infinite elasticity, but here, specifically, refers to MI5, PWE, SOE, MI (R), Electra House, Section D and MI14. The notable exception are the records of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, which the government – for entirely understandable reasons – has not released. What is interesting is that much MI6 CX material may be found in many other files if you look closely enough. Names have been redacted; sometimes there are tantalising references to further information. Handwritten notes to and from its wartime chief, Sir Stewart Menzies, may also be found which seem to have not been weeded.

Writing this book, then, has been akin to assembling a jigsaw with pieces that remain hidden. So far as possible, I have tried to back up any assertions with reference to official or at least contemporaneous files. Often this has not been possible. Academic papers are useful in providing both context and as an antidote to the more exaggerated reminiscences of participants. The truth, I suspect, lies somewhere in between.

As is probably apparent from the text, I am not a believer in the occult and so have not – as many have done – told aspects of this story through the prism of those beliefs. As such, I have not made use of the more partisan accounts which, as the text makes clear, often peddle unsubstantiated stories and versions of stories. In some cases – particularly concerning Aleister Crowley – that simply isn’t possible. The same goes for much of the material on the occult itself.

The point here – to paraphrase Admiral Godfrey – is that it doesn’t matter what I think, or what an academic researcher thinks or a reviewer might think or indeed a believer steeped in the arcane practices of the occult thinks. What matters is what the participants believed at the time. On one point I should be clear: many who did believe in the occult did so for entirely laudable reasons. Not everyone who reads (or casts) a horoscope is a gullible fool. Those who believe in other such superstitions do not walk around the house wearing tinfoil on their head. Many are genuine in their beliefs and cannot be dismissed out of hand.

It is a simply a matter of record that in the summer of 1940, the occult provided a useful tool and, in an odd way, worked. That is, fairly quickly, it showed its limitations almost straightaway. Ultimately, trying to discern the advice being given to Adolf Hitler was self-defeating. But in that strange dawn of interest in the subject against the backdrop of the greatest danger the United Kingdom ever faced, emerges a remarkable story to which I hope I have done justice in these pages.

Nicholas Booth

June, 2016

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to record my appreciation to many people who have – in recent months, and, indeed, over the years – provided much needed advice, insights and splendid help on a variety of curious, yet endlessly fascinating, subjects. My own ‘occult’ education has been aided by conversations with Professor Deborah Harkness, Dr Stephen Clucas and the late Dr Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, founding director of the Centre for the Study of Esotericism at Exeter University. It is the writer’s privilege to be able to consult the experts in the field. I am very grateful to Dr Roger Moorhouse for his advice and knowledge about Georg Elser and the incidents surrounding the explosion at the Bürgerbraükeller, and Sir Sidney Aster with regard to the Tilea Affair. A number of experts on the intelligence world have freely given of their time and help over the years: David Stafford, Nigel West, Gill Bennett, Eunan O’Halpin and Dr Jo Fox. Any errors of interpretation or fact, I should point out, are my own.

Phil Baker, the author of an exemplary biography of Dennis Wheatley, was fantastically helpful, not least in picking up some elementary errors. So, too, was Charles Beck, keeper of the remarkable Wheatley archive and the website denniswheatley.info, who also helped in innumerable ways. A couple of other collectors – who wish to remain anonymous – also helped provide some illustrations and background information. Dominic Wheatley, grandson of the great writer, was also very helpful and allowed me to quote extensively from much of Dennis’s later writings.

Paul Busby, biographer of the Second Viscount Tredegar, was incredibly generous with his reading of the manuscript and advice concerning the convoluted life of Evan Morgan: Andrew Macklin, who runs the splendid Agnesbernelle.net site, was very helpful about the remarkable activities of ‘Vicky’ during the wartime years; at the Romanian Cultural Centre in London, I would also like to thank Carmen Campaneau for her help with regard to V.V. Tilea and the Ratiu family archive; Peter Fleming’s daughters, Kate and Lucy, were very helpful.

The staff at Manchester University Library and the Manchester Central Library were very helpful in guiding me to find sometimes obscure references. So, too, were Oksana Newman and her cheerful colleagues at Cheshire East Libraries – for their help, professionalism and forebearance, I am once again in their debt. At a time when libraries are seriously underfunded and facing extinction, it is a reminder of the great service that they provide.

I would also like to thank librarians and archivists at a number of institutions; Hannah Brown at the Wellcome Trust; Dr Philip Young at the Warburg Institute; Erica New at the National Museum of Royal Navy, Portsmouth; and Li Wei Yang at the Huntington in Pasadena.

I also owe a particular debt of gratitude to Dr Peter Burt, Commodore and Honorary Historian at the Royal Motor Yacht Club in Sandbanks for helping find the portrait of Mansfield Cumming. It was painted in 1918 by H.F. Crowther Smith and believed to have been initialled by C himself; Tim Worner, the current owner, graciously allowed for it to be reproduced on these pages. Gillian Barnes-Riding at the Surrey Heath County Museum, was also very helpful in arranging for me to use the image of Max Knight which formed part of an exhibition on his life and (local) times.

I would like to thank the staff of The National Archive – particularly, Howard Davies in his earlier role – as well as Jane Rosen, James Taylor and Geoffrey Spender at the Imperial War Museum.

Friends, family and others read the manuscript. I am grateful for all their help, not least from the shared knowledge and advice of Jeremy Duns and Guy Walters, who know a thing or two about the subject. Thanks also to Dr David Whitehouse, for his friendship, encouragement and good advice. Thanks also to the denizens of Pussycat Alley – V and 3A (codenames as their real identities remain highly classified). Sadly, I should record the unfortunate circumstance of the passing of two friends, Ric Wickham and John Davies, whose companionship I appreciated at different times of my life. It was Ric who became a fellow observer of the heavens in my youth; and John, whose wise counsel is now sorely missed. I think they would have liked this book.

I also wish to thank my own agent (literary, not secret), Humfrey Hunter, dedicated handler (who commissioned the book) Mark Beynon, as well as the not exactly clandestine services of not really forged documentation but splendidly designed ones at The History Press: Naomi Reynolds, Caitlin Kirkman and Katie Beard.

All throughout this time, I have been helped (some of the time) by a black cat and (at all times and in all places) a truly bewitching, shining figure. As ever, without Sarah, my wife, the writing of this book would simply not have been possible. Her help, love and care in so many ways gave me the strength of purpose to head towards my desk. I should also thank her for not putting a hex on me as our workroom teetered with both esoterica and an equally esoteric failing – the loud playing of John Barry 007 soundtracks (‘in the name of research’, obviously). Thanks also to Tilly, who reminded me to have lunch (his own, mainly) by sticking his claws into my leg on innumerable occasions. To Sarah, thank you, love – it wouldn’t have been possible without you. And now, the back room can be reclaimed from the ghosts (spectres, natch) and the cat can be fed.

Nicholas Booth

June, 2016

CONTENTS

Title

Dedication

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

Introduction: On His Satanic Majesty’s Secret Service

1      007 and Counting

2      Higher Authorities

3      The Devil in the Details

4      From Russia, With Condoms

5      Explosive Forces

6      Desperate Measures

7      Darkness and Light

8      The Stars Foretell

9      Magical Mystery Tour

10    Sky Fall

11    Across The Water

12    Zenith

Epilogue: Remembrance Foretold

Notes on Sources

Permissions

Bibliography

Plates

Copyright

Where facts are lacking, rumours abound

Alberto Moravia

INTRODUCTION

ON HIS SATANIC MAJESTY’SSECRET SERVICE

To the Director of Naval Intelligence

24 May 1941

Sir:

If it is true that Herr Hess is much influenced by astrology and Magick, my services might be of use to the Department in case he should not be willing to do what you wish. I have the honour to be, Sir,

Your obedient servant

ALEISTER CROWLEY

The only way to describe it is a lair and, in its dimly lit and chintzy ostentation, an evil one at that. When the tall naval officer entered, he tried to keep both an open mind and a straight face. The circumstances might well have portended great dangers for, at face value, this meeting with the self-appointed necromancer who liked to call himself the wickedest man in the world, was one of the most extraordinary that the man from Naval Intelligence would ever experience. And given some of the people Commander Ian Fleming RNVR encountered during his wartime secret service, that is saying something.

With his usual urbane aplomb, the future creator of James Bond took it all in his stride. As the personal assistant to the sometimes acerbic head of Naval Intelligence, Fleming was used to considering strange and bizarre operations. Wartime expediency dictated that no matter how seemingly ridiculous, nothing was beyond their remit. In so many ways, Ian Fleming’s meeting with Aleister Crowley lent itself to his later writings with villains defined by their physical repugnance. As several commentators have pointed out, Crowley himself would have made an ideal Bond villain. It was his eyes, and their unwavering hypnotic stare, that captivated the future thriller writer. Their mesmeric aspect informed the hypnotic stare – to wit, ‘the whites of his eyes, which showed all around the irises, lending something impassive and doll-like to his gaze’ – of his first ever prototypical villain, Le Chiffre.

In the spring of 1941, though, the discussion itself (at face value concerning a generous offer of help) was politely received. In the previous war, Aleister Crowley had, he claimed, been employed by British Intelligence as some sort of propagandist. Now, according to some accounts, this latest meeting was merely a stepping stone to even greater employment. The Beast, as Crowley liked to refer to himself, was extremely impressed by Fleming’s ‘unalloyed joy in sex, food and thrills’.

‘You could well have been an occultist,’ Crowley is supposed to have said.

‘I consider that I am,’ Fleming replied, no doubt stroking a black (or possibly, a white) cat for good measure.

What exactly they discussed and why has been the source of endless – often farcical – speculation over the years. It has fuelled endless conspiracy theories that have become ever more elaborate and byzantine with the passing of time. Some are rooted in tongue-in-cheek mischief-making, others as proof of the supremacy of supernatural forces.

The reality, as this book will show, is much more mundane.

The greater truth is that while many have maintained their wartime meeting smacks of James Bond, in truth, his rendezvous with Aleister Crowley reads more like Austin Powers. According to the dialogue above, courtesy of Amado Crowley who was supposedly the Beast’s son (in reality, one of a strange number of fantasists who gathered in his wake) the overarching sense of theatricality had more to do with pantomime.

That it took place on the English Riviera is another surreal aspect to the story.

Torquay is hardly a den of devilish iniquity, yet that was where the wickedest man in the world had washed up. By now in his late 60s, Crowley was a pitiful shadow of his former self, thanks to a heroin addiction fuelled by the debilitating effects of his asthma, made worse by having been bombed out during the Blitz. Far from achieving the acclaim and respect he felt he deserved, Crowley was on his uppers. Throughout his life he had embellished details of his greatness as a chess player, mountaineer, writer, artist and occult magus but was, probably more accurately in the phrase of a grandson of one of his lovers, ‘the rottenest son of a bitch I ever met’.

If Aleister Crowley was never quite a lovable eccentric, he had made a certain strain of English strangeness all his own. As the man who claimed to be his son Amado has pointed out, ‘his very eccentricity … was his cover as an agent.’ Certainly that seems to have been the case in the First World War and now, in the Second, that a representative of an organisation as staid as Naval Intelligence had even agreed to meet the self-styled Beast may seem very peculiar indeed. Yet Fleming’s meeting with Crowley was one of a gathering series of surreal events which would culminate that same late spring of 1941 with perhaps the most bizarre occurrence of all – the arrival of Rudolf Hess in the British Isles a few days earlier.

These surreal events did not occur in isolation and had, at least, some basis in reality. As strange as it may seem to posterity, that same spring of 1941 saw the zenith of some of the most bizarre aspects of secret warfare – astrology, magic, political warfare and black propaganda – which would emanate from a zoo located on the outskirts of London. Far from being a concerted effort to harness the occult, this particular strand of an already surreal story had begun with the rather more mundane desire to understand if Adolf Hitler was being advised by astrologers and ended, with whatever divination of astral significance, with Rudolf Hess’s parachute descent over Scotland.

Over the years, these events have prompted many strange rumours and contradictory conspiracies. Ian Fleming’s supposed omniscience extends to not only being in league with the Beast, but that he had somehow already placed an astrologer in Hess’s immediate circle. This mysterious figure then supposedly briefed an associate of the Deputy Führer, who then advised Hess to fly to Britain as it was written in the stars (or, at least, an unusual conjunction of planets in Taurus). In other words, a very different form of bull was taking place against the backdrop of what one bemused chronicler – a senior intelligence official – later termed a ‘period of horoscopes, crystal-gazing and guesswork’.

So what really happened when 666 met the literary father of 007?

That and similar questions which have gathered like urban myths is the purpose of this book. It will examine, reassess and reveal the reality of what actually happened with some of the more peculiar stories of the secret war, how writers embellished many of them and, underlying it, that the only reason the occult was even considered was because of desperation as Britain stood alone against the Third Reich in 1940–1. The ultimate irony is that for all this use of seers – and occultists and prognosticators of various hues – none could predict what the end result might be.

That was not for lack of trying, and some of the characters involved were, as the contemporary records make clear, very, very trying. Their number includes a repressed homosexual Hungarian émigré astrologer with a penchant for dressing up in women’s clothes as well as a military uniform that he wasn’t entitled to wear; a mysterious agent runner who sometimes paraded around Central London with what appeared to be a dancing bear, whose first wife was rumoured to have died in an occultic ceremony that went hideously wrong; a lord of the realm who was an ornithologist of some note, dabbled in the occult, recruited to carry out secret operations with pigeons and whose mother seems to have thought she was a bird.

As in an early Bond novel where 007 is reminiscing about the good old days – and moral certainties of a war against evil – he wonders, as no doubt readers of this book will at times, if they should be better dismissed as ‘all just the stuff of boys’ adventure books, but it was all true’?

The answer, incredibly in many cases in this story, is yes.

The occult is defined as secret, hidden knowledge. For those who believe in its power, such concealed wisdom, especially that handed down from the ancients, provides a key to unlocking all the great mysteries of life. Yet so too, in a different sense, do intelligence operatives and spies, who are also trying to unravel secrets and hidden information to provide strategic advantage. Significantly, for this narrative, the occult and espionage are linked, as both concern hidden worlds, replete with concerns about security, consciousness and a sense of righteousness (particularly for those who are cut off from the refuge of their homelands).

When both have been combined together, even greater riddles and stranger rumours have resulted – especially with regard to the Second World War. In the story which follows, an even greater blurring has occurred of almost mythic grandeur: art imitates life; fiction becomes taken as fact, the more lurid the more egregiously so; much evidence has been exaggerated or mangled to become potent fiction; and many urban myths have emerged from the twilight reality of whoever could make the most ridiculous story sound even remotely plausible.

The Second World War was probably the last great battle between obvious good and evil. At some level that stark delineation contrasts truth and lies, informing both magic and propaganda that were truly also black and white. Ultimately, it is a story of how good won out as British Intelligence prevailed against breathtaking incompetence on the part of its German equivalents. It is an all-too-human story of foolishness, bravery and folly involving bedtime indiscretions, broken promises, curious delusions and bizarre coincidences at the most unlikely times of the fighting.

As the late intelligence historian M.R.D. Foot has correctly diagnosed, many of the operations in the Second World War were ‘true to the tradition of English eccentricity; the sort of thing that Captain Hornblower or Mycroft Holmes in fiction [would] have gone in for had they been faced with a similar challenge’. To their roll call should be added newer, equally ingenious gentlemen adventurers like Kimball O’Hara, Sandy Arbuthnott and William Hannay, created by authors who had all served, in some capacity, on their majesty’s respective secret service. All blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction, none more significantly than a character which a vaguely amnesiac Russian general recalls in perhaps the finest novel written by Ian Fleming, a man named Bond.

In the story that follows, much remains hidden in plain sight.

As with 007 himself – a supposed secret agent who seemed to be on first-name terms with most of the concierges and barmen in the fanciest hotels around the world – there was a strange paradox. For organisations that were supposedly concealed, much of the British secret services were remarkably visible. There is hardly an organisation in the world which has been publicly examined as much as British Intelligence. It is, and always has been, one of the most unsecret services in the world. And, in the face of an official policy never to comment on many claims made against it, much of what has been written has reached the level of an urban myth. Even in an era of greater government openness with the release of many thousands of hitherto secret files, many of the more peculiar operations during the Second World War have often relied on the invariably bizarre recollections of some equally perplexing characters.

As the incomparable M.R.D. Foot has also written, ‘It was only to be expected that hoaxers and fraudsters would take advantage of the public’s apparently insatiable appetite for war stories describing episodes of extraordinary courage and adventure.’

Given that many people in this story were writers, it is hardly surprising that the more ridiculous claims have become embedded within the public imagination, dusted off and reprinted over the Internet and other dubious places. Many of the stories veer from the utterly improbable to the extremely inconceivable. Taking many of these stories at face value is set with pitfalls. In all the acres of newsprint and breathless blogs which have followed, particularly when James Bond elevated him to immortality, too much can be read into aspects of Ian Fleming’s secret service. Yet as the producer Cubby Broccoli – who was instrumental in putting his creation on the silver screen – noted of one particular script meeting with Roald Dahl, one of Fleming’s wartime colleagues, his own recollections were very different to what the writer claimed, ‘but then I wasn’t the best fairy tale writer in the world’.

In other words, the odd leg-pull was to be expected.

None are so exasperating as those involving spying and the supernatural. ‘Many of its protagonists are grail-seekers steeped in the occult,’ notes one eminently sensible review, ‘who want us to share their belief in magic.’ And yet oddly, the truth, as we will see, is far stranger still, a story that actually began at the end of the sixteenth century when the country faced invasion from overseas and also had to consider any means possible in fighting the enemy – and that, supposedly, included the occult.

1

007 AND COUNTING

The creation of real life intelligence operative and old Etonian Ian Fleming, Bond borrowed his 007 title from Dr John Dee. The 16th Century British secret agent used the code for his messages to Queen Elizabeth I. The two zeros meant ‘for your eyes only’.

BBC News, 22 November 2002

Intelligence work necessarily involves such cheating, lying and betraying, which is why it has so deleterious effect on the character. I never met anyone professionally engaged in it whom I should care to trust in any capacity.

Malcolm Muggeridge, 1972

The first time espionage, deception and the occult came together at the behest of the British government was in the sixteenth century when, by a supposed historical coincidence, the symbol 007 was involved. Or at least that was the claim of someone who has done much to muddy both this and the more recent historical record concerning the supposed omniscience of British Intelligence. After all, it makes for great symbolism that a real-life character – on whom Shakespeare supposedly based Prospero – was a magician who used that same code number, a supposed kabbalistic cipher, in his most secret communications.

It is a matter of record that Dr John Dee was an adviser to the Elizabethan Court on mathematics, geography, astronomy, navigation and philosophy (and the originator of the phrase British Empire). His experiments in alchemy, casting of horoscopes and supposed conversations with angels have eclipsed the certainty with which he was most likely an intelligencer (in effect, a spy for the court) as he travelled around Europe. But in all the acres of academic assessment of Dr Dee’s accomplishments, there is no evidence that he ever used the symbol 007.

The writer who made that claim in the sixties, Richard Deacon – whose real name was Donald McCormick – had been employed after the war by Ian Fleming and knew him very well. Like so many others in this story, McCormick enjoyed nothing more than a good, old-fashioned wind up in his writings, bringing to them a certain élan: not many authors in their eightieth year ever manage to publish a connoisseur’s guide to erotic literature. For many previous decades, McCormick had spun often similarly outrageous yarns amongst more genuine, easily verifiable information.

When writing a book about the British Secret Service in 1969, McCormick (writing as Deacon) claimed that Dr Dee used the symbol 007. It found a willing, appreciative audience. Spy mania, spearheaded by Ian Fleming’s creation, was then at its height. James Bond had become the epitome of cool when, as one witty chronicler has noted, ‘it came to pass that Thomas Connery (later Sean) did – as women will tell you – make the word flesh’.

But putting flesh on fraudulent bones would become a greater, ever growing diversion for McCormick and others, too, in the truly cottage industry which places Ian Fleming at the heart of bizarre wartime operations. As the author of a recent, highly amusing appreciation of Fleming’s impact – that James Bond was indeed nothing less than the man who saved post-war Great Britain – has written, the author’s real wartime record ‘relied on individual pluck and initiative and which, while reasonable as part of a genuine policy of total war, were in the end, irrelevant to the war’s outcome’.

What is indisputable is that during the reign of Elizabeth I, England was under almost constant threat of invasion thanks to a chasm in the religious divisions between Catholics and Protestants. Worse, a Cold War had developed over Spain’s desire for a trade monopoly (which led to an actual outbreak of hostilities in 1585). Against this background, the fomenting and foiling of plots against Her Majesty’s government was a constant preoccupation for which her principal secretary – and unofficial spymaster – had to be constantly alert.

In those doom-laden times, Sir Francis Walsingham made it his business to look at all sources of intelligence (especially ‘foreign places from whence Mr Secretary Walsingham was wont to receive his advertisements’, to quote a contemporary chronicle), no matter how unlikely their source nor exotic their provenance.

Hence his use of the good Dr Dee, who was a curious polymath on the cusp of the renaissance.1 John Dee was undoubtedly the most colourful agent in the land. Most of Walsingham’s informants in foreign courts and within the orbit of both domestic plotting and papist cabals were much less vividly drawn. Nevertheless, Sir Francis would stop at nothing in the name of security. He pioneered covert operations, plausible deniability and encouraged the cracking of codes to reveal the intentions of perfidious foreigners (such as those surrounding Mary Queen of Scots, which would come to include both the Ridolfi and Babington plots).

A wary, melancholic man who was eventually worn down by the very weight of the secrets he was carrying, Walsingham was, in a sense, the first modern spymaster. ‘A most subtle searcher of hidden secrets’ in the estimation of a contemporary, William Camden, Walsingham could be described as the spiritual forefather for the secret service. In the centuries which followed, espionage became a growing preoccupation for Walsingham’s heirs, both spiritual and literal.

With each subsequent threat of invasion, notably following the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon, England’s ambassadors were happy to pay agents and stool pigeons for their news. The king’s navy and army had its own spies, too, but it wasn’t until the opening years of the twentieth century – with the rise of the kaiser’s Germany – that espionage gained the imprimatur of official legitimacy with the formation of the modern secret service.

Then, as now, Britannia had to waive the rules of conventional warfare to face off the threat of an arms race, spy scares and a constant worry about foreign terror campaigns. Such was the case when, as late as 1909, the Committee on Imperial Defence (a quango of senior ministers and military chiefs of staff) came to consider how to stand off the kaiser’s warmongering; they were stunned to discover there wasn’t, as was usually claimed, actually a British secret service in existence.

They, it was clear, were as much victims of myth as everyone else and decided that they had better do something about it.

When, in the spring of 2015, the most recently appointed Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, Alex Younger, made his first public appearance, he took care to discuss some of his own experiences: ‘As I speak, there are SIS officers serving in some of the most dangerous and forbidding places on Earth. I had the honour of leading some of them in Afghanistan.’ Adding that he was ‘particularly proud’ of how their work had saved numerous British and coalition lives, there was, perhaps without his realising it, also an unacknowledged link with why there needed to be a secret service in the first place.

Unsurprisingly, a writer was involved.

Rudyard Kipling’s Kim is the apotheosis of the Victorian spy novel, wherein unseen agents of the Raj played ‘the Great Game that never ceases day and night throughout India’ (a phrase which is used thirty-six times in Kipling’s story) with its own eerie echoes of today’s war on terror and establishing of political supremacy in the Near East. Intrigue, espionage and, at times, secret warfare centred on the mountains of Afghanistan, where Kipling’s eponymous hero searched for a Russian and a French spy. And so it continues today with the Taliban and Islamist insurgents.

Kipling’s fiction imitated late Victorian life and exaggerated it a little. The actual military intelligence organisation in the Raj at the time was hardly on the scale nor quite as sophisticated as that described in Kim. There was no overall intelligence-gathering body in India, though, as a foretaste of things to come, there was much rivalry and jealousy between those which did exist.

Real-life espionage – or rather its deficiencies – soon became more marked at the turn of the century when the Empire was threatened by Afrikaner insurgents. The Boer War saw a handful of guerrillas running rings around the British Army. Many battalions were brought to their knees by the use of unorthodox forces. Unmilitary methods, suggested a brave and resourceful reporter for the Morning Post, might be a better answer. Winston Churchill would become an important figure in distilling the need for greater flexibility, more imagination and the use of the unconventional.

Yet in the first years of the new century, the myths remained. While the British Empire was believed to have the best espionage system in the world, it actually had no agents in mainland Europe. Worse, with continuing trouble in South Africa and on the North West Frontier, various foreigners from without and terrorists within – encompassing suffragettes, anarchists and, admittedly, people they just didn’t like the look of – threatened the certainties of kingdom. But, even worse, was ‘a menace to the rest of the world’, as the Foreign Office referred to Germany’s militarism and expansionism in 1907.

At the start of the twentieth century, Britain was a naval power with an empire that stretched across a quarter of the globe. With a navy twice the size of any rivals, interlopers could hardly be tolerated. ‘If the German fleet becomes superior to ours,’ the then First Sea Lord had written at the turn of the century, ‘the German army can conquer this country.’

The Kriegsmarine warships were taken as potent symbols of Teutonic power. The accession of Kaiser Wilhelm II saw him declare that the ocean ‘is essential to German greatness’. This Germanic desire for naval pre-eminence fuelled an arms race over the new Dreadnought-class ships, which could both outgun and outrun existing vessels. These anxieties would be inflamed by erroneous reports that Berlin was stepping up its building programme. So began the first ever version of mutual assured destruction: that the Germans would invade Britain or else the Royal Navy would do the same in German waters as it had done at Copenhagen in 1807 and sink the new fleet.

No more potent symbol of this Teutonic aggression came in the form of his Imperial Majesty himself. Often appearing in public wearing his naval uniform, Kaiser Bill found glory and a positive fetish in the potential power of battleships. Supported by propaganda, many of his underlings in the German Navy – including Admiral von Tirpitz – had concluded that war with Britain was unavoidable. The kaiser, in conversation with a friend who later, with his permission, published the conversation in a sensational article in 1908, famously declared: ‘You English are mad, mad as March hares. What on Earth has come over you that you harbour such suspicions against us?’

Something had to be done – and quickly.

Naval Intelligence, originally a committee looking at information gathered from overseas created in 1882, now concentrated purely on the collection and collation of all available material about the Germany Navy. Officers who worked for the Naval Intelligence Division (NID) now became heirs to that grand Nelsonian tradition with a far greater acuity than all other military intelligence branches (partly because, unofficially at least, it was also relying on Lloyds of London). In time, its officers distributed extensive questionnaires to captains of His Majesty’s Ships, later making secret surveys of Kiel Harbour using cameras.

As Germany started to rattle its sabres, a more efficient national intelligence organisation was needed right across the board. That was why, in 1909, the Committee of Imperial Defence came to consider the matter and the need to counteract a gathering virulence that had taken hold of the British public: the inhumanity and ubiquity of the German spy, a notion stirred by the breathtakingly malign genius that was William Tufnell Le Queux.

War correspondent, lecturer, novelist and unashamed fantasist, Le Queux was, almost inevitably, a contributor to the Daily Mail, where he was given free rein to play on the great fears that foreigners were plotting the downfall of the Empire. In 1906, a series of his inflamed articles were collected together in book form as The Invasion of 1910. The ordinary Londoner would have been hard-pressed to avoid its promotion. With sandwich-boarded men parading up and down the busiest streets in Prussian uniforms and spike helmets, his work could hardly fail to draw attention.

In vain, the prime minister dismissed Le Queux as ‘a pernicious scavenger’,2 and today, Alan Judd terms his work fantastic, awful and ‘bad enough to be enjoyable’. That same year of 1906, he dashed off half a dozen further potboilers. Within a decade, Le Queux had written dozens of similar works, the most famous being Spies Of The Kaiser in 1909. Overheated, melodramatic and replete with execrable dialogue, he was a kind of Dan Brown de nos jours in claiming that all his stories were based in reality. The public was simply being served what it wanted to hear: legions of German waiters and barbers – potential poisoners and throat-cutters numbering their thousands – were waiting to subvert the country into submission.

This, then, was the atmosphere in which the luminaries of the War Department met in the summer of 1909 to consider such febrile claims. And for that, the Committee of Imperial Defence turned to a curiously benign character in his fifties, a passed-over naval officer then paddling around in a backwater, both literal and actual, who, as his most recent heir and inheritor says, was, in every sense of the word, ultimately a hard act to follow, an eccentric and an inspired choice to head up the secret service.

There is white magic and there is black magic, with many subtle variations in between, as with shadings of light and dark: there is illusion and there are hoaxes; there is also legerdemain, a splendid word suggesting deftness of touch with military connotations; there are séances and spiritual happenings, along with esotericism, dualism and gnosticism – ancient religions whose supporters shunned the material world and embraced the spiritual one. Indeed, the very word magic comes from the Persian magi, whose original meaning was ‘fire-worshippers’. Most of those fires were seen in the sky, whose portents these high priests found it prudent to discern, such as those which propelled perhaps the most illustrious magi in history towards a stable in Bethlehem.

In other words, the history of magic provides us with the fragments of childhood memory and half-forgotten (or half-remembered) folk stories. The list is long: Arabian nights; carpets which transported their owners to mysterious lands; rings that granted miraculous wishes; ubiquitous genies in bottles; seventh sons of seventh sons; and trees which sprout wonderful fruits. Add to them the grails, quests and dragons of ancient myth, and we can trace a lineage to today’s Harry Potter and Philip Pullman’s Lyra and Will, which still enthral present-day children – and their parents.

In a wider sense, hidden or secret knowledge has an irresistible appeal.

If the main criticism of the occult is its readiness ‘to relate the unrelated’, the same, too, could be levelled at the fruit of espionage and intelligence material. The rich spiritual world – of magic, mysticism, astrology and alchemy – all evolve from the notion that the ancients or other civilizations somehow possessed the ultimate wisdom. It doesn’t take too great a leap from cracking these hidden codes to creating those employed by agents right under the noses of the enemy.

Occultic revelations may be viewed as the ultimate spiritual need-to-know basis. ‘When you are operating as an agent in the field, you never know what’s happening behind your back,’ said the late Professor Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke of Exeter University, the acknowledged world expert on these matters. ‘Even your own people may think you are completely dispensable. That’s very similar to the religious situation with the mortal in a gnostic world.’

Even after the age of enlightenment, when superstition was supposedly banished, divining the truth from specialist knowledge that gave an insight into a higher order continued. As a result, various occultic concepts have become curiously intertwined in the popular imagination, though each represent separate tributaries in its long, often surreal history. Illusion, magic and hidden or even forbidden knowledge are all viewed as one and the same. Secrets and secrecy are not restricted to one sphere of human endeavour.

Small wonder that many people who later dabbled in the occult world were also drawn from – and to – the espionage services in the Second World War. Nowhere does the subject have a starker contrast than that between Great Britain and Germany in the first few years of the twentieth century. The fighting to come in the Great War made the careers of many of the secret servants who came to prominence in the Second. Their own loyalties to king and kaiser spilled over into the later conflict. Shadowing it was another far stranger story, involving hidden and often unexplored dimensions, despite the superficial similarities between them.

Wishful thinking, it should be noted, has always been a leitmotif of the secret world. Who needed dull, prosaic facts when fiction was so much more believable. The main reason Edwardian spy scares took hold was because, for all its deficiencies, the fiction captured the public imagination. It is significant that many of the characters in the story which follows were writers, journalists and hacks of one kind or another. Both journalism and espionage have intertwined to create myths of great potency that, as the sometimes acerbic chronicler of espionage history, Philip Knightley, has commented, are nothing less than ‘romantic nonsense that thrives in the intellectual twilight of the intelligence world, folk tales on which new recruits are nurtured and trained’.

Certainly, espionage and literature share an ancient lineage. The biblical King David had his own ‘emissaries’, Odysseus seized (and killed) a spy to reveal information about a bivouac, while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern spied on no less an exalted figure than the Danish Prince himself, Hamlet. Literary links with spies are as old as the novel itself: the Restoration author Apla Behn was involved in espionage, more tragically still was Christopher Marlowe and, in a more pedestrian way, Daniel Defoe. And this literary tradition continues, for no better reason then that writers, after all, are as inquisitive as spies. At some level, journalism and espionage are almost identical in their needs of gathering information that will gain primacy, either on the front page of a newspaper or else in a classified document that will be destined for the prime minister’s eyes only.

Given that many of the more remarkable intelligence officers in the Second World War were writers or journalists, myths were inevitable. With writers of the calibre of Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Compton Mackenzie, Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl, it could hardly be otherwise.

Exaggeration was in their lifeblood. When asked about the distinction between spying and reporting, one chronicler – who characteristically did a great deal to confuse the two in the seventies – stated outright: ‘There is none.’ The late William Stevenson, who, as we will see, wrote one of the more misleading books about espionage ever, preferred to use the word ‘Spyglass’. ‘All through the centuries,’ he took care to explain, ‘reporters of one kind or another have put the spyglass to events.’

It is notable that many former spooks were pithily dismissive of their earlier careers as it all seemed so wonderfully absurd. As a journalist who had worked for MI6 during the Second World War commented, the shoe was usually on the other foot. ‘Diplomats and intelligence agents, in my experience,’ the caustic Malcolm Muggeridge would famously lament, ‘are even bigger liars than journalists, and the historians who try to reconstruct the past out of their records are, for the most part, dealing in fantasy.’3

There are very few people – let alone fictional agents imperilled by fiendish foreigners – who can make the extraordinary claim of cutting off their own leg with a penknife. This often repeated story about Mansfield Cumming, the founding chief of the modern Secret Intelligence Service, is not quite true. Yet it remains part of his enduring legend, its peculiar symbolism inevitably growing ‘with the telling and it became part of service mythology’ in the words of the SIS’s own authorised history.

The current chief, in unveiling a plaque to his extraordinary predecessor, noted with a great deal of satisfaction that Cumming’s modern-day heirs use ‘guile, creativity – and that thing that he would most certainly recognise – the sheer satisfaction of putting one over on those who mean us harm’. And, in this particular context, his self-inflicted sacrifice comes to define much of the potency of the fables surrounding Mansfield Cumming and why he is still so revered today within the modern MI6.

When the Great War broke out, the 55-year-old Captain Cumming had embarked on a new career as a spymaster without any particular qualification for the job. An agreeable eccentric with a paunch and, it has to be said, a Mr Punch-like physiognomy, he was an inspired choice. Cumming enjoyed all the more entertaining appurtenances of tradecraft – disguises such as toupées, false moustaches and a variety of outfits which he obtained from a theatrical costumiers in Soho – and sometimes disappeared for weeks on end. In some accounts, it is said that he pretended to be a German businessman, travelling through the Balkans, despite the fact that he didn’t speak a single word of German.

That his successors still use the first letter of his surname (and, tongue in cheek, Ian Fleming appropriated the other) is a remarkable heritage. ‘I am the only person in the Service allowed to write or type in Green ink,’ says the latest C – as the chief still signs himself in all official communications – which also reflects Cumming’s naval background.

In many ways, it is unfortunate that Mansfield Cumming was born on April Fool’s Day (1859). Many accounts of people who worked with the first C have portrayed him as little more than a glorious buffoon: wearing a gold-rimmed monocle, with a penchant for disguises and always referring to his work as ‘capital sport’ and gleefully relating such escapades to his ‘top mates’, as he called his closest associates.

Yet he was hardly an upper-class twit. The man born Mansfield George Smith into a comfortable middle-class existence was a career naval officer who was commissioned as a sub-lieutenant after attending Dartmouth Naval College. A later estimation describes him as ‘a clever officer with a great taste for electricity’. In time, Cumming developed an unusual attribute for a sailor, suffering from chronic, debilitating seasickness. While routing pirates in the Strait of Malacca in the late 1890s, he had to take extended sick leave. Its annoying recurrence meant that he was declared unfit for active service.

Soon, he was restricted to shore-based commands.

A second marriage followed into the family of a fairly wealthy Scottish landowner, Lady May, a prim, demure lady who remained aloof from her spouse’s day job at the family home in Hampshire. Her husband simply added her maternal name Cumming to his own surname. In 1898, he had been seconded to the foreign section of the Naval Intelligence Division, which by now was distributing extensive questionnaires to captains of His Majesty’s Ships. It later followed this up by developing a network of volunteer coastal observers all around the world to record shipping movements, not least those of the increasingly belligerent Germany.

Small wonder the Admiralty was terrified of a surprise attack. With this in mind, Cumming was retired on half pay to a houseboat in Bursledon4 on the Hamble, where his work involved the building up of boom defences on Southampton Water. These were an intricate series of wires, extended and elongated poles and various wooden men-of-war that would easily ensnare any enemy ships trying to break through naval defences. In July 1906, Cumming was ‘promoted’ to the rank of commander (ret’d), with his work on boom defences described as ‘valuable’.

Though it was hardly a front-line posting, his handicap never stopped him in his tracks. Like many other ageing officers who had been invalided out of active service, Mansfield Cumming might well have seen his career fade in the glorious sunset that was Edwardian England. What transformed his fortunes was compounded by the worst spy scares to date – courtesy of two Williams, Le Queux and the kaiser – and resulted in his being summoned up to London to face a committee that wanted to transform British Intelligence into something more than the ‘amateur improvisation’ which was then in existence.

Some time in the spring of 1908, a failed artist who was subsisting on bread and milk could be found shuffling aimlessly around a variety of Viennese flophouses for a few hours of itinerant rest. With nothing much better to do in the capital of his native Austria, this shambling, anti-social drifter spent most of his days visiting museums, libraries, art galleries and the opera. The young Adolf Hitler was, his apologists have made out, absorbing as much Viennese culture as any self-respecting artist and future leader of the Deutsches Volk would be expected to do.5

So it came to pass that one day that spring in the Habsburg Treasure House, the suffering artist caught sight of an elongated sword on to which various adornments had been inscribed or written over the subsequent centuries. Shambling around the ornate exhibit case, the young Adolf Hitler first saw its name – the Spear of Destiny – then heard a nearby guide extolling its virtues.

‘There is a legend associated with this spear,’ the guide said in suitably portentous tones. ‘Whoever claims it and solves its secrets, holds the destiny of the world in his hands, for good or evil.’

Adolf Hitler was supposedly electrified. The guide pointed out that the spear could be traced as far back as Emperor Otto the Great in the tenth century AD – if not before. It was, he claimed, supposedly the lance which the Roman soldier Longinus had used to pierce the flesh of Jesus while he was on the cross. Allegedly used by such leaders as Constantine, Justinian and Charlemagne (in no less than forty-seven military campaigns), ‘the Spear had passed like the finger of destiny,’ one breathless chronicle relates, ‘forever creating new patterns of force which had again and again changed the entire history of Europe.’

Whatever its true origins and its current provenance, Adolf Hitler went over to the nearby Hof Library to find out more. There were, it seemed, a whole tranche of spears, all of which were candidates for that which had pierced Jesus on the cross. But the one on display in Vienna seemed to be uniquely possessed of the kind of epoch-making powers which your average fascist dictator-in-the-making and putative tyrant might find useful one day. For three days, Hitler read up on the legends surrounding the spear. On the fourth, he went back to the Treasure House.

‘I slowly became aware of a mighty presence around it,’ he would later recall. ‘The same awesome presence which I had experienced inwardly on those rare occasions in my life when I had sensed that a great destiny awaited me.’

This revelation presented Hitler with an apocalyptic ‘window into the future’ in which his own importance became abundantly apparent, if not immediately attainable.

The message, though, was simple. He who controlled the Spear of Destiny would control the destiny of the world.

This story is, of course, arrant nonsense, but apologists for the Nazis and the occult have rarely let the facts get in the way of a good story. The notion that Adolf Hitler’s ultimate supremacy came from such demonic influences still persists today. Most of the preceding story can be dismissed as entertaining, and indeed overheated, fiction.

‘Hitler’s rise to power is directly linked to supernatural powers,’ wrote the acknowledged expert on the subject, Professor Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. ‘According to this mythology, the appeal of Nazism cannot be explained adequately by secular material or material considerations.’

The flames of fantasy have been further fanned by that unique repository of the weird and wonderful, the World Wide Web. Even a cursory search on the Internet shows how pervasive the myth of the Spear of Destiny has become. In reality, the object which now resides in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches’ Museum has been shown (in a metallurgical analysis from 2003) to date from the seventh century AD.

Yet the legend of the Spear of Destiny lives on.

For a mindlessly diverting time, simply do a search for the Spear of Destiny on the Internet. Every kind of site imaginable ‘from ultra-religious Catholic to fascist fruitcake and new age cult’ provide new wrinkles to the essential kernel of the story outlined above. Certainly, by the time Adolf Hitler came to power, these sorts of accounts suggest he had come to view the Spear of Destiny in much the same way that King Arthur did Excalibur.

The reality of Adolf Hitler’s supposed obsession with the Spear of Destiny is less Indiana Jones and more an amateur dramatic production where the cast ham it up mercilessly in the silly-ass theatrical style of ’Allo ’Allo. Most of the claims for the Spear of Destiny’s influence on the Führer are hogwash, spread by a fellow flophouse inhabitant who, despite his subsequent stories, was never even a friend of the young Adolf Hitler. These particular yarns have been elaborated by a former British Commando who had been captured in the Western Desert in 1941 after a raid to assassinate Rommel.

Major Trevor Ravenscroft escaped from captivity three times (but was caught on each occasion) and after the war became a practitioner of white magic. At some point, Ravenscroft met Walter Johannes Stein, who claimed to have met the future Führer in a Viennese flophouse. The truth is Stein never actually knew Adolf Hitler at the time and only ever came across the Spear of Destiny legend years later, supposedly after finding a copy of a book in an occult bookshop which had apparently been owned by Adolf Hitler.

Major Ravenscroft simply collected them together and embellished them to concoct a ludicrously fanciful account of Hitler’s supposed obsession with the occult. The result is what Professor Goodrick-Clarke called ‘probably the single most influential “Nazi Mysteries” book in the English speaking world’. When The Spear of Destiny appeared in 1972, it became a kind of TheDa Vinci Code of its day. It certainly caused an uproar with its claims that Adolf Hitler took peyote, attended séances, employed both satanic powers and planetary doppelgängers, as well as coming under the direct influence of a social network of occultists in Munich and recruited Aleister Crowley as one of his disciples. Although conspiracy theorists continue to pick over these kinds of stories, another more recent historian has aptly noted, ‘books written about Nazi occultism between 1960 and 1975 were typically sensational and under-researched’.

And, for the most part, complete and utter nonsense.

Perhaps the strangest part of this already peculiar story is that Walter Johannes Stein was actually Jewish and fled to Britain in 1933. He liked to make two claims: that Aleister Crowley was a black magician who had influenced Hitler, and that he himself was a ‘confidential adviser’ to Winston Churchill. There is, bizarrely, some truth in the latter, for according to MI5 files he was an emissary to a nebulous group of anti-Hitler aristocrats to whom he was sent in October 1939 to Belgium. This was part of an an ongoing series of contacts with high-ranking Germans opposed to Hitler via various cutouts and back channels to foment anti-Nazi sentiment which would, as we will see, come to a dramatic denouement.

As to what Stein had done in his earlier years, a pall of mystery descends.

According to Professor Goodrick-Clarke, Ravenscroft may well have met Walter Stein when he was searching for medical treatment, which the latter clearly needed at various points in his life. Stein himself seriously claimed that he was the reincarnation of Charlemagne’s confidant, Hugo of Tours. He also believed he could capture lost moments in time through transcendental meditation or what he called ‘mind expansion’. The latter, in Trevor Ravenscroft’s account, led to the Führer remembering Stein decades later.

To say that both were party to wishful thinking is similar to calling Adolf Hitler a shade impetuous. While there was never any doubt that Trevor Ravenscroft had been an extraordinarily brave man, he was not exactly the most reliable of witnesses. Ravenscroft never took any contemporaneous notes, and neither did Stein. One evening in 1957, Stein supposedly told Ravenscroft that he should write the story of the spear. In a bilious irony, Stein became ill and passed away the very next day.

Two decades later, the major tried to sue the writer James Herbert6 for supposed plagiarism in The Spear – the latter’s improbably silly but enjoyable story about neo-Nazi terrorism in England – which Ravenscroft claimed was stolen from his own The Spear of Destiny. As they waited at the High Court in March 1979, a weirdly illuminating conversation took place. During a discussion with a QC, Ravenscroft suddenly announced that he and his litigant had met before.

At the crucifixion.

‘I was on the right-hand side of Christ and Herbert was on the other,’ Ravenscroft said. That particular legal action ended with James Herbert having to pay damages for plagiarism. ‘He did so to give his novel a backbone of truth with the least possible labour to himself,’ said the judge, before adding his own splenetically vitriolic coda. ‘One must not underestimate the commercial attraction of the rubbish I have attempted to describe.’

It is for reasons like this that a powerful urban myth has taken hold about the Führer’s time in Vienna. Wandering around soup kitchens, dressing like a tramp, imbibing half-forgotten items of cultural knowledge to fuel his prejudices, the Spear of Destiny supposedly provides a continuous link with all past and future worlds of magic and occultic power, a kind of lucky talisman between the worlds of sense and spirit. Three decades later, after the Anschluss which re-annexed his native Austria, the Führer is supposed to have spent as much time with the Spear of Destiny as he could. That was why it was removed and placed beneath the streets of Nuremberg, symbolically and significantly, the spiritual home of Nazism’s most Wagnerian excesses.

What we do know is that the Nazis did indeed seize the Hapsburg ‘Crown Jewels’ – with which the Spear of Destiny was associated – in 1938 and transport them from Vienna to Nuremberg. It was a pattern of plunder to be repeated around Occupied Europe. Today, the Spear resides in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches’ Museum7 and would, like any other mildly interesting military relic, have led a blameless life if it were not for the idiotic claims of modern-day would-be mystics.

By the time that Adolf Hitler had moved into a homeless shelter at the end of 1909 after once more failing to gain entrance to a Viennese art school, the British Secret Service was born out of extreme political expediency. A sub-committee of The Committee of Imperial Defence recommended that a unified, national intelligence service be created, ‘just as convinced as any reader of Le Queux’s books that large numbers of German spies were at work in Britain’ in one academic assessment.

What was originally known as the Secret Service Bureau came into being on 24 July 1909. One half concerned itself with home security, the other keeping a gimlet eye on the foreigners who were believed to be causing all the trouble in the first place. Both organisations would be commanded by officers who had been invalided out of their respective services.

To keep an eye on the enemy within, the government turned to an accomplished linguist, Captain Vernon Kell, who had served in the South Staffordshire Regiment in the Boer Rebellion. Kell had returned home with the terrible asthma that would afflict him for the rest of his life, yet could, in the estimation of one colleague, ‘smell a spy like a terrier smells a rat’. Heading up the home section of the Secret Service Bureau, Kell soon exhibited imperturbable steeliness and a propensity for hand-to-hand bureaucratic fighting with the fellow desk-bound officer with whom he now shared an office.

Even though Mansfield Cumming was junior and of a lower rank to Kell, he was hardly respectful. According to the records, Captain Kell and Captain Smith-Cumming spent most of their time bickering over resources, perhaps because they had very little else to do. By the time Cumming took up his post at the start of October, both he and Kell had moved into the War Office and came under the control of Military Operations.8 ‘Went to the office,’ Captain Cumming noted in his diary on his first day at work, ‘and remained all day, but saw no one, nor was there anything to do there.’