The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [33]
On 17 November Nicolson signed a statement confirming that the ‘Chief of the Secret Service’ would have ‘sole control’ of ‘all espionage and counter-espionage agents abroad’. When ‘special information’ was required by the Admiralty or the War Office ‘he alone’ was to be ‘responsible for the manner by which it is to be obtained’. Cumming was also to have exclusive responsibility for his own staff and the funds placed at his disposal. He was to ‘keep in constant touch with the War Office and Admiralty’ who were ‘to inform him of their requirements as occasion demands and furnish him with criticisms of his reports in a manner to help towards their improvement where necessary’. Finally, Cumming was to provide Nicolson (as Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs) with ‘a monthly statement of all his disbursements’ and was to be subject to Nicolson’s ‘sole control . . . in all matters connected with the expenditure of Secret Service funds’.
Fending off the War Office
Nicolson’s statement was an extremely important document, which Cumming rightly regarded as a ‘charter’ for his Service. Indeed, the exchanges of late 1915 mark a significant moment in confirming the institutional autonomy of the Service and consolidating the interdepartmental role, under Foreign Office supervision, which was to remain a central characteristic of the organisation as it developed during its first forty years. Securing exclusive control of staff and agents, moreover, meant that Cumming was well placed to maintain that deep secrecy of Service activities upon which he put such great store. Although the Director of Military Operations himself approved the charter, in the battle zone itself GHQ in France continued to assert priority for their own intelligence organisation. At a conference on 29 November about arrangements in France, Walter Kirke ‘adopted a very high tone in saying that G.H.Q. was paramount & F.O. had nothing to say in the matter’.
The following month, to cope with the further wartime increase in business, the General Staff in London was again reorganised and a separate Directorate of Military Intelligence established in the War Office. On 23 December Callwell became Director of Military Intelligence (DMI), but he was merely filling in until 3 January 1916 when George Macdonogh, brought back from France, took over the position, which he held until September 1918. In the new structure Colonel French’s MO6 branch was retitled MI1 and became the secretarial section of the Directorate, with responsibility, among other things, for the distribution of military intelligence as well as for secret service. In April 1916 MI1 was divided into four sub-sections, with the Secret Service Bureau going to MI1(c), an arrangement which lasted for the rest of the war.7 Although the title made it look as though Cumming’s Bureau was a sub-section of Military Intelligence, at the time the name was given ‘it was expressly declared that it had no significance of that nature, but was merely a convenient “nom de guerre”’. From this point on, however, MI1(c) was increasingly used as the cover-name for Cumming’s Bureau. At this time, too, Kell’s organisation (which had been part of MO5 since 1910) became MI5.
During December 1915 someone in the army, possibly