The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [143]
In the end it was Sir John Anderson who came up with the solution by reviving his 1927 suggestion that Colonel Kell and MI5 took over ‘S.S.1 and all its duties’. Since MI5 was ‘already responsible for counter espionage not only for the fighting services but for all government departments’, this was ‘a logical extension of its duties’. Thus there would ‘be only two organisations dealing with secret service work, C covering foreign countries, and M.I.5 the Empire’.45 Although this ignored Indian Political Intelligence, which continued to serve its specialist function, so it was to be. SIS was stripped of its domestic operations, and the Casuals were transferred to MI5, which ceased to be a branch of the War Office and adopted its modern title of the Security Service. Guy Liddell and Maxwell Knight went on to have very distinguished careers in MI5, while Section V under Vivian provided liaison between the two agencies. The new arrangement came into force on 1 October 1931.46 Thus, exactly twenty-two years after their creation, the Foreign and Home branches of the Secret Service Bureau, now the Secret Intelligence Service and the Security Service, took on their modern form and distinct spheres of responsibility which were to survive for at least the next eighty years.
Spilling the beans
One way of cashing in on secret work was to write or lecture about it for money. A perhaps predictable consequence of British secret service successes during the First World War was the desire by some of those involved, both officers and agents, to tell their stories to a wider public. In March 1919 Norman Thwaites, acting head of station in New York, told Sir William Wiseman (who was in Europe) there were ‘signs that we are going to have an influx of “British Secret Service” agents who propose to lecture on their experiences’. One Nicolas Everitt, who had apparently worked for Naval Intelligence, had already arrived, but Thwaites assured Wiseman that the New York office had already ‘cramped his style’ by planting stories in the World newspaper ridiculing him. Thwaites thought Everitt was ‘quite harmless and a good patriot who needs the money, but his boastful talks’ were ‘in bad taste’. Everitt’s excuse was that Blinker Hall, who had successfully stood as a Conservative MP in the 1918 general election, had ‘set the example by telling tall stories during his election campaign of the wonders performed’.47 Cumming’s own addiction to secrecy meant that he had offered no such encouragement to his subordinates. Years afterwards, Pay Sykes wrote that Cumming ‘took a poor view’ of Hall’s action. One day, he recalled, sitting in a traffic jam outside the National Gallery, Cumming ‘turned to me & said “Sykes, I am going to publish my memoirs.” “Really, Sir,” I queried. “Yes” he said. “The book will be quarto size, bound in red, top-edge gilt, subtitled ‘The Indiscretions of the CSS.’ It will have four hundred pages, all blank.”’48
In 1928 Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden, or the British Agent was published, ‘founded’, he wrote, ‘on my experiences in the Intelligence Department during the war, but rearranged for the purposes of fiction’.49 This was another way of exploiting clandestine government work, and, by turning it into fiction, perhaps hoping to evade accusations of revealing too much about the structure and workings of British intelligence. The book seemed clearly autobiographical. The central character, Ashenden, was, like Maugham, a novelist and dramatist based in Switzerland. Subsequent commentators, moreover, have endeavoured to link characters in the book with actual people. Ashenden’s superior, R (the single-letter title itself echoing Secret Service practice), for example, has been identified as John Wallinger, who took Maugham on for his War Office intelligence network in 1915.