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as always, had its eyes on a wider horizon. At the start Cumming and Kell were simply told to get on with the work, taking on the motley collection of existing covert sources the service ministries had haphazardly employed up to that point. Neither man was given much of a brief, nor were they asked to prepare any sort of business plan, or even to consider how Britain’s security and intelligence requirements could best be arranged. If they had, the subsequent history of SIS and MI5 might have been very different. The 1925 Secret Service Committee (agreeing with Sinclair) had ‘no hesitation’ in stating that if they had been called upon to organise one from scratch, they would not have adopted ‘the existing system as our model’, but would have endeavoured ‘to create a single department’. The ‘heterogeneous interests, liaisons, traditions and responsibilities of the different services, however, had resulted in a system which, while it was not believed to be ideal, worked sufficiently well not to be replaced’. Successive proposals to create ‘a single department’ repeatedly came up against the objection that it might not bring any improvement, and (as observed in 1925) might well be ‘an actual failure’. Here, again, the pragmatic British approach was to the fore, with root-and-branch reform based on some theoretical ideal being rejected in favour of an adequately working, if admittedly imperfect, system.

But there was more to it than that. In the first place, a residual bias against centralised and unified British security and intelligence arrangements also appears to have reinforced decisions not to move in that direction. This was certainly the case regarding Basil Thomson’s ambitions to create a powerful domestic security agency in 1919-21. Second, considerations of the personalities involved, and the individuals who might head any consolidated organisation - certainly Thomson, but also Sinclair in the mid-1920s - also had a bearing on the decision-making process. Ministers and officials shied away from concentrating power in the hands of ostensibly ambitious men. Third, however desirable amalgamation might be from a bureaucratic point of view - it being seen as no more than a kind of administrative tidying up - there were strong arguments against it from the intelligence-processing perspective. Not only (as Cumming appreciated) could the conflation of domestic and foreign work bring political risks, but the concentration of all the British government’s intelligence eggs into one super-agency basket through which all information would be supplied could undermine the extent to which customer departments were able to analyse and evaluate the material, rudimentary though that process was before the Joint Intelligence Committee system became established from the late 1930s. As the Director of Military Intelligence shrewdly put it in 1925, the existence of different organisations had ‘the advantage of the check which [they] . . . automatically provided on each other’s results’.

From the early months of the First World War until almost the end of his time as Chief, Cumming was repeatedly faced by powerful departmental interests (especially, though by no means solely, the War Office) trying to take control of his Bureau, or at the very least chip away at its operations. It is a testament to his success that, unlike Kell’s MI5 or Thomson’s Directorate of Intelligence, MIɪ (c)/SIS was never threatened with outright abolition, but, on the other hand, it was subject only to a series of take over bids. In these circumstances, Cumming’s extraordinary feat was to create, nurture and protect a covert foreign intelligence-gathering organisation, with an established autonomous existence under the supportive stewardship of the Foreign Office, of sufficient status and reputation that by the early 1920s no one could imagine the British government doing without it.

Hugh Sinclair and the interwar years

When Mansfield Cumming died suddenly in June 1923, Hugh Sinclair had already been designated as his successor. While it had generally been