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By Root 2616 0

with FRS’s report in mind, Cumming declared that his ‘most valuable information’ had been ‘procured by a man who was sent abroad to ascertain certain definite facts’. This contrasted with his three ‘passive agents’ on whom he depended for ‘early information of war’ and whose performance was ‘difficult to appraise as to their value, as they send in no reports’. Indeed, one of these agents, ‘U’, seemed particularly feeble. Although he lived for part of the year in Kiel and socialised constantly with German naval officers, he told Cumming that ‘he never asked any of them any questions, for fear of arousing suspicion - in fact, when the conversation turned upon Armaments &c, he always asked them to change it’. He assured Cumming, however, that should he ‘smell war in the air’, he would ‘at once hurry across the Dutch frontier and send us a telegram’, and even ‘if necessary follow it himself ’.

For Cumming, a more valuable source, and ‘one which it is hoped will be greatly extended’, was that of ‘voluntary help’ provided by British people ‘whose business or profession gives them special facilities for finding out what is going on abroad’. One such individual (called ‘Mr Queer’ in the diary) was a director of a British armaments company and reported that the German firm Krupp were buying up stocks ofnickel-tungsten steel for the manufacture of small guns. On returning in January 1910 from a business trip to an unnamed foreign government, he gave Cumming the specification of a heavy gun (‘to throw a projectile weighing over 500 kilos’) which the government in question had themselves got from Krupp. Among other things this revealed that ‘for their larger guns’ Krupp were using ‘Nickel-Chrome steel, entirely Oil-hardened and tempered’. Queer, who was evidently very well plugged into the European armaments industry, also reported that the Skoda Works in Bohemia had received orders from the Austrian government to manufacture big guns ‘for two ships of the “Dreadnought” class’. Cumming concluded his first report by stressing how little he and Kell had in common, and on security grounds urged that the home and foreign sides of the work should be completely autonomous. He further thought it a ‘pity that the S.S. Agent [that is, himself ] should be obliged to tell even his Chiefs what he is doing - certainly he should not tell more than one person’. Indeed, he concluded that ‘it would be far better if he could keep his work, his methods and all knowledge of his assistants entirely to himself ’.

One thing which Cumming omitted in his report was any mention of his own intelligence-gathering role. Over five days in February 1910, accompanied by Captain Cyrus H. ‘Roy’ Regnart, a Royal Marine who was Bethell’s assistant in the Naval Intelligence Department, he went twice to Antwerp to meet an agent who failed to appear. He had a more adventurous time in April when (again with Regnart) he went first to Paris to meet his agent B, then on to Liège where they were to meet ‘JR’, who had promised to provide intelligence on German airship construction and show them a new type of portable weapon he was to smuggle out of Germany. A firearms expert was brought from London, and Cumming organised a professional photographer to join them en route in Brussels. Unfortunately these elaborate - perhaps over-elaborate - plans broke down. Although JR arrived from Berlin, Cumming and the photographer got separated from Regnart and the expert, neither of whom made the rendezvous. JR (who perhaps had more experience than Cumming in these matters) altered the arrangements at the last minute, not bringing the weapon to Liège but keeping it at a previously undisclosed location about an hour’s drive away. Cumming and the photographer got there in mid-afternoon, and in failing light quickly had to set to work. JR produced the device only after Cumming had paid him ‘the 25 [pounds] agreed on, and also a further 10 for the answers to the questions sent by the airship people’. As JR claimed he was in a hurry to get away and take the weapon back to Germany, Cumming ‘had