The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [35]
Although French maintained that he was writing in a personal capacity and simply ‘with a view to providing food for discussion’, Cumming reacted very badly, resenting the impertinence of a junior officer writing to him in such terms and evidently perceiving in the letter another direct threat to the existence of his organisation. He sent Sir Arthur Nicolson a copy of the letter, with a sharp covering note, trusting ‘that the authorities who have the power to control the Secret Service will take such steps as will prevent me while in charge of it, from being constantly interfered with and disturbed by such letters as the attached’. Cumming bluntly claimed that the adoption of the proposals which French had ‘sprung upon me’ would ‘mean the wreck of the whole system’. If the Secret Service were controlled by the suggested ‘hybrid’ section it would ‘still have the same three masters to obey’. From Cumming’s point of view, the ‘greatest defect of the present Service’ was ‘the lack of support given to its Chief by the military authorities’, who, ever since his appointment, had ‘permitted constant interference with my work, have undermined my authority and have treated me as an outsider . . . My instructions from the Foreign Office under whose authority I was appointed, have been ignored, and I have been placed in a false and difficult position in consequence.’ Cumming begged, ‘for the sake of the efficient working of this important Service which costs a vast sum of money’, that his ‘present position in relation to the War Office may be put on a more reasonable basis’. Perhaps aware that he himself might be thought to have overstepped the mark with such an openly bitter letter, Cumming concluded by assuring Nicolson that ‘my relations with General Macdonogh and Colonel French have always been of a most friendly nature, and I have much to thank them for. In the security of their recognised positions and support which they receive as a matter of course, they do not realise the great difficulties with which I have to contend.’
In this last sentence Cumming identified a crucial problem about the institutional status of the Secret Service which affected it during its early years (and to a certain extent remained a difficulty for some years to come). It was both a strength and a weakness that the Service did not legally exist, or easily fit into the established hierarchies of the armed services or the government as a whole. Its corporate invisibility, or deniability, was part of the reason it had been established in the first place, so that secret intelligence work could be kept quite separate (or apparently so) from the Foreign Office and the service ministries. Yet in wartime, when the supply of military and naval intelligence became an especially high priority, there were strong arguments for fully (or substantially) incorporating the Secret Service into the inevitably greatly expanded Naval and/or Military Intelligence organisations. For Cumming, more perhaps than his successors as Chief, a further factor was the unproven nature of his Bureau, for which the First World War was undoubtedly a baptism of fire. Of course, one sure way of ensuring that the strongest possible case was made for the survival of an autonomous Secret Service was not just to assemble theoretical arguments about ideal institutional arrangements, but to demonstrate the Service’s actual capabilities by successfully providing the type and volume of intelligence its customers required. In the grand British tradition of muddling through, a pragmatic test of viability was always likely to carry great weight. Cumming was no doubt well aware of this, but his appeals to the Foreign Office demonstrate that