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in foreign countries’. The committee thought that this individual could be located at the Belgian capital, Brussels, and could be ‘the medium through which other British foreign agents sent in their reports, such a course being less likely to excite suspicion than if these agents communicated with Great Britain direct’. It was proposed that the Bureau should include ‘two ex-naval and military officers’, with ‘a knowledge of foreign languages’. On the recommendation of Sir Edward Henry, it was agreed both to employ a firm of private detectives for the work and ‘that a specially competent agent should be sent out . . . to get in touch with men in various German ports who would be willing to send us information particularly in time of strained relations’. The overall cost of the Bureau was estimated at something over £2,000 a year (the equivalent of about £150,000 in current money), to be met, at least in part, out of ‘the present secret service vote’.

An interesting feature of these recommendations (which were entirely accepted by the main sub-committee at their final meeting on 12 July 1909) is the marked bias towards foreign intelligence-gathering contained in the proposed ‘objects’ of the Bureau, a contrast with the original focus on domestic counter-intelligence. It is tempting to ascribe this to the chairmanship of Sir Charles Hardinge, responsible, among other things, for disbursing Secret Vote money. Under Foreign Office control, the Secret Vote had for many years been used for a wide variety of purposes, including payments to both the War Office and the Admiralty for the intermittent employment of spies, and, although the service ministries had clearly positioned themselves as the primary customers for the proposed new Bureau, we might see Hardinge’s hand both in the ‘external’ emphasis of his sub-committee’s proposals and in the explicit acknowledgement that funding would be provided from the Secret Vote.5 Whatever the explanation, the pattern of armed service engagement with, and Foreign Office control over, the secret service was one that persisted for the next forty years. Another aspect of the proposal was the extreme secrecy within which it was made, and the official ‘deniability’ under which the new Bureau would operate. A précis of the sub-committee’s findings, prepared at the time the first staff were appointed, noted that ‘by means of the Bureau, our N[aval] and M[ilitary] attachés and Government officials would not only be freed from the necessity of dealing with spies, but it would also be impossible to obtain direct evidence that we had any dealings with them at all’. This, too, was to be a central and lasting feature of the Service.

Once the formation of a Secret Service Bureau had been approved by the main Committee of Imperial Defence on 24 July, a group met on 26 August to work out the details. Sir Edward Henry and Ewart attended, along with Edmonds and Macdonogh. Bethell sent a staff officer, Captain Reginald Temple. The meeting accepted Henry’s recommendation that Edward Drew, a former police chief inspector and now a private detective, should be engaged and that the Bureau should begin work as soon as possible in offices leased by him at 64 Victoria Street in Westminster. It was agreed that Long, who had been employed ‘for some years’ by the War Office, should be the foreign agent based on the Continent. Evidently, Long had already been approached as he was ‘willing to accept the appointment’ and had agreed to ‘obtain a commercial agency in Brussels to cloak his activities’. It was further noted that an agent had been ‘employed in Germany by the Admiralty’ to cover German ports as suggested by Hardinge’s sub-committee. The 26 August meeting was also told that the War Office and Admiralty had officers in mind to staff the Bureau. The War Office proposed Captain Vernon Kell, ‘an exceptionally good linguist . . . qualified in French, German, Russian and Chinese’ (and who had previously worked in the War Office as Edmonds’s ‘righthand man in the Far East section’), while the Admiralty nominated Commander