The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [36]
The anomalous situation of Cumming’s Bureau underlay an effort by Macdonogh in early 1917 once again to assert War Office control, though the Director of Military Intelligence also stressed the importance of the contribution which the Bureau made to the war effort as a whole. Writing to Cumming on 18 February 1917, Macdonogh wanted to ‘make it clear’ that he had ‘never admitted at any time that you were under the Foreign Office. I consider & always have considered that for all military intelligence you are directly under me, &, as I told you a year ago, I have no intention of allowing your theory of F.O. control to come between myself & you.’ Macdonogh was responding to a letter from Cumming (which has not survived) claiming some degree of autonomy for his organisation, and which Macdonogh thought raised two questions: ‘(1) whether I am director of military intelligence, & (2) whether you are under my orders. The answer to the first question is, I think, obvious, & that being so the answer to the second is equally plain.’ Implicitly (and unjustly) taxing Cumming with ‘empire-building’, Macdonogh wrote that ‘the value of any organization does not depend upon its size, the number of subjects it deals with, nor on the extent of its pay list, but on the manner in which it assists the working of the whole machine’. It therefore followed that it was ‘much better to be the head of a section which everyone praises both for the quality of its work & for the absence of friction with which it is performed, rather than that of a much larger one which is a perpetual cause of strife to all connected with it’. So that there should be ‘no further doubt about the matter’, Macdonogh wanted Cumming ‘definitely’ to inform him ‘that you accept the status of being under my orders in all military intelligence matters, unqualified by any control, nominal or otherwise, of any other authority’. If Cumming could not do this, Macdonogh said that he would have to ‘inform the F.O. that I have no further use for your branch & that I propose that the W.O. shall in future conduct its own S.S., War Trade, counter-espionage & identification business abroad without you as its intermediary’. A further result of this would be the withdrawal of ‘all military officers now employed by you’, which was a real threat since a sizeable proportion of Cumming’s staff were seconded from either the army or the navy.
No specific response to Macdonogh’s ultimatum appears to have survived, though evidently matters did not come to a head. Sporadic evidence from his diary indicates that, while Cumming stayed within the ambit of the Directorate of Military Intelligence, demarcation disputes continued concerning what exactly he was to do and with whom he was permitted to deal. In early June 1917, for example, Cumming noted that Colonel Buchan - John Buchan, the novelist, who headed one of the government’s propaganda arms - ‘made an appointment to see me tomorrow but the D.M.I. positively forbade me to see him’. Cumming (or Buchan) appealed to the Foreign Office, for a few days later Cumming received ‘definite instructions’ from Lord Hardinge (who had succeeded Nicolson as Permanent Under-Secretary) ‘to supply J.B. with any information he requires without passing it thro’ W.O.’. On 26 June Buchan came to Cumming’s office where he had ‘a long yarn with me re cooperation which we settled on the lines laid down’. Whatever the joint action was, it was surely not military intelligence, and probably closer to Colonel French’s category of ‘pseudo-diplomatic action’, but what the affair demonstrated was that, with Foreign Office support, Cumming could still sidestep direct instructions issued to him by the Director of Military Intelligence.
During the autumn of 1917, in fact, Cumming’s relations with the War Office improved, while those with the Admiralty worsened. At what was evidently an irritable meeting with the recently promoted Rear Admiral Hall