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especially either towards the north coast or towards Holland & Belgium’. Copenhagen was suggested not only because it was especially well located ‘for receiving information from the German Baltic & North Sea ports’, but also (as Macdonogh argued, though without providing any specific evidence) because ‘Danes in many ways make the best S.S. agents for employment’. Nicolson recognised that the decision to appoint a British intelligence officer permanently in a foreign country (who, in later SIS parlance, would have been the first overseas ‘head of station’) was not one to be taken lightly. This was as much a new departure as establishing a permanent Secret Service Bureau in the first place, and as General Wilson, who had become Director of Military Operations in August (and was to be very supportive of Cumming), noted, the intention was that ‘this appointment should be merely the start of a wider system’, with further ‘Branch agents’ appointed elsewhere if ‘this one proved a success’. Nevertheless, since from the start one of the chief purposes of the Bureau had been to distance the British government from the problematic business of secret intelligence-gathering, the Foreign Office clearly wanted to be reassured that no hint of official involvement might accompany this new development. Nicolson insisted that the matter be submitted to the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, himself. Grey approved the proposal ‘in principle’, but wanted ‘a great deal more detailed information’ about both the circumstances and the individual suggested for the post.

Cumming’s candidate was Regnart, ‘an excellent linguist, speaking Danish, German & other languages & . . . very keen on S.S. work’. Interviewed about the appointment by Nicolson’s private secretary, Lord Errington, Cumming told him that Regnart had private means (which because of the poor rates of pay offered to full-time members of the Bureau was widely thought to be essential), ‘did not care for Society’ and ‘was prepared to sink his identity altogether - even to the extent of taking a shop under a trade name and working it as a bona fide business, to cover his real objects’. Errington ‘said that the FO did not wish to place themselves under any obligation to the officer, so that he could come to them in a year or twos time and say that he had lost say £5000, and want it good’. He was also most anxious about maintaining the secrecy of the matter and ensuring that there should not be the remotest possibility of the government being associated with the proposed intelligence work. How was the officer to ‘sink his identity’, he asked? ‘Did the attaches know him? If his letters went astray or were intercepted would he not be traced as having been at his present office?’ After Cumming had ‘reassured him on all these points’, Errington ‘appeared satisfied on the whole’, though he continued to quiz Cumming about the chances of disclosure. Cumming’s carefully prepared scheme was upset in November 1910 by the trial for espionage in Germany of two British officers, Lieutenant Vivian Brandon and Captain Bernard Trench, who had been caught red-handed in August with maps, notes and photographs of defence and naval installations on the German North Sea coast and along the Kiel Canal. The two men had been working primarily for Regnart (though Cumming had agreed to provide £10 for any ‘extra expenses’), and there were fears that his involvement might become known to the Germans.

In the end the appointment was not made and Regnart remained in the Admiralty. In May 1911 the next six-monthly Secret Service Bureau meeting agreed to reallocate ‘the £700 for a man at Copenhagen, who had been approved but never appointed’, in order to pay for work in Brussels. Reflecting continuing uncertainty about which department was actually in charge, together with a slight misapprehension about how Cumming’s organisation would work, Sir Arthur Nicolson referred to this as ‘an Admiralty agency in Brussels’. Nicolson had some sense of the interdepartmental nature of the Bureau and also ‘understood’ that ‘both the