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war had started. There were two main networks based in Belgium. The first was run by Roy Regnart in Brussels and concentrated on the eastern frontier with Germany, the ‘Maastricht appendix’ (that part of the Netherlands which protruded south into Belgium and through which the strategists thought a German attack might come), and up into the Netherlands to Venlo and Nijmegen. From here he aimed to watch German ‘military centres’ such as Cologne, Münster and Oldenburg. The second network was run by ‘AC’ with a base at Lille in France and primary responsibility for southern Belgium approximately from Liège eastwards to the Channel coast. Reporting to AC was a local agent, ‘DB’, based at Dinant, south of Namur, who had his own network of sub-agents. Most of the reporting from these networks was practical. In January AC was asked to investigate Dutch railways in the Maastricht appendix and ‘to look out for possible Bridge sites (connected with roads) on the banks of the Meuse’ just north of Liège. In February DB submitted a report on the railway line between Roermond and Maaseik at the northern end of the appendix. Roy Regnart, troublesome as ever, complained to Cumming that he could ‘do nothing without more £ [money]’ and said it was ‘useless to try & get agents at the Ports & elsewhere’ unless he could ‘retain them at once and pay them’. He thought ‘he ought to have at least £500 a year & a free hand’.

Cumming’s networks in Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as shipping-reporting agents based in Denmark, failed completely to provide any advance warning for the assault on France which the Germans launched through Belgium in August 1914. While the broad location of the advance was pretty well predicted (though the Germans avoided the Maastricht appendix), the timing was a complete surprise. The real prewar successes for Cumming’s organisation were in technical reporting, especially on German naval construction. One of Cumming’s best agents (and the highest paid), Hector Bywater, whom he named ‘H2O’, produced a regular series of reports in 1913 and 1914. Details are sparse, but in April 1913 Captain Jackson in the Admiralty ‘remarked that H2O sent a lot of good stuff’. During 1914 one report on German naval guns was thought so significant that H2O was quizzed in person in London on its contents by Admiral Reginald Tupper, who had commanded the naval gunnery school at Plymouth. H2O also reported on aeronautical matters, another Admiralty priority. In January 1914 another agent supplied ‘a big report’ on dirigibles (airships). Macdonogh told Cumming that the Director of the Air Department in the Admiralty, Captain Murray Sueter, thought highly of the agent’s plans ‘& said we ought to pay him all we could afford’. Traces of the technical reporting from Cumming’s agents have survived in Naval Intelligence Division logbooks written up by the head of the German section, Fleet Paymaster Charles Rotter, collating information on German submarine and battleship construction. That Cumming was able to supply the navy with valued intelligence is reflected by an entry in the diary in March 1914: ‘Rotter asked me to get him information about secret building of Submarines. He says they speak of U.21 but may possibly be U.31. He says they have about 50 built & projected.’ Despite the success of Cumming’s agents in collecting technical intelligence, the impact of this work was less than might have been hoped. Nicholas Hiley has remarked on the resistance which much of this reporting encountered in the Admiralty where the preconceived ideas of some experts led them to question intelligence which stressed the great importance of German developments in torpedoes, submarines, mines and aircraft. 20

The growth of the Secret Service Bureau over its first five years is reflected in an Account Book for both branches of the Bureau covering April 1912 until September 1914. Its budget, estimated at £2,000 in 1909, had grown to nearly £11,000 by 1912. Although it was originally envisaged that the money would be divided equally between Kell’s Home and Cumming