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By Root 2484 0

experience of Mansfield Cumming’s infant organisation during the First World War reflected these wider developments. From August 1914 the military authorities’ chief intelligence requirement - from whatever source - was operationally useful information for the Expeditionary Force in the field. Increasingly, both General Headquarters (GHQ) in France and the War Office in London asserted exclusive rights - and control - over the Secret Service. But Cumming argued that he had wider responsibilities beyond the purely military demands of the armies in France and Flanders. As a sailor himself, he was sharply aware of the Admiralty’s intelligence needs, which he actively sought to meet. With Foreign Office support, moreover, he managed to retain his institutional autonomy, seeing off successive military attempts to annex his Service and, by the end of the war, he had conclusively established the independent basis and interdepartmental character of an organisation that was to emerge in the early 1920s as the Secret Intelligence Service.

Serving three masters

Cumming’s relationship with each of the three departments he served - the Foreign Office, the Admiralty and the War Office - inevitably changed in August 1914 with the service ministries’ growing demands for immediate operational intelligence. This was especially true of the War Office. The staffing of British Military Intelligence was immediately affected by the outbreak of war. General Henry Wilson, the Director of Military Operations, who had been very supportive of Cumming, went off to be sub-chief of staff in the expeditionary force and was replaced at the War Office by another Irishman, General Charles Callwell, a fifty-five-year-old ‘Dug Out’, a retired officer brought back (like so many others) to fill a wartime job. He had been Assistant Director of Military Operations in the early 1900s, but had no direct experience of either Cumming’s or Kell’s relatively new organisations. George Macdonogh, who as head of ‘M.O.5’ in the War Office had ‘been responsible for all Secret Service work’, went to France to take charge of intelligence at GHQ, and was succeeded first by Colonel Douglas MacEwan, who stayed two months before also heading for the front, and in October 1914 by Colonel George Cockerill. For the next eighteen months or so, Callwell and Cockerill were Cumming’s principal military masters.1 There were fewer changes on the naval side. Henry Oliver, in charge of Naval Intelligence since November 1913, moved on to be Chief of the Admiralty War Staff at the beginning of November 1914. He was succeeded by William Reginald Hall. Widely known as ‘Blinker’ (because of his nervous twitch), Hall remained Director of the Intelligence Division in the Admiralty for the rest of the war.

From the beginning there were problems of status and hierarchy. No one was very clear who precisely was in charge of the Secret Service, though this ambiguity evidently gave Cumming some useful room for manoeuvre. From the evidence of his diary, between 4 August and 30 September 1914 Cumming visited the War Office and the Admiralty nearly every day, both to brief them about his work and to get approval for spending money. On Sunday 9 August, for example, he ‘called on Col. McE[wan] with last night’s telegrams’. The following Thursday he saw both MacEwan and ‘Roland’ [Admiral Oliver], bringing reports to the former and getting his approval to take on two more officers. On 25 August Cumming noted in his diary: ‘Called on McE & on Roland, with cipher messages’. Over the first three weeks of the war Cumming also visited the Foreign Office five times (generally seeing Ronald Campbell, the Permanent Under-Secretary’s private secretary), but on 26 August Colonel Macdonogh told him that he was ‘not to call at F.O. any more’. During September Cumming had three further meetings with Campbell but on each occasion he was accompanying an officer from the War Office or the Admiralty. Further reflecting War Office concerns about Cumming’s evident refusal to operate within what they regarded as the proper