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By Root 2447 0

Balkans and Near East, South America and the USA. On a Sunday in October 1916 – perhaps it was a quiet day in the office – he noted in his diary that he had 1,024 ‘staff & agents’ spread across the world. There were sixty at headquarters. The largest number overseas was in Alexandria: ‘300? [sic]’; next came Holland (250), Athens (100), Denmark (80) and Spain (‘abt 50’); with smaller numbers in Salonika, Romania, France, Switzerland, Russia, Norway, Sweden, Malta, Italy, New York, South Africa and Portugal. ‘S. America’ was listed, but with only ‘?’ beside it. In 1914-15, however, as had been the case before the outbreak of war, Cumming’s main concentration was in Belgium and the Netherlands.

Secret service in the Low Countries

Although none of Cumming’s agents had predicted the German declaration of war in August 1914, it was evident that his Belgian and Dutch networks ought still to have been in a position to report on the timing, strength and direction of the expected German assault on France. Before Macdonogh went to France with the expeditionary force, he arranged that the British army’s intelligence-gathering should be divided into two parts. The first would comprise a section based in France at General Headquarters. This ‘would endeavour to secure agents in the territory occupied by the enemy north of Luxemburg and convey the information by them either through the line, or round the flanks of the army’. Macdonogh anticipated that this intelligence would chiefly be ‘concerned with the strength, composition and movements of the force on our immediate front’. The second section would deal with ‘all information from the interior of Germany’. This was ‘to be got, if at all, by the S.S. Bureau in London’, whose chief – Cumming – was to ‘remain in direct communication’ with Macdonogh.

The GHQ section took over Cumming’s man Roy Regnart in Brussels, as well as Major Cecil Cameron, who had been engaged by Cumming and deployed to Givet scarcely a week before the outbreak of war. GHQ travelled over to France on 14 August 1914. Cumming went to Brussels the following day to attempt to place his agents on a war footing, as well as to regularise Cameron’s position vis-à-vis the British embassy and smooth ruffled feathers over some indiscretion committed by Henry Dale Long. But by this stage German troops had penetrated deep into the country, disrupting both Cumming’s and Macdonogh’s arrangements (such as they were). Their networks were swamped and the post at Givet was withdrawn. Cameron joined Macdonogh at GHQ and was instructed ‘to work round our left flank and try to get in rear of the enemy’. He ‘showed marked ability and was able to obtain a certain amount of information’ before the opposing lines solidified into ‘a continuous line of entrenchments from the sea to Switzerland. By November 1914’, reported Macdonogh, ‘it had become practically impossible to get anything through the front and there were no flanks round which to work.’

Cumming meanwhile endeavoured to develop reporting from the Netherlands. Asked by the Director of Naval Intelligence about ‘arrangements on Dutch coast’, on 5 August he asked the London manager of a Dutch shipping company, W. H. Müller & Co., to put agents at six points along the coast ‘to report Tr [German] warship movements’. Two days later he agreed to pay a representative £30 a month to ‘get in touch with friends in Amsterdam’. Cumming was not the only one looking to gather intelligence in the Netherlands. On 19 August the British consul-general at Rotterdam, Ernest Maxse, informed his masters in the Foreign Office that, in collaboration with Captain Wilfred Henderson (naval attaché in Berlin from October 1913 until withdrawn on the outbreak of war), he had organised a ‘complete’ intelligence organisation ‘on the frontiers of Holland’. It was worked by a Captain Richard Tinsley and Maxse assured London that his office was ‘not traceable in it’. Maxse believed that he could ‘guarantee correct information on points required by Naval Intelligence Department of the Admiralty and by the Foreign