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’ He had ‘a shifty look about him’ and his nationality was ‘very difficult to fix’. He claimed to speak many languages, but always travelled ‘on the Continent as a Spaniard speaking Spanish and Portuguese’. HLB told Cumming that he had enjoyed a cosmopolitan career as a soldier in Africa, Chief of the Secret Police in Bolivia, a French secret service agent and an arms dealer. He added that ‘the smartest Agents in the German service’ were in Britain, and one of them, called von Gessler, ‘may be known anywhere by his having 4 rows of teeth’. He said he (HLB) had a Peruvian ring which contained ‘an Indian poison’ that would ‘knock a man down in three seconds’. It was ‘a bit “risky” to use, as a microscopic overdose would make a strong man a hopeless idiot for life and beyond any chance of cure’. Cumming thought the man was ‘no doubt a blackguard, but is probably a clever one, and I should like to get something out of him. All my staff are blackguards,’ he continued, ‘but they are incapable ones, and a man with a little ingenuity and brains would be a change, even if not an agreeable one.’

Another thing which struck Cumming was the consistently high expectations of potential agents. In August 1910, one man whom he wanted to send on a tour of Germany told him that ‘he must have an allowance for Champagne’. In December 1910 the part-Russian, Dutch and English divorced wife of a German officer (whose conduct ‘had certainly been reprehensible’) offered to get information from a male admirer on the German Naval Staff. She said ‘she was not going to do this work for money, but to revenge the slight upon her honour and for the sake of her children’. She agreed, however, to accept £20 a month for ‘expenses’ and ‘was rather insistent upon a “guarantie” [sic] which’, noted Cumming with the benefit of not much more than a year in the job and an air of tired cynicism, ‘all spies ask for. They explain that it is a guarantee of good faith which is due to them in exchange for the compromising gift of their names and addresses, but my experience teaches me that it means an advance of payment followed by an unbroken silence.’ Later the same day Bethell told Cumming about a man who had ‘access to Krupps Yard’ and might be worth cultivating. Cumming thought that the only way of getting hold of him was ‘to ask him to eat and drink, and that all these people without exception make a strong point of doing this in the best style at the most expensive restaurants’. Two Danes who turned up in London, also at the end of 1910, offered Cumming an abundant selection of material, including enlarged maps of German naval bases, sketches of a torpedo mechanism and several signal codes as ‘used by Searchlights, Wireless from Submarines &c’. They asked for £5,000 (equivalent to £350,000 in modern prices) which in Cumming’s opinion ‘was not to be thought of ’. Even ‘if we had accepted their plans as genuine, we should have offered £200 for the lot’. In the end he paid them nothing other than £10 between them for their travelling expenses, although in conversation (and reflecting his longstanding interest in harbour defences) he had obtained ‘a good deal of information’ about underground tunnels in the various harbours and the existence of ‘land mines laid from a central firing station to different salient points’.

Over the first few years of the Bureau, we can see Cumming working on tradecraft. He appears to have enjoyed using disguise when meeting agents. For a rendezvous in Paris in July 1910 he ‘was slightly disguised (toupee & moustache) and had on a rather peculiar costume’. In preparation for meeting (in January 1911) a man he called ‘Ironmould’, an engineer who was offering to go to Trieste to report on Austrian naval shipbuilding, Cumming was made up at William Berry Clarkson’s famous theatrical costume shop in Wardour Street in Soho.18 The disguise was ‘perfect . . . its existence not being noticeable even in a good light’. Cumming ‘then went to a photographer and had a photograph taken of the disguise as it is necessary to give the dresser something