The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [101]
During the war the Secret Service had suffered from a considerable turnover of personnel, and Cumming had complained about the armed services’ propensity to pinch valuable officers from him just as they were settling into their jobs. Over the postwar years, however, despite the vicissitudes of finance, there was greater stability and continuity of staff, and Cumming managed to assemble a core group of officers, many of whom were to play important roles in the history of the Service up to and during the Second World War. Among his closest colleagues was Paymaster Percy Stanley Sykes, who joined in November 1915 at the age of thirty-seven. A qualified accountant, ‘Pay’ Sykes was to manage the finances of the Service for thirty years. When he finally retired in 1946, the Director of Naval Intelligence wrote that he was a ‘specialist’ with ‘exceptional experience and qualifications for his present post’ who had ‘carried out his professional duties of a specialised nature with zeal and ability’.24 In April 1919 Cumming appointed Major Desmond Morton to be his head of Production. Born in 1891, Morton came from a prosperous landed and professional background and had been educated at Eton and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, before embarking on a military career in the Royal Field Artillery. After the outbreak of war in August 1914 he served on the Western Front almost continuously for three years, winning a Military Cross in 1916. Wounded and invalided home in 1917, he returned to France and saw out the war as an aide-de-camp to the British Commander-in-Chief, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig. Morton served in SIS for over fifteen years, and continued to have an important intelligence role in Whitehall thereafter, serving as Winston Churchill’s liaison officer with SIS for much of the Second World War.25
Another significant appointment was Colonel Stewart Menzies, an Old Etonian cavalryman from a very privileged social background. He was a career soldier who had served with the Life Guards on the Western Front and been decorated for gallantry before being gassed, after which he was appointed to a security intelligence position at General Headquarters. By 1918 he was a liaison officer between the Directorate of Military Intelligence and MI1(c). Although employed (and paid for) by the army, he was primarily located in Cumming’s organisation. After a spell in Paris in early 1919 on Basil Thomson’s security staff attached to the British delegation at the peace conference, he succeeded Claude Dansey as head of Cumming’s Military Section IV, although he did not transfer from the War Office to the SIS payroll until 1 April 1923. He remained on it, however, for nearly thirty years and was to be Chief from 1939 to 1952. In January 1921 Cumming appointed Major Malcolm ‘Woolly’ Woollcombe to work in Sir Robert Nathan’s section. Cumming had initially thought to employ Nathan, an old India hand who had worked very successfully against Indian subversives in North America during the war, to take over MI1(c)’s work in the USA, focusing now on Irish and Irish-American revolutionaries, 26 but he kept him at home and put him in charge of the Political Section V. For two years before his early death in June 1921, Nathan, who was plagued by ill-health, was the second most important officer in SIS. According to Woollcombe family tradition, Nathan had offered Woollcombe a job in MI1(c) following a lecture which Nathan had given at the army Staff College. Barely six months after joining the Service, Woollcombe was put in charge of the Political Section, which he continued to superintend (with some distinction)