The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [39]
By 1917 the geographical organisation of the Head Office was coming under increasing criticism from the army and the navy. As a 1919 review of wartime naval secret service noted, although the officer in charge of a particular section was, ‘as far as possible, conversant with the language and affairs of the country to be dealt with’, this officer ‘had not, as a rule, any technical knowledge whatever of Naval, Military, or Aeronautical affairs (though fairly able to deal with Political and Economical questions) ’. In many cases, moreover, he ‘was not even an officer of the Fighting services before the War’. Nevertheless, ‘according to the best of his understanding’, he ‘separated out the Intelligence coming in, en masse, from abroad, and passed it on to the Admiralty, War Office, etc, through its liaison officer’. He was, however, ‘quite unable to provide the requisite direction of enquiry on technical matters, professional advice, criticism, or commendation to the Agents abroad, all of which are supremely necessary to success in the provision of Naval or any other special Intelligence’. In fact, it was ‘little more than chance that produced anything really useful’ to the Naval Intelligence Division.13
During the late summer of 1917 Freddie Browning started to work on a scheme to reorganise the Service, which he and Cumming discussed on 23 August with a new member of staff, Major Claude Marjoribanks Dansey. The forty-one-year-old Dansey, who came from a family of English country squires, had an unusually wide range of experience. As a youth he had been moved for health reasons from a conventional English public school (Wellington) to a British boys’ school in Bruges, Belgium, and had been seduced by ‘Robbie’ Ross (who later claimed to have been Oscar Wilde’s first lover). Dansey went on to serve in the British South Africa Police during the Matabele Rebellion of 1896, as a colonial policemen fighting bandits in Borneo, and as a British army lieutenant in the South African War of 1899-1902. Between 1904 and 1909 he was a colonial political officer in Somaliland, after which he travelled in Africa and was later employed as resident secretary of a country club in upstate New York. When Dansey worked for Vernon Kell’s organisation in the early years of the war, Cumming had had regular dealings (and lunches) with him, and the two men had discussed the possibility of Dansey coming to work for him, which he finally did on 20 August 1917. 14
Cumming was clearly anxious to accommodate the needs of the armed services, in part perhaps to forestall the possibility of their building up separate secret intelligence services (as to some extent the army had already done), and he began to improve the links between his organisation and them. On 14 September 1917 he saw General Sir David Henderson, the Director-General of Military Aeronautics, and ‘discussed with him the question of a liaison officer to take charge of my Aviation Section’. Henderson also agreed that the proposed new independent air force ‘should not attempt to set up a rival S.S. organisation but should set tasks to ours’. Admiralty liaison was secured by the appointment on 15 October of the first career naval officer to the Secret Service, Captain Boyle Somerville, who was to head a new Naval Section. Somerville came from a famous Irish family (his sister was one half of Somerville and Ross, authors of the ‘Irish R.M.’ stories) and was an expert hydrographer, linguist and astronomer. Nearly twenty years after he retired to live back home in County Cork he was murdered by the IRA for helping local lads join the Royal Navy.
As for the army, Macdonogh, the Director of Military Intelligence, once again asserted his control over the Secret Service. On 22 October 1917 he peremptorily summoned Cumming ‘& told me he was holding a Conference of his Military Staff re my reorganisation which I could attend but not take part in’. He said that he was going to General Headquarters in France the next day ‘to tell them he was going to take over the whole S.S. & before doing this he must