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for smallarms’. On 6 March Cumming noted that ‘a large packet of valuable stuff came in from our friends’, which he brought to Wilson, ‘who thought it extremely valuable and is to show it to Sir J[ohn] F[rench, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff] at once’. Wilson ‘talked to me about the state of affairs and said that it was an extremely good move to get hold of these people, and hoped that we were doing something for them’. Liaison with the French remained close. There is a hint in Cumming’s diary that by January 1914 he had an officer actually posted to the French headquarters. In July, on Macdonogh’s recommendation, Cumming took on Captain Edward Louis Spiers (‘a very good man & interpreter Fr., Ger. & Ital.’) and toyed with the idea of sending him to Paris.19 In February, with Henry Wilson’s help, he got French agreement for the aeroplane scheme. He purchased a machine and was making arrangements for its base in France in July, but the declaration of war at the beginning of August seems to have come before any practical use had been made of it.

During discussions with French opposite numbers in 1912 Cumming had discovered that the two services had some agents in common. One, ‘HCJ’, went to Russia and with Cumming’s permission submitted the same reports to both organisations. In April 1913 Cumming learned that HCJ was also working for the Russians. Over lunch at the Savoy Café in London, he told Cumming that he had been engaged by them to help overhaul their ‘heavy and clumsy’ intelligence organisation. On the same occasion he declared that ‘war was very probable between Russia and Austria as the Russians were prepared in a way we did not expect and would require only the slightest pretext to attack the Austrians’, a prediction which came to pass the following year. In the spring of 1914 Cumming raised the possibility with Admiral Henry Oliver (who, replacing Jackson, had been Director of the Intelligence Division at the Admiralty since November 1913) of working with the Russian secret service to co-operate in running a Danish network to report on Germany. Even if the Russians would not collaborate officially, Cumming thought of placing an agent in St Petersburg ‘to receive & forward telegrams’.

Cumming remained keen to develop official relations with the Russians. In June 1914 a French intelligence officer told him that ‘the new Chief of the Russ. SS’ was coming to Paris ‘& as soon as he knows of his arrival he will let me know & will introduce me to him’, adding (with that avoidance of official channels which characterises much intelligence work), ‘we need not trouble our Attaché in the matter’. The Russian, in fact, came to London, and Cumming met him (apparently along with the Russian military attaché in Paris, Count Ignatieff). No detailed record survives of what was discussed. A scribbled note in Cumming’s hand preserved in his diary says ‘Mobilisation Plan in 8 days. We to photograph’, though whose plan it was and where it came from is not revealed. But the French were involved too. A few days later Cumming noted a conversation with Admiral Oliver, ‘discussing SS matters & the new scheme with Fr. & Russians’. On 2 July Cumming interviewed a potential agent, a ‘good Russian - interpreter - speaks French, German, some Spanish & Hindustani’. He was the ‘agent for [a] patent motor car wheel’ and ‘could live in St. P[etersburg] on 400 [pounds]’. Cumming told him he ‘could promise nothing, but if Russ scheme went through, he might do as Agent there’. Russia was by no means the limit of Cumming’s ambition. During the spring of 1914 Oliver proposed basing an agent in China, at Kiaochow (Jiaozhou) near Tsingtao (Qingdao), where there was a German naval base, and the six-monthly meeting of the Secret Service Bureau committee in May 1914 allotted £200 for the purpose.

Over the first half of 1914 Cumming seems to have spent most of his time working on the deployment of agents along Germany’s western frontier, intended both to give early warning of a German attack and to provide the basis for intelligence reporting after