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of a Secret Service Bureau, Alexander Bethell wrote on 10 August 1909 to Cumming observing that ‘Boom defence must be getting a bit stale with you’ and that he might ‘therefore perhaps like a new billet’. Bethell had ‘something good’ to offer and he invited Cumming up to London to discuss it. Two days later (as Cumming recorded in his diary), Bethell told him ‘that the appointment he had to offer was that of Chief of the S.S. Service [sic] for the Navy - a new Department about to be formed at the insistence of the I[mperial] D[efence] C[ommittee]’. The work ‘was to be the obtaining and collecting of all information required by his Department. I was to work under him and should have charge of all the Agents employed by him and by the W[ar] D[epartment].’ Bethell also told him that he would have a ‘junior’ colleague (Kell was fourteen years younger and of lower equivalent rank), and that the new service was being set up with the agreement of the Director of Military Operations.9

While little in Cumming’s background seemed particularly suited to secret service matters, he undoubtedly grew into the work, and was certainly attracted by the prospect from the start. ‘The offer of the work is most tempting,’ he wrote to Bethell on 17 August, ‘and I should like very much to undertake it,’ but he also made it clear that he was by no means tired of boom defence, and during August and early September managed to establish that he could continue nominally to be in charge of that work while taking on his new duties. Since Hardinge wanted the Bureau to come into existence on 1 October, Drew’s office was rented from that date and towards the end of September there was a flurry of activity sorting out arrangements. On 23 September, highlighting difficulties about the precise division of responsibilities which were to bedevil the early months of the organisation, Cumming was ‘disappointed’ to learn from Bethell that he was ‘not to be Chief of the whole Bureau’, but that Kell ‘was to work with me on equal terms’. Bethell also told him that ‘no recognition of our work would be possible, as we were to be dissociated from the authorities entirely, and not recognised by them except secretly’. More positively, however, Cumming learned that Hardinge ‘had promised that there should be no stint of money to pay our own Agents &c’.

The first formal meeting of the Secret Service Bureau took place in the War Office on the morning of Monday 4 October 1909 when Edmonds and Macdonogh briefed Cumming and Kell about their new responsibilities. They said that they were going to keep Melville (‘the best man we have at present’) in ‘an office of his own’, and that Long, ‘another good man’ who spoke German and French, would be sent to Brussels ‘to act as chief agent there’. Edmonds also referred to some other individuals who had done intelligence work and might be kept on. He gave Kell and Cumming their first instructions about what would become known as ‘tradecraft’. He ‘told us never to keep names and addresses on the same paper’ and ‘never to use paper with a water mark in it’. They should never ‘see any of these scallywags for the first time without M[elville] or someone present’, or use the office as a rendezvous. A private room elsewhere should be rented for the purpose. ‘We were not to address letters from the office or receive letters there, and we were to assume other names.’ Cumming noted in his diary (perhaps this was a joke), ‘K[ell] added a Y to his present name,’ but carefully did not commit his own proposed sobriquet to paper, though he later used the names ‘Captain Currey’ and ‘Captain Spencer’. At the end of the meeting it was settled that as Kell ‘was not free for a fortnight, I should commence work by copying out all the records in M[acdonogh]’s office - as soon as I had procured a Safe in which to keep them . . . I lunched with K and we had a yarn over the future, and agreed to work together for the success of the cause.’

For some time, in fact, Cumming remained underemployed. Even before the 4 October meeting he had sketched out plans, but