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By Root 2540 0

Kirke - who may not have been aware of the charter Cumming had secured from Nicolson (though the evidence of Kirke’s diary confirms that he was certainly aware of the Foreign Office’s protective attitude towards Cumming’s organisation) - took the opportunity of these changes to float a plan for the ‘Reorganisation of S.S. in the War Office’. Although in the wake of Nicolson’s minute there was no possibility of these proposals being implemented, they are worth quoting as they embody what might be characterised as the ‘extreme’ army conception of the proper position and role of Cumming’s Service, and provide strong evidence of the kinds of military attitudes Cumming and his colleagues came up against. The plan proposed that the new Director of Military Intelligence should take over the Secret Service entirely: ‘The F.O. should be eliminated, and in any case “C” must have no direct access to it.’ The Naval Intelligence authorities similarly would have to work through the War Office; an arrangement should be made with the Director of the Intelligence Division, whereby he ‘entrusts his interests to the D.M.I., it being understood that the latter is the head of the S.S., and that C is his servant’. C’s functions were described as ‘purely executive’, and ‘consist in obtaining information from S.S. organisations under his control’. He was not responsible for ‘distributing any information’, which was to be the task of the MI1 section in the War Office. C, in any case, would be ‘very fully employed in developing new organisations and keeping existing ones up to the mark by constant correspondence’. C’s ‘sole channel of communication’ with the Director of Military Intelligence was to be through one of the DMI’s staff officers, and the MI1 section was to be the only ‘channel of communication between the S.S. Bureau and all other Government Offices, British or Foreign, other than foreign S.S. Bureaus’.8 Thus was Cumming to be relegated to the position of a glorified secretary and extremely subordinate bureaucrat.

Cumming continued to assert a degree of autonomy, but it was in the face of continual challenge from army officers, especially Macdonogh and Colonel French, who both saw the relationship between the War Office and Cumming’s Bureau purely in terms of military intelligence. In late September 1916 French had written a long letter to Cumming reflecting on the question of secret service and how best it might be organised ‘in the event of any future war’. ‘Any re-organisation or change’, he urged, ‘should be thought out now, while we are all filled with the actual and practical experience of what war may demand of S.S., and not postponed until the end of the war.’ French argued that there should be a single Secret Service responsible for both naval and military intelligence, ‘otherwise we shall always be working at cross purposes, and in almost every area we should have at least two services working, if not against one another, at least in rivalry with one another’. He thought the separation of espionage and counter-espionage was a weakness, and that the position of Cumming and Kell as ‘the servants of at least 3 Government Departments and which is indefinite as regards limitations’ was ‘bad organisation’. French, therefore, proposed that the Secret Service should be controlled by a small joint section of army and navy officers, ‘either under the D.M.I. or the D.I.D. [Director of the Intelligence Division]’, which would ‘settle all matters of policy, and . . . carry out all negotiations with the Foreign Office’. He went on to consider ‘the limitation of secret service espionage’. This, he thought, should deal only with naval or military information. ‘Where we have dabbled in pseudo-diplomatic action [which he did not define] our information has suffered’, and for military missions to deal with ‘questions of war trade and various other points unconnected with secret service’ had been ‘a grevious [sic] mistake’. French further maintained that ‘when naval or military operations are being carried out in any area, the secret service in