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By Root 2862 0

and take away all the facilities for doing it. Am firmly convinced that K will oust me altogether before long.’ Bethell came to the rescue. After Cumming had poured his heart out over dinner, Bethell assured him ‘that I need not do anything to justify my appointment. I must wait patiently for work to come. That I need not sit idle in the Office, but could go about and learn. That I should not be watched, and that he had every confidence.’ Bethell told Cumming he could say he was employed in the Naval Intelligence Department, but ‘must use great discretion in doing this’, and that he could rent a flat (‘at my own expense of course’) and work there. If the experiment was successful, the Foreign Office might take on the cost. Bethell finally told Cumming that the War Office was ‘to have nothing to say to my work, which is to be managed entirely by me, under him (the D.N.I.)’.

Although Bethell’s assertion was not strictly true, since from the start the Bureau had been conceived as an interdepartmental service (and the War Office was to remain an important ‘customer’), his confidence in Cumming and the reassurance of Admiralty backing was very welcome, and had practical effect three weeks later when arrangements were being made for Cumming to take over ‘B’, an existing War Office agent based on the Continent. The plan was for Cumming to use him to run agents at Hamburg and Wilhelmshaven and ‘one Travelling man’, but when Kell insisted that he would come to the first meeting between Cumming and B in order to pay B’s salary, Cumming put his foot down. With Bethell’s backing he got Ewart and Macdonogh to prevent this and they instructed Kell to hand over the money to Cumming to pay B himself. The meeting with B on 26 November 1909 was Cumming’s first encounter with a real spy. He was introduced by Edmonds, who had previously been running him but told B that henceforth Cumming would ‘deal entirely with him’. Bethell’s staff officer, Reginald Temple, attended the meeting to help with German translation as B (an Austrian) did not speak English. Cumming, who had been taking German lessons at the Berlitz Language School, could ‘follow what was said; but not enough to understand all his [B’s] ideas and opinions’.

The meeting went well. B ‘seemed to think that he should have no difficulty in getting us the information we wanted, as he said all the TRs [Cumming’s diary term for Germans - short for ‘Tariff Reformers’]10 were open to bribes and could not resist the sight of a gold piece’. It was settled that there should be ‘one man in Hanover - to attend primarily to Military matters, one in Wilhelmshaven and one who should travel about, making his headquarters in Stendal or Wittenburg, and visiting all the big [ship] Yards at least once in every three months’. When Cumming raised the question of ‘the 4 Dreadnoughts [battleships], supposed to be about to commence building at Pola and elsewhere in Austria’, B ‘jibbed at this immediately and said he was an Austrian and could do nothing that could hurt his native country’. Cumming thought him ‘an intelligent and bold man’ and that he would ‘probably prove my best aide, but’, he added, ‘the difficulty about his patriotic feeling for Austria will have to be considered’. Bethell was pleased when Cumming reported these arrangements to him. He believed the War Office ‘had evidently recognised that they had made a tactical mistake in dividing the work in the way they had done, and that I [Cumming] had really secured the more important part. He thought all would come right when we had settled down.’

Although Cumming did not finally hand in his keys to the Victoria Street office until March 1910, by the end of November 1909 he had moved into a flat in Ashley Mansions, 254 Vauxhall Bridge Road, and established an independent base there for his section of the Bureau. Early in the New Year he arranged a bogus ‘cover address’ with the Post Office - ‘Messrs Rasen, Falcon Ltd, Box 400, General Post Office, London’ - an alleged firm of ‘Shippers and Exporters’, thus establishing a precedent for the classic