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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011
The first part of acclaimed author Mick Smith's epic, completely unauthorised history of Britain s external intelligence community. Six tells the complete story of the service's birth and early years, including the tragic, untold tale of what happened to Britain's extensive networks in Soviet Russia between the wars. It reveals for the first time how the playwright and MI6 agent Harley Granville Barker bribed the Daily News to keep Arthur Ransome in Russia, and the real reason Paul Dukes returned there. It shows development of tradecraft and the great personal risk officers and their agents took, far from home and unprotected. In Salonika, for example, Lieutenant Norman Dewhurst realised it was time to leave when he opened his door to find one of his agents hanging dismembered in a sack. This first part of Six takes us up to the eve of the conflict, using hundreds of previously classified files and interviews with key players to show how one of the world's most secretive of secret agencies originated and developed into something like the MI6 we know today.
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MICHAEL SMITH
SIX
THE REAL JAMES BONDS 1909–1939
In memory of Nigel Antony Richard Backhouse, MVO
(1956–2008)
‘Between the wars, the profession and practice of espionage did not much change. Invisible inks and false beards were still standard issue.’
ROBERT CECIL,
Personal Assistant to Sir Stewart Menzies, Chief of the Secret Service 1939–1951
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to some indefatigable researchers into the secret archives for their assistance in this project, most notably David List, but also Phil Tomaselli, Nick Hiley, Yuri Totrov, Rolf Dahlø, Craig McKay, Andrew Cook, Yigal Sheffy, Ann Trevor, Nina Staehle and Oliver Lörscher. I am also grateful to Richard Cafferata, Roger Fairholme, Shirley Durrant, Hannah Charnock, and Edward and Susan Harding-Newman, Henrik Sinding-Larsen, Yolande Whittall, Elizabeth Moulson, Molly Megson, Ian Sumner, James Stephens, Jonathan Wadman, Hollie Teague, John Schwartz, Sylvia Vetta, Robert Kirby, Charlotte Knee, and last, but certainly by no means least, my wife Hayley and my children Ben, Kirsty, Louise, Leila and Levin.
JOHN Merrett slouched along the Nevsky Prospekt, a big scruffy bear of a man hugging the stucco walls, his attempt to merge into the background assisted only by the dingy surroundings and the lack of street lights. The agents of the Cheka, the Extraordinary Commission, were everywhere and there was said to be a substantial price on his head, although the likelihood of anyone who went to the Cheka getting any money seemed remote.
Once the Nevsky had been one of the most fashionable streets in the world; now its cafés and shops were shuttered against the misery imposed by the Soviets. Here and there a huddle of men gathered around a hawker selling half-rotten vegetables, or hacked at the carcass of a horse driven into the ground by an owner with too little food for himself, let alone a nag.
Merrett had once been one of the smartest businessmen in St Petersburg, clean shaven with a frock coat, top hat, twirling cane and a sparkle in his eye. Not now. To all outward appearances, he looked like a tramp, a man hidden even from himself. It was a false picture. Merrett was very far from the withdrawn, shabby image he presented to the outside world. He was simply doing a job. Jim Gillespie had left him with firm orders to look after the British spy networks. He was determined to stick to what he saw as his patriotic duty. He’d never been a spy, never trained for it, but someone had to do it. Why not him?
At first, Merrett disguised himself with a thick red beard. Then one of the agents in the British network got rattled and gave him up. Merrett only escaped the Cheka agents by jumping out of a window and shinning down a drainpipe, but they managed to grab his wife Lydia. As if he didn’t have enough on his plate, now he worried constantly for her safety and what they might persuade her to say of him.
With the Cheka knowing he had a beard, he’d shaved it off, but the stubble was growing back. He badly needed a shave, though probably now it didn’t matter one way or another. They knew him with or without a beard. If they couldn’t find him, they could do nothing to harm him or the networks. So he kept on moving, never sleeping in the same place twice, adopting the pseudonym Ivan Ivanovich, Russia’s equivalent of John Bull.
It was grinding work, collecting the intelligence, paying the agents and, most difficult of all, in the midst of the ‘Red Terror’, keeping them calm. Hundreds,thousands, of Russians had been taken from their homes and some would not be going home ever again. Small wonder the agents were jittery. ‘Babysitting’ was how Gillespie put it, and at times that’s what it felt like. The MI1c man had promised him before he went that someone would come soon to take over, a professional who wouldn’t have to worry constantly if he were doing the right thing, or what the Bolsheviks were doing to his wife.
Merrett hoped the new man would come soon. The 200,000 roubles Gillespie gave him had long since run out. He and the agents were surviving on his savings and money loaned by the members of the city’s British community he was getting to freedom. He’d just left another six of them waiting for ‘an old woman in a white apron’, who would collect them at dawn and pass them on to one of the couriers. Those were the boys running the real risks. They were paid to smuggle intelligence over the Finnish border, where Gillespie had set up shop waiting for them. They still did that – no-one was going to argue that Merrett wasn’t fulfilling his part of the bargain – but he’d had them running a different kind of package down the lines as well, more than 200 Britons all terrified of being scooped up by the Terror and left to rot in Butyrka prison.
As Merrett passed Meltzer’s furniture store, its windows boarded up to protect what little was left, a hawker stepped out from the shadows in front of him and he recognised one of the agents.
‘Ivan Ivanovich,’ the man whispered, looking anxiously around, ‘you have to come with me. The new fellow’s arrived. He’s looking for you. Says his name’s Paul Dukes.’
ONE
‘Capital sport’
THE British ‘secret service’ that would eventually become known as MI6 was set up in 1909 following several years of growing concern, verging on panic, at the idea of German spies marauding across Britain preparing for war. There is no doubt that Germany was sending spies to Britain, including an increasing number of army officers who claimed to be on holiday ‘learning English’, but were in fact collecting information that might be useful in the event of an invasion. Nevertheless, they were doing so in relatively small numbers and, for the most part at least, the information they collected was openly available to anyone who cared to look for it. They did not constitute anything like a major threat and the spy scare that swept Britain in the early 1900s was in fact out of all proportion to the reality. It was stoked, even orchestrated, by the author William le Queux, who produced a series of best-selling books – with titles like Spies of the Kaiser: Plotting the Downfall of England and The Invasion of 1910 – that deliberately set out to blur the lines between fact and fiction. Le Queux protested vigorously to anyone who would listen, and many influential people did, that the authorities were negligently ignoring the German threat. Lord Northcliffe, proprietor of the Daily Mail, serialised The Invasion of 1910 in his newspaper, carefully rerouting the hypothetical marauding Hun troops through towns and villages where the Mail’s circulation was at its highest. ‘Among the thousands of Germans working in London, the hundred or so spies, all trusted soldiers, had passed unnoticed,’ wrote le Queux. ‘But, working in unison, each little group of two or three had been allotted its task and had previously thoroughly reconnoitred the position and studied the most rapid or effective means.’1
As the public excitement grew, so too did the number of alleged German spies. Lord Roberts, taking up the theme in Parliament, said:
It is calculated, my Lords, that there are 80,000 Germans in the United Kingdom, almost all of them trained soldiers. They work in many of the hotels at some of the chief railway stations, and if a German force once got into this country it would have the advantage of help and reinforcement such as no other army on foreign soil has ever before enjoyed.
The Daily Mail instructed its readers that they should ‘refuse to be served by a German waiter’, adding as an afterthought: ‘If your waiter says he is Swiss, ask to see his passport.’2
Even senior military officers not generally known for taking their lead from the press were convinced by le Queux’s claims, not least because Colonel James Edmonds, the Royal Engineer who was in charge of ‘secret service’ at the War Office, was a friend of the author. Edmonds asked the police what could be done about ‘the systematic visits to this country by Germans’. He complained of Germans ‘of soldierly appearance’ who had rented a house close to Army ranges on Romney Marsh and spent most of their time out on the marshes sketching. Two or three would stay for a month or so before being replaced by others. But the police pointed out that what the Germans were doing was actually not against the law and were unconvinced by Edmonds’s claim that German tourists were ‘assiduous in collecting other information concerning the topography of the country, roads, dockyards, military magazines, which might be considered of value from the military point of view’.3
Despite his concentration on the threat from German espionage, Edmonds was also aware of what was in fact the far greater threat to Britain – its failure to create an effective espionage system of its own to collect intelligence on Germany. Unlike their German colleagues, most British army officers saw espionage as immoral, an occupation to be avoided by any true gentleman. Charles à Court Repington served as military attaché in Brussels and The Hague in the early 1900s. Both cities were ideal posts from which to monitor the German military build-up, but he dismissed any such thought. ‘I would never do any Secret Service work,’ he wrote. ‘My view is that the military attaché is the guest of the country to which he is accredited, and must only see and learn that which is permissible for a guest to investigate. Certainly, he must keep his eyes and ears open and miss nothing. But Secret Service is not his business and he should always refuse a hand in it.’ Not even Sir William Everett, the British military attaché in Berlin, was happy about being asked to collect intelligence on his German hosts. ‘You will not have forgotten when we talked this matter over some months ago, that I mentioned how distasteful this sort of work was to me and how much more distasteful it would be to me when it no longer formed a necessary part of my duties,’ he said, when asked to act as a spy. ‘I so dread the thought of being compelled to continue in communication and contact with the class of man who must be employed in this sort of work, while the measures to which we are obliged to resort are repulsive to me.’4
By 1905, the War Office had begun drawing up plans for a ‘Secret Service in the Event of a War in Europe’; any ambiguity suggested by that title was swiftly removed a few months later with the drafting of the more explicit ‘Secret Service Arrangements in the Event of War with Germany’. Both sets of plans worked on ‘a general system of Observers, Carriers, Collectors and Forwarders’ set up in peacetime. The second set proposed a precise system of networks run by ‘Collectors’, who would be British officers based in neighbouring countries – Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands. They would use ‘Carriers’ to receive information from and pass messages to anything from five to a dozen ‘Observers’ who were to be based in various German towns and were candidly described as ‘spies, pure and simple’. The ‘Carriers’ were to be people who might travel in and out of the country without arousing suspicion, such as ‘commercial travellers, gypsies and women’. The ‘Collectors’ would then use the nearest British embassy or consulate as the ‘Forwarder’ to pass their intelligence back to London.5
At the end of 1908, with no real improvement in the situation, Edmonds produced a long paper on ‘secret service’ in which he compared the British system unfavourably to those of other European countries, including Germany, Russia and France, and then proceeded to prove his point with a banal, even naïve, section on ‘procuring intelligence’. Fortunately, it seems unlikely that the senior officials to whom it was addressed would have got that far, since most had little if any enthusiasm for finding out how ‘this dirty business of espionage’ was carried out. They would, however, have read the covering letter from Major-General Spencer Ewart, the director of Military Operations, who summed up the situation succinctly: ‘We have so far I think failed to realise the value of Secret Service and have neglected to study the question sufficiently. It is impossible to extemporise a system of espionage after hostilities have broken out and any arrangement to be of value must be elaborated in time of peace.’6
It would be wrong to deduce from this that Edmonds did not have any agents at all. Five years earlier, the War Office had recruited an undercover intelligence officer, William Melville, a former head of the police Special Branch and a man who had achieved a certain degree of public notoriety. His exploits against Irish republican bombers and anarchists were widely celebrated by the popular press, which often recorded unlikely detail apparently designed to make him appear more heroic and attractive to their readers. Despite this publicity, Melville managed to adapt with ease to a life that was completely incognito. He was known to his bosses as ‘M’ and operated out of offices at 25 Victoria Street under the cover of William Morgan, general agent. While his main role was to watch out for ‘suspicious Germans that might come to my notice, the same as to Frenchmen and foreigners generally’, he was also tasked to seek out and recruit ‘suitable men to go abroad to obtain information’. Melville not only recruited and controlled a small number of ‘Secret Service agents’ in Russia, Belgium, Germany and Africa, but also acted as what would now be regarded as a London-based ‘fireman’, carrying out a number of secret missions of his own around the world. He was regarded by his bosses as ‘very resourceful’, with ‘a great capacity for picking up suitable persons to act as agents’.7
By the beginning of 1909, the War Office had four different agents in Germany (two of whom were shared with the Admiralty); one in Belgium; one in German South West Africa; and three sub-agents operating in Russia, controlled from Berlin by yet another German-based agent, an Austrian named Byzewski. There was also a deputy fireman, Herbert Dale Long, who had a good deal of experience operating in Africa, but with war looming had been recalled to London to carry out missions in Europe, spending the early part of 1909 in a fruitless search for the German spies alleged to be preparing invasion routes through East Anglia. In April, Colonel Schultz, one of the agents in Germany, died and Melville returned to Germany to recruit a replacement. The new agent, described as a retired officer in the armed forces of ‘a friendly power’, was so well regarded that he was placed on a salary of £600 a year. This extraordinarily high payment resulted from ‘K’ being not one person but in fact three, all of the same name, Christmas, the most important of them being Captain Walter Christmas, a well-connected former officer in the Royal Danish Navy, who was also a personal friend of Crown Prince, later King, Constantine of Greece. Christmas was designated K or WK, perhaps because it was simply assumed that being Danish, his name began with a K, or possibly it was deemed unwise to use the designation WC for an agent. Christmas’s family were based in Esbjerg, with at least one of them travelling in and out of Germany to collect the intelligence as well as reporting it to London once safely back home.8
Galvanised by a combination of spy fever and the lack of a proper intelligence collection system, both Edmonds and Ewart lobbied hard for some form of action. The problem they faced was that the Liberal government then in power was unconvinced that Germany posed any great threat. So Edmonds and those within the military who agreed on the threat took to referring to the Germans as ‘TRs’. This stood for ‘tariff reformers’, a reference to protectionist policies shared both by the Germans and by the right wing of the British opposition Conservative Party, and appears to have been an attempt to emphasise the German threat in a way the Liberal politicians would understand. As a result, Germany itself was constantly referred to by British intelligence officers as ‘Tiaria’.9
The persistent lobbying worked and, in March 1909, Herbert Asquith, the British Prime Minister, instructed the Committee of Imperial Defence ‘to consider the dangers from German espionage to British naval ports’. A sub-committee was set up, chaired by the Secretary of State for War, Richard Haldane, and including both Ewart and the director of naval intelligence, Rear-Admiral Alexander Bethell, as well as the Home Secretary, the postmaster-general, the first lord of the Admiralty, the commissioner of police and the permanent under-secretaries at the Treasury and Foreign Office, who between them administered the secret service vote. The terms of reference concentrated on the threat internally from foreign espionage, adding only as an afterthought that the sub-committee should also consider ‘whether any alteration is desirable in the system already in force in the Admiralty and the War Office for obtaining information from abroad’. At first, many of the sub-committee members were sceptical of the alleged German threat. Edmonds, who also attended the meeting, describing himself as ‘employed under the Director of Military Operations on Secret Service’, said a secret service’s motto should be ‘trust no one’ and quoted Kipling’s adage: ‘trust a snake before a harlot and a harlot before a Pathan’. Haldane’s adviser Viscount Esher, who was clearly not an avid reader of either Kipling or the Daily Mail, described Edmonds as ‘a silly witness from the War Office’ and asked him sarcastically if he was not worried about ‘the large number of German waiters in this country’. Esher noted in his diary that ‘spycatchers get espionage on the brain’.
Nevertheless, despite the high level of scaremongering, the sub-committee recognised that some German spies were indeed active in Britain and, even if not at the level that William le Queux and others suggested, the threat was real. Just as importantly it accepted that ‘our organisation for acquiring information of what is taking place in foreign ports and dockyards is defective, and that this is particularly the case with regard to Germany’. It also recognised that the Admiralty and War Office were ‘in a difficult position when dealing with foreign spies who may have information to sell, since their dealings have to be direct and not through intermediaries’ and it would be a good idea to have an organisation that could handle such delicate matters and ensure government officials did not have to dirty their hands by dealing with spies. The solution was to be the creation of a secret service bureau;
To deal both with espionage in this country and with our own foreign agents abroad, and to serve as a screen between the Admiralty and War Office and foreign spies who may have information that they wish to sell to the government … By means of this bureau, our naval and military attachés and government officials would not only be freed from the necessity of dealing with spies, but direct evidence could not be obtained that we were having any dealings with them.
So secret was the creation of the bureau to be that the sub-committee’s recommendations were not to be printed or circulated among its members. Just one copy was to be made and handed to Ewart, who was to be in charge of organising the bureau ‘without delay’ with assistance from Bethell and the commissioner of police, Sir Edward Henry.10
The sub-committee ruled that the bureau should be run by two officers, one each from the Army and the Royal Navy. The Army chose Captain Vernon Kell, whose fluency in French, German, Russian and Cantonese and experience in the Far East both with the military and as a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph appeared to mark him out as the ideal chief of a foreign intelligence service. Bethell’s choice was at first sight far less promising. Commander Mansfield Smith Cumming was fifty years old, an obscure naval officer who had been forcibly retired from the active list owing to chronic sea sickness and had spent the past decade experimenting with the best methods of providing boom defence for Southampton harbour. Bethell claimed that Cumming ‘possesses special qualifications for the appointment’, although what these were seemed initially unclear.11
Bethell wrote to Cumming two weeks after the Haldane committee reported, suggesting that after more than ten years he must be pretty bored with boom defences. ‘You may therefore perhaps like a new billet. If so I have something good I can offer you and if you would like to come and see me on Thursday about noon I will tell you what it is.’ Two days later, Cumming presented himself at the Admiralty, where Bethell told him that the appointment he had to offer was ‘chief’ of the new secret service. Cumming would be in charge of ‘all’ of the Admiralty’s and War Office’s agents alongside ‘a junior colleague’. He accepted the post as ‘a wonderful opportunity of doing more work for the Service before I am finally shelved’.12
The new headquarters of the Secret Service Bureau was set up in a second set of offices in Victoria Street under cover of a private detective agency run by a former CID officer, Chief Inspector Edward Drew, who as well as working as an assistant would receive £500 for the cost of the accommodation and the use of his name. In accordance with plans agreed by Haldane’s committee, Herbert Dale Long was to be asked to go to Brussels, then seen as the espionage capital of Europe, to act as controller of the European agents. The committee had also instructed the navy to recruit another agent in Germany to report on German shipbuilding. As a result, Bethell sent Max Schultz, a 34-year-old shipbroker who had a Prussian father, to northern Germany. Before taking on the secret service mission, Schultz was based in Southampton and as a result quite possibly already known to Cumming. Despite Kell’s apparent qualifications for foreign intelligence-gathering, he was to take charge of the domestic security section of the bureau, which would later become MI5, and would be known as K, from the first letter of his surname; Cumming was to control the foreign intelligence service. In reality this simply reflected the main interests and priorities of their respective services. Cumming and Kell met with Edmonds and his successor, Colonel George Macdonogh, another Royal Engineer, on 4 October 1909. They were then briefed on what work had already taken place, what agents existed and what their main qualifications were. The two agents Christmas and Byzewski both came up in the discussion and evidence of the attitude towards such agents was evident from the way Edmonds referred to them as ‘scallywags’. The bureau opened for business officially six days later with Kell and Cumming each earning £500 per annum, somewhat less than the £663 per annum paid to William Melville, although the latter sum seems to have included the rent for his offices.13
The new head of Britain’s intelligence operations abroad, now to be known only as C, from the first letter of his name, was seen by most of those who met him as an extraordinarily charismatic man. Despite appearing to have been sidelined by his long role in developing boom defences, Cumming was seen as something of a pioneer, always open to new ideas, which might be what Bethell saw as his ‘special qualifications’. He had a passion for yachts, cars and the very new pursuit of flying and, as a result, was not only an influential member of the Royal Automobile Club but in 1905 became a founder member of the Royal Motor Yacht Club and, a year later, the Royal Aero Club. But perhaps Cumming’s best qualification was that he had already been sent abroad by the Foreign Office on a spying mission to study ‘the development of motor propulsion in fishing fleets in Sweden and Holland’. This was allegedly in order to ascertain ‘the reliability of internal combustion engines running paraffin’, and shortly after taking over his new role, Cumming noted in his diary that he ‘would like to get in touch with certain Danes and Swedes – with some of whom I made acquaintance when sent abroad recently by the FO [Foreign Office] in connection with Marine Motors.’ He was it seems the ideal candidate for what was by any standards a pioneering and highly exciting role.
‘This extraordinary man was short of stature, thick-set with grey hair half covering a well-rounded head,’ one of his intelligence officers later wrote. ‘His mouth was stern and an eagle eye, full of vivacity, glanced – or glared as the case may be – piercingly through a gold-rimmed monocle.’ Another of Cumming’s recruits described entering his office for the first time:
Seated at a large desk with his back to the window, and apparently absorbed in reading a document, was the most remarkable man I have ever met in my life. The thing that struck me most about him was the shape of his large, intelligent head, which I saw in profile against the light. Without paying the slightest attention to me as I stood by the door, he went on reading, occasionally making a note on the papers before him. Then with startling suddenness he put his papers aside and banging the desk hard with his hand said: ‘Sit down, my boy, I think you will do.’ I knew then that something really eventful had come into my life. This was my first introduction to C – the name by which this man was known to all who came in official contact with him. He had, of course, other names and one quite well known in London society, but to us, or rather to those who served under him, he was always known and referred to by this single letter of the alphabet.
Such was Cumming’s influence that ‘C’ was to become the title given to all subsequent heads of British intelligence, evolving from the initial of his name into an abbreviation for ‘chief’ of the secret service. But initially he struggled to impose his undoubtedly powerful presence on those in charge of the new Secret Service Bureau. Macdonogh refused to deal with him directly, insisting that Kell be in charge of relations with the War Office. He also refused to allow Cumming to take any of the agent records away from the War Office and insisted that one of either Kell or Cumming should be in the Victoria Street offices at any time in case he wanted to get hold of them. Cumming protested to Bethell that it would be impossible to set up agent networks if he were never to leave the office. By now Cumming was seriously concerned that he was being sidelined and that Macdonogh would ensure that Kell, who had been sold to him by Bethell as his junior colleague, was in charge of all of the bureau’s operations. In his diary he complained:
Cannot do any work in the office. Been here five weeks, not yet signed my name. Absolutely cut off from everyone while there, as cannot give my address or [be] telephoned under my own name. Have been consistently left out of it since I started. The system has been organised by the Military, who have just had control of our destinies long enough to take away all the work I could do, hand over by far the most difficult part of the work (for which their own man is obviously better suited) and take away all the facilities for doing it. I am firmly convinced that K will oust me altogether before long. He will have quantities of work to show, while I shall have nothing. It will transpire that I am not a linguist, and he will then be given the whole job with a subordinate, while I am retired – more or less discredited.14
Fortunately, the problems, and Cumming’s concerns, appear to be the natural consequence of people with little if any experience in intelligence matters trying to set up a system virtually from scratch. Within days, the idea of a joint bureau had been abandoned, with Macdonogh accepting that the foreign and domestic espionage operations should be completely separate. Cumming was to be in sole charge of foreign operations and was tasked ‘to correspond with all paid agents desirous of selling secrets’ and to ‘organise an efficient system by which German progress in armaments and naval construction can be watched’. The plan for Long to go to Brussels was put on hold, with Kell adamant that he and Melville must work solely for him and could not be spared. Cumming was told to ‘hunt up a retired officer in Brussels as agent’. Macdonogh had initially suggested the War Office should continue to run its old agents abroad, in particular Byzewski, but Cumming, backed by Bethell, insisted that as head of the foreign intelligence service he must be in charge of all agents overseas and eventually won the argument, also obtaining permission to move into offices of his own at a flat in Ashley Mansions. The flat – for which he received an additional grant of £100 a year – had the advantage of being close to the bureau’s Victoria Street headquarters while at the same time establishing the independence of his foreign espionage section.
On 26 November 1909, Cumming met the first of the agents he had inherited. The meeting with Byzewski did not begin particularly well, in part justifying Macdonogh’s reluctance to hand him over. Edmonds, who had run him until now, introduced him to Cumming and left. Byzewski, who was an Austrian national, was understandably cautious. He had run what was by all accounts an efficient intelligence service into tsarist Russia for the British with three agents, all of whom he controlled from Berlin. Now suddenly he was being asked to switch his organisation to collecting intelligence on German shipbuilding – something that ran counter to his natural loyalties – and to add to his concerns, he was to be working to a completely new man he had never met before, who was telling him how to do his job. He agreed to recruit one man in Wilhelmshaven and another to travel between the main ports but baulked when he was asked to find out details of four large Austrian battleships allegedly being built in the Adriatic port of Pola. ‘He jibbed at this immediately and said he was an Austrian and could do nothing that could hurt his native country,’ Cumming noted, adding: ‘He will be of little use should Austria join Germany in a war against us.’ But after discovering that Byzewski was fluent in French, a language in which Cumming was more comfortable than German, the atmosphere improved somewhat. ‘He is definitely an intelligent and bold man and I think he will probably prove my best aide,’ Cumming noted later in his diary. ‘But the difficulty about his patriotic feeling for Austria will have to be considered.’15
A few days later, Cumming met Captain Walter Christmas, the best of the three WKs. They met at the lodgings of Captain C. H. ‘Roy’ Regnart, a Royal Marine officer and assistant director of naval intelligence loaned to Cumming by Bethell as an assistant. Christmas reported seeing some new German weaponry. Unlike Byzewski, he was very keen to spy on the Germans, at one point saying: ‘I have always looked upon myself as at least half English.’ Cumming concluded in his diary that Christmas ‘seemed straightforward, but I am not quite certain he ever saw those guns!’
Christmas was in fact very straightforward indeed. He was willing to spy for what were already the standard inducements of sex and cash and would go on to provide Cumming with a regular supply of the Danish navy’s ship-watching reports of German vessels passing through the Skagerrak and the Kattegat, the channels joining the North Sea to the Baltic. On top of his £200 salary, the 48-year-old insisted that the go-between who collected his intelligence should always be a ‘pretty’ young woman who was to meet him in a hotel in Skagen, the town at the northernmost tip of Denmark. The women concerned were almost certainly prostitutes procured and paid for the purpose by the real collector of the intelligence. When a few years later, the Germans got too close to Christmas and Cumming had to have him exfiltrated to London, he was lodged in the notorious Shepherd Market area of Mayfair, where there were plenty of pretty young women, all pursuing the same business as the go-betweens who used to collect his intelligence from the Skagen hotel. The close links between what are alleged to be the world’s two oldest professions were to be repeated persistently throughout the Service’s history. Sex and money often represented far better inducements to spy than patriotic or moral beliefs.16
By the beginning of 1910, Cumming had drafted a strategy to collect intelligence from Germany that appears to have been based on the previous War Office schemes and their plans to use collectors based in neighbouring countries. So-called ‘third-country operations’ were to become the standard response for Britain’s secret service when faced with a difficult target like Germany. Cumming also set up a cover organisation – Rasen, Falcon and Co., Shippers and Exporters – and a number of telegraphic addresses for contact with agents, including Sunbonnet London for routine communications and Autumn London for use in emergencies, with arrangements made with the Post Office to ensure that he would receive such messages at his flat at any time, night or day. He also set up a number of deals with businessmen travelling to Germany to collect intelligence, relying on their patriotism and the occasional offer of expenses. This would become standard practice for a perennially cash-strapped British intelligence service – Cumming’s initial budget was a mere £2,700 and he was forever fighting off Treasury attempts at cuts. ‘Much useful information was obtained by enthusiastic Englishmen while travelling in Germany and Austria,’ one of the naval officers who worked with Cumming later wrote. ‘This was not ideal since reports from such sources often contained more chaff than wheat.’ However, given the lack of funding, it was a necessary way of supplementing the work of the professional intelligence agents.
Intelligence work, however hazardous it may be, and however valuable the results, was never sufficiently recognised by our home authorities as deserving of reward. The work of our intelligence correspondents was severely handicapped by the exiguous funds available. It may be that this pointed neglect is due to an inherent prejudice against the whole business of espionage.17
There is evidence in the accounts of severe financial cutbacks early in 1910, with two of B’s sub-agents, including the recently installed man in Wilhelmshaven, laid off, the two other members of Christmas’s family collectively known as WK let go, and another agent in Germany, designated D, who had failed to impress Cumming, also dropped. Others were either to be put on retainers with extra money for good reports, or paid simply on results alone. Byzewski and Walter Christmas, the remaining member of the WK family, were now the two main agents on the accounts and the only ones paid a full-time salary regardless of results, with Byzewski based in Berlin and Christmas described as a ‘traveller’ doing ‘general work’, although clearly his base in Denmark made him an ideal agent to collect intelligence in the main German ports at Kiel, Bremen and Hamburg. There were four other agents in Germany. Three of them were the remaining Byzewski sub-agent, a man called Hans Reichart, who was based in Hanover; Max Schultz, who travelled to Germany on a regular basis, using his cover as a shipbroker to collect intelligence in the shipbuilding yards; and A, a German woman based in Berlin, who was supposedly only to warn of any imminent preparations for war but whose usefulness could not therefore be tested. The last of the four was a Belgian called Arsène Marie Verrue, who also went under the pseudonym of Frédéric Rué, and ‘travelled in Germany’. He was inherited from James Edmonds, who had recruited him on the recommendation of the Courage brewery, which Verrue represented in Germany. Known, slightly oddly, as U, rather than V or R, he was also working for a freelance espionage agency based in Brussels. It is not clear if either Edmonds or Cumming was aware of this or indeed that Verrue was a convicted criminal, who had served a number of prison sentences for various offences ranging from fraud to assault, although this might not have been regarded as a disqualification given that Cumming regarded most of his agents as ‘rascals’. What Edmonds and Cumming would certainly not have been aware of at the time, although it was later to prove disastrous, was that the Brussels espionage agency’s preferred customer was the far more generous German intelligence service.
The accounts also show two other agents on the Service’s books. The first was a man called JR, who was based in Brussels and appears to have been recruited temporarily until Cumming could find someone to run his continental base. Given his low retainer of £50, it was no surprise that he was also working for French intelligence, telling Cumming disarmingly that they would happily provide him with a reference. The other agent was a TG, who had apparently agreed to ‘join a regiment in Kiel and send us periodical reports for fifty pounds’, which seems at first sight extremely low for the highly dangerous role of infiltrating the German army to spy for the British. But the accounts note this down as ‘a retainer’, suggesting that he would be paid extra for any reports, and after protests from TG, it was doubled to £100 a year.18
Cumming described the various agents in a report on the first six months of his work for the committee overseeing the work of the Secret Service Bureau. They split into two main types:
1. Those who are not required to collect definite information or send in periodical reports, but who are expected to keep a good look out for any unusual or significant movements or changes – either Naval or Military – and report them. From these agents ‘no news is good news’ and in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, it is to be believed that they are doing their duty and are earning the pay they receive. It has been pointed out that this negative news is of great value and that although we may wait for years for any report, it may be invaluable when it comes. On the other hand this class of agent should be very carefully chosen and should be of proved character, as very much will depend upon them, and the temptation will be strong when the critical moment arrives, to avoid risk by doing nothing.
2. The other kind – those who in addition to giving warning of extraordinary activity on the part of those they are deputed to watch, are expected to collect information of all kinds and forward it to me at stated intervals – I cannot as yet speak with any authority, as sufficient time has not elapsed since their appointment to enable me to form an opinion.
He then added a third group, which given the straitened circumstances of the British secret service for most of its existence was to become an important supplement to its agent networks:
A valuable source and one which it is hoped will be greatly extended, is that of the voluntary help given by those whose business or profession gives them special facilities for finding out what is going on abroad. I have received intelligence in this way from several whom it is not necessary to specify by name, and have sent in reports of their information from time to time. I am afraid that it will always be difficult to get voluntary help from people living abroad – even those of British birth. The risk they run is so great, and the consequence of detection so serious, that it is only in rare cases that they are likely to be of any use. I have, however, found one man – a Scotchman who occupies a position which will give him exceptional opportunities of knowing if anything in the nature of war is impending, who has promised that in such a case he will come over himself, or if that is impossible, will send a messenger in whom he has absolute confidence, to give warning. I feel bound to say that I place more reliance upon this man – who is of sturdy and independent character – than upon any of the others who have undertaken this important duty.
Cumming wrote the word ‘Rollo’ alongside this report, in the green ink that has become the trademark of every ‘C’ since (its use was originally a naval tradition), possibly suggesting it is the name of the mysterious ‘Scotchman’. The most obvious candidate is George Rollo, a former ‘volunteer’ reservist of Scottish descent who worked for his family’s Liverpool-based marine engineering company – and so would have had the perfect opportunity to conduct business in Germany’s Baltic ports. But one businessman of Scottish descent who undoubtedly provided valuable information to Cumming during the pre-war years was Frederick Fairholme, a director of the Sheffield steel firm Davy Brothers who certainly could have been described as having ‘exceptional opportunities’ of gathering intelligence on the Imperial German Navy. Fairholme’s father was Scottish and his mother was a Bavarian baroness, and he had spent his childhood partly at the family home in Austria. As a result, he spoke fluent German and dealt with the massive German steelmaker Krupp on his company’s behalf. He met Cumming in January 1910 and was immediately able to supply important new intelligence on the German navy’s latest guns and the newly developed shell they would fire, leading to the earliest report still in existence to have been circulated by the newly formed British secret service:
The following information has been received from a reliable source. It is reported that Krupp are making a very large howitzer, 29.3cm, firing a projectile weighing 300 kilos, with a muzzle velocity of 450 metres per second, which pierces a nickel steel ‘deck armour’ plate of 10cm at an angle of 55 degrees. The projectile penetrated the plate at a velocity of 253 metres per second and was unbroken. The projectile was filled with tri-nitro-toluol [TNT]. It is stated that the new 30.5 gun is to throw a projectile weighing over 500 kilos, with a muzzle velocity of 2800ft, and which will penetrate a 12in Krupp plate at 1600 feet per second … It is claimed that Krupp is using Nickel-Tungsten steel for all small guns. A great deal of the segregation [a stage in the steel-making process] trouble is got over by its use, and a longer life is claimed for the gun on account of the less erosion.
A few days before the report was issued, Walter Christmas produced what appears to be the first of a series of monthly summaries of his travels around Germany’s naval shipyards and docks. It covered the month of December 1909 and gave details of work underway at the Imperial Yard in Wilhelmshaven, the Imperial Yard at Danzig and the Germania Yard at Gaarden, near Kiel. He reported a new shipyard under construction on Heligoland, and the speeds achieved in trials by the new dreadnought warship Nassau, and by the armoured cruisers Blücher, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst. He also described the ‘remarkable speed’ of 34.62 knots achieved by a new torpedo boat fitted with turbines, and the continued construction of U-boats, with two new submarines doubling the German navy’s submarine fleet and a further two due to be built during 1910. This was probably the first of many monthly reports from an agent who was among Cumming’s most successful in the run-up to the First World War. Christmas was also the first of what was to become a long line of British secret service employees who used their experiences to write spy novels. He began sooner than most, publishing Svend Spejder (‘Svend the Scout’) – in which the hero hunts down German spies in Denmark – in 1911, relatively early in his career for the British secret service.19
Christmas was not the only agent beginning to produce the goods. January 1910 was highly productive for Cumming, who also received and disseminated a comprehensive report from the Austrian Adriatic dockyards at Trieste, Pola and Fiume. The report was written by an agent who was not only clearly well informed about the latest naval equipment and weaponry, but was also looking out for potential agents, apparently under orders to do so from Cumming. Once again ‘Scotchmen’ were seen as the most likely recruits. Cumming sent the report verbatim, with a brief introduction of his own. ‘The agent reports that none of the English residents were of any use to him, as they were either afraid of injuring their business interests, or were openly Austrian in sympathy,’ Cumming said. There were, however, ‘some Scotchmen who are of good type’ and had helped him get into the best places to collect intelligence. These included the main Austrian navy base at Pola, where he found a 30.5cm naval gun on a parked lorry. ‘I crawled under its tarpaulin and measured its muzzle.’ The agent particularly recommended the manager of the Adria Steamship Company, a man called Rolland who was due to visit England in the near future and would be staying at the Charing Cross Hotel.
He is a very old and very canny Scotchman and I am not certain that he did not get some inkling of my object, by the broad hints he gave me as to his visits to England and his willingness to give information. He is absolutely straight and I fancy is anxious to tell anything he knows.20
The new head of Britain’s secret service was not above going on missions of his own across the continent, journeying to Brussels and Paris, where he set up an intelligence-sharing agreement with the French Deuxième Bureau under Major Jean Wallner. This link was seen as so important that Cumming sent an officer to the British embassy to liaise with his counterparts in French intelligence. He frequently affected elaborate disguises, even for meetings with agents in London, and was always armed with a swordstick, a walking stick that pulled apart to reveal a rapier. Compton Mackenzie, who would serve as a secret service officer during the First World War, described how Cumming gave him the swordstick he had taken with him on spying expeditions before the war. ‘That’s when this business was really amusing,’ Cumming said. ‘After the war is over, we’ll do some amusing secret service work together. It’s capital sport.’21
Notes
1. William le Queux, The Invasion of 1910, Hurst and Blackett, London, 1906; William le Queux, Spies of the Kaiser: Plotting the Downfall of England, Hurst and Blackett, London, 1909.
2. Christopher Andrew, Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community, Heinemann, London, 1985, p. 43; Michael Smith, The Spying Game: The Secret History ofBritish Espionage, Politico’s, London, 2003, p. 65.
3. The UK National Archives, Public Record Office (hereafter TNA PRO), HD3/131, agent reports on suspicious German in Suffolk, 18 November 1905 and 21 November 1905; Chalmers to Sir Thomas Sanderson, 30 November 1905.
4. TNA PRO HD3/111, Everett to Sanderson, 8 February 1901; Court to Sanderson, December 1901.
5. TNA PRO HD3/128, Alan Johnstone to Thomas Sanderson, 10 October 1905 and 17 October 1905.
6. TNA PRO KV1/2, Ewart to CGS dated 12 January 1909; KV1/4 Edmonds, Intelligence Methods, undated.
7. TNA PRO KV1/8, memoir of William Melville, 31 December 1917; HD3/130, Henry to Davies, 21 January 1905; Sanderson to Davies, 26 January 1905.
8. TNA PRO HD 3/138, Intelligence Division of the War Office SS accounts for August 1909; list of ‘Permanent Agents’; HD 3/139, SS accounts for June and July 1909; FO 1093/29, list of salaries for ‘Secret Service Bureau’ and ‘Secret Service Agents’ for 1909–10; HD 3/138, Intelligence Division of the War Office List of ‘Permanent Agents’.
9. TNA PRO KV6/47, letter from Long to Melville, 5 March 1909, letter from Edmonds to Melville, 10 March 1909, letters from Long to Melville, 11 March 1909 and 23 March 1909 (I am grateful to Dr Nicholas Hiley for sight of his annotated note on the origins of the TR designation).
10. TNA PRO CAB16/8, report and proceedings, Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence, Appointed to Consider the Question of Foreign Espionage in the United Kingdom.
11. TNA PRO KV1/3, Memorandum re Formation of Secret Service Bureau, 26 August 1909; ADM196/39; WO106/6292, conclusions of the sub-committee requested to consider how a secret service bureau could be established in Great Britain, 28 April 1909; Judd, The Questfor C, pp. 1, 20; Nigel West, At Her Majesty’s Secret Service: The Chiefs of Britain’s IntelligenceAgency MI6, London, Greenhill, 2006, pp. 21–2.
12. The letter from Bethell to Cumming can be seen on the SIS website at http://www.sis.gov. uk/output/Page557.html; Judd, The Quest for C, pp. 1, 83–4.
13. TNA PRO KV1/3, Memorandum re Formation of Secret Service Bureau, 26 August 1909; FO1093/29, SS Expenditure, Revised Estimate of Salaries during 1910–1911; FO1093/27 Suggestions by the General Staff Regarding a Secret Service Bureau; Judd, The Quest for C, pp. 95–8, 105.
14. Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, Allen Lane, London, 2009, p. 26; Keith Jeffrey, The Secret History of MI6 1909–1949, Penguin, New York, 2010, pp. 9–10
15. TNA PRO FO1093/29, Secret Service Expenditure, Estimate for 1910–1911, dated 31 January 1910; Notes on Estimates for 1913/1914; Judd, The Quest for C, pp. 92–120.
16. TNA PRO FO1093/29, various accounts listing Cumming’s agents for the period 1909–11; Judd, The Quest for C, pp. 124, 325; Walter Christmas, King George of Greece, tr. A. G. Chater, Eveleigh Nash, London, 1914, p. 23.
17. ‘Work of the Secret Service: how Germany’s preparations became known to the Admiralty’, Daily Telegraph, 24 September 1930; Judd, The Quest for C, p. 134.
18. TNA PRO FO1093/29, various accounts listing Cumming’s agents for the period 1909–12; see in particular Service Expenditure, Estimate for 1910–1911, dated 31 January 1910, and Supplementary Estimate of SS Expenditure for Quarter Ending 31 March 1911, dated 19 January 1911; WO374/65422, High Court Petition Launched by Captain Bertrand Stewart, March 1914; Hector C. Bywater and H. C. Ferraby, Strange Intelligence: Memoirs of NavalService, London, Constable, 1931, pp. 175–6; Judd, The Quest for C, pp. 157, 160–61, 167, 175; Nicholas P. Hiley, ‘The Failure of British Espionage against Germany, 1907–1914’, Historical Journal, 26 (1983), pp. 872, 889.
19. Judd, The Quest for C, pp. 136–9; Burke’s Landed Gentry 1936, Burke’s Peerage and Gentry, London, 1936. I am grateful to Roger Fairholm for his assistance in tracking down the details of the Fairholme family.
20. Churchill College Cambridge Archives MCKN3131 I am grateful to Phil Tomaselli for providing me with a copy of this document; Phil Tomaselli, Tracing Your Secret ServiceAncestors, Pen and Sword, Barnsley, 2009.
21. Judd, The Quest for C, pp. 215–16, 230–36, 270; Compton Mackenzie, Greek Memories, Cassell, London, 1932, pp. 411–12.
TWO
Preparing for war
THERE was in fact another source of intelligence besides Cumming’s various agents. It came from army and navy officers looking for adventure. They were apparently inspired by the spirit of Erskine Childers’s 1903 novel, The Riddle of the Sands, in which Charles Carruthers and his friend Arthur Davies uncover German preparations for an invasion of Britain while sailing and ‘duck-shooting’ in northern Germany.1 Large numbers of British officers volunteered to go to Germany on intelligence-gathering missions, few of them seeing themselves as ‘spies’, a word still seen as having underhand connotations not worthy of a man holding the King’s commission. These men, often naïve and excessively enthusiastic amateurs over whom Cumming had too little control, were to provide him with his greatest problems in the early years. The situation was not helped by the fact that he had his own over-enthusiastic amateur to cope with in the shape of his part-time assistant Roy Regnart, who was primarily responsible for the earliest of a number of German arrests of British spies. The Brandon–Trench affair, as it was to become known, was the first of a series of scandals which led to British spies being paraded before the German courts.
Clearly keen to make his mark, Regnart decided to send a fellow Royal Marine, the thirty-year-old Captain Bernard Trench, on a tour of areas of northern Germany to map out the defences along the North Sea coast, which was where British planners had suggested any forced landings should take place. Trench had made a previous trip to Germany to report on the naval dockyard at Kiel with a friend, a Royal Navy lieutenant, Vivian Brandon, and asked if Brandon, a hydrographic expert, could come with him. Regnart happily agreed. Trench was allocated the codename Counterscarp while Brandon was to be known as Bonfire in what Regnart must have seen as clever jokes – rather than easily identifiable and therefore highly insecure. The two were to be contacted via the Thomas Cook office in Hamburg, an early use of a company that would repeatedly be of assistance to British intelligence. A third person was codenamed Orange. This appears to have been a Lieutenant Peel – the pun was clearly intended and yet again highly insecure. Peel was moored in a yacht flying the Norwegian flag at Delfzijl in the Netherlands, a short ferry ride across the Ems estuary from Emden in Germany, and was acting as a ‘letter box’ for the intelligence gathered by Trench and Brandon. The idea of sending the reports through the German postal system was sprung not just on Trench and Brandon, but also on Cumming, at the very last minute. ‘This is quite contrary to my wishes in the matter,’ Cumming wrote. ‘I feel very strongly that it is utterly wrong and mistaken policy, and has no single advantage to support it, but on speaking to Roy about the matter he says that Bonfire was to write to him only on a particular matter, that of a man who had been recommended to him by a ship’s captain. I did not see why this should be separate from the rest, but let it pass.’ Regnart was in fact lying to get himself out of a difficult situation, which is almost certainly why he was so unpopular in the Admiralty.2
Brandon left for Germany on 6 August 1910 to rendezvous with Trench, who was in Denmark, studying Danish, and appears to have carried out reconnaissance of Kiel and the Kiel Canal before meeting Brandon in the town of Brunsbüttel, on the mouth of the Elbe, at the start of their ‘walking tour’. Brandon had a list of questions on the German defences, some of which Trench was able to answer immediately as a result of the reconnaissance work he had already carried out. Trench then went to Sylt in the North Frisian Islands, which was seen as a likely British landing site, while Brandon went to Cuxhaven and Heligoland. One or both of them also visited Bremerhaven and Bremen, before they made their way to the East Frisian Islands. Here Trench visited Nordeney, apparently alone, but they visited Wangerooge together, mapping an area of shallows while swimming. They were throughout maintaining contact with Peel at Delfzijl, and asked him to send them a detailed map of Wangerooge. Ten days into the trip, Regnart asked George Macdonogh for permission to send Trench and Brandon to Danzig to watch the entire Imperial Navy, a total of eighty-eight major warships, mounting full-scale manoeuvres which were to end with the Kaiser reviewing the fleet. This would have the critical impact of forcing Trench and Brandon to rush the remainder of their ‘tour’. The sudden change of plan, and the way it was presented, left Macdonogh singularly unimpressed with Regnart, and he asked Cumming for a report on the man. Anxious not to criticise someone he would have to work with, and rely on, in the future, Cumming begged Macdonogh not to force him to write the report ‘as it would be a very awkward thing to do and might lose us the services of a good man. To this he agreed, but he said that I must promise not to take Roy into any more of my schemes.’3
A few days later, Trench and Brandon arrived together on the East Friesian island of Borkum, one of the most important points in the German North Sea defences and the main target of their mission. They were now in something of a hurry to finish gathering the required intelligence before they left for Danzig. Trench managed to infiltrate a searchlight battery that was being tested for the first time and, after coming out, suggested to Brandon that he go in and have a look. Brandon had a camera and flashlight with him. Having managed to get in, he took a photograph, not the cleverest of things to do in the middle of a searchlight battery that was at its most alert. The flash was spotted by a sentry and the area was scanned by one of the searchlights, which immediately picked out Brandon. He was arrested and escorted to Emden on a boat. Trench, who was still free and apparently not seen as a suspect, travelled on the same boat and was allowed unhindered access to his colleague. He then went to their hotel in Emden and ineptly hid the various maps, notes, sketches and photographs from their mission in rather obvious places around the room. Having made a poor fist of trying to conceal the evidence, he attempted to escape across to the Netherlands but was arrested.
