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By Root 2803 0

of information, as requested by other government departments. At no stage did he seek to offer policy advice, or even very much to analyse or manipulate the information gathered by his officers and agents. For him, the Bureau was simply an expert organisation, designed to respond as best it could to the requirements of customer departments. And, unlike some others in the intelligence world - Colonel French during the war, Basil Thomson immediately after, and even Cumming’s successor, Hugh Sinclair, in the interwar years - he never showed any tendency towards empire-building.9 When the Bureau grew, it did so organically and in response to customer demand. Cumming’s institutional ambition was not in the slightest acquisitive (which could have made him enemies), but consistently protective, vigorously defending his organisation from the threatened depredations of other departments. His obsession, moreover, with secrecy (the ‘first, last and most necessary essential’) had a beneficial and self-effacing effect. By consistently maintaining as low a profile as possible, neither he nor his organisation appeared to threaten anyone else.

A final, and extremely significant, feature of Cumming’s time as Chief is the shrewd political judgment he demonstrated in the face of the 1919 War Office proposal to amalgamate his department and MI5, at a time when ministers and officials alike were gripped by fears that Red Revolution might engulf the United Kingdom. Everything in Cumming’s class and career background would have disposed him towards diehard right-wing political attitudes, militantly opposed to the threat of the Labour movement and socialism (let alone that of Communism). But what is remarkable about Cumming, in contrast to other toilers in the intelligence vineyard, such as Hall (a Conservative MP from 1918 to 1923), Thomson and Sinclair (certainly when he was Director of Naval Intelligence), who were prepared at times to let their right-wing political views supersede the obligations of constitutional government, is that, whatever his private political opinions, he carefully and wisely distanced himself and his organisation from domestic British politics. He saw clearly, as his successor Stewart Menzies was also to do twenty-five years later, the absolute necessity of keeping domestic and foreign intelligence work separate. Anticipating the possibility of a Labour government, and managing to do so in an admirably unhysterical way, Cumming asserted that combining his organisation with MI5 and getting involved in secret service against domestic political targets could jeopardise the effectiveness of foreign intelligence work by prompting public and parliamentary attacks on the intelligence machine as a whole. As with his passion for motor cars, speedboats and aeroplanes, Cumming, a nineteenth-century Victorian with a lively twentieth-century interest in technological advances, may have been more prepared to accept political change than many of his contemporaries. Or he may simply have appreciated that the active espousal of anti-left-wing politics could damage the work of his beloved Bureau. Whatever the reason, his decision to distance the Bureau from domestic security and intelligence work was absolutely sound.

Mansfield Cumming’s achievement over the first fourteen years of the Secret Intelligence Service was not the creation of a perfect British foreign intelligence organisation. The Secret Service Bureau created in October 1909 was established to meet a specific short-term challenge to Britain from imperial Germany. It was a classic, pragmatic British fix, decided in rather a hurry and certainly without much, if any, thought about the longer-term future. The appointment of the linguist Vernon Kell to run the domestic side, while the monoglot Cumming was given the responsibility for foreign intelligence, which could have been disastrous, merely reflected the immediate preoccupations of their respective service departments. While the War Office was particularly worried about the vulnerability of home defence, the Admiralty,