The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [21]
Six months on, the committee thought Cumming and Kell were still doing well: ‘Sir A. Nicolson, Admiral Bethell and General Wilson concurring, expressed satisfaction at the excellent work being done by both branches.’ Yet the evidence of the intelligence agency’s performance during the Agadir Crisis over the summer of 1911 is rather mixed. The crisis was set off by the arrival of the German gunboat Panther at the Moroccan port of Agadir which the French regarded as being within their own exclusive sphere of influence, and a sharp deterioration in Franco-German relations for a while seemed to threaten a war between the two countries into which Britain might be drawn. The Secret Service Bureau had been formed to provide intelligence during precisely this kind of situation. Towards the end of July, The Times reported that the German High Sea Fleet had begun its ‘annual summer cruise’ and that one of the German squadrons had passed through the Kiel Canal to the North Sea, demonstrating that the canal was ‘ready for war’. In London there were worries about the location of the German warships, and even that the British fleet might be attacked. During the evening of 26 July Macdonogh sought out Henry Wilson and told him ‘that our Admiralty have lost the German Fleet & have asked us to find them. Macdonogh sent [Bertrand] Stewart off to Brussels to see L. [probably Long] & send him round the German Ports.’ The whole thing’, wrote Wilson in his diary, ‘is a Pantomime.’13
The ‘pantomime’ turned into a disaster when a week later Stewart was arrested in Bremen and charged with espionage. By one account he was arrested ‘in bed at 1 a.m.’; by another he was in a public lavatory, attempting to destroy a code-book planted on him by a German double-agent. ‘The Hun police broke open the door of the privy, [and] he was arrested with the corpus delicti on him.’ Stewart, a thirty-nine-year-old London solicitor and officer in the part-time West Kent Yeomanry, was an enthusiastic amateur, who (perhaps disingenuously) claimed during his subsequent prosecution that he ‘only knew enough German to obtain his meals and to make himself understood in hotels and on railways’. On Macdonogh’s orders, in fact, Stewart was working directly under Cumming, who had sent him in the first instance to Nijmegen in the Netherlands to contact an agent called Verrue who was working in Germany. Inadvisedly accompanying Verrue across the frontier, Stewart had visited Hamburg, Cuxhaven and Bremerhaven before being arrested. When he returned to England after more than two years in a German prison, Stewart claimed £12,500 compensation, blaming Cumming, Macdonogh and Wilson for his predicament.14 Cumming hazarded that Stewart had been shopped to the Germans by his ‘passive’ agent ‘U’ (evidently Verrue), whom Bethell, with the wisdom of hindsight, argued might have ‘been a decoy all through’. It is ‘annoying’, he told Cumming, ‘but we must expect drawbacks such as these in this kind of business’.
During September 1911 Cumming’s ‘early-warning system’ also brought reports of threatening developments in Germany. On 4 September Wilson noted a report from an agent in Belgium that two German divisions were concentrating in Malmédy, just across the frontier, which, combined with other indications, seemed so ‘ominous’ that he briefed Winston Churchill (Home Secretary since February 1910) and Sir Edward Grey personally about the matter. Later in the month Wilson recorded several similar warnings, including on 18 September alone ‘no less than four reports of our S.S. from the