The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [46]
The thirty-eight-year-old Tinsley, who proved to be a difficult character, played an important role in Cumming’s Dutch organisation. He was a former merchant navy officer (and an officer in the Royal Naval Reserve) who had been working in Rotterdam since 1909, first as agent for the Cunard Line and subsequently as local manager of the Uranium Steamship Company, a Canadian concern which ran cut-price emigrant ships across the Atlantic. In 1911 he had briefly been expelled by the Dutch government for allowing some returning Russian emigrants to land without authorisation. Tinsley struck Walter Kirke (who met him in November 1915) ‘as being a smart fellow, but not a man for whom any really high class agent would work’. With Tinsley ‘it is a matter of business’, and Kirke doubted ‘his imparting patriotic enthusiasm to agents’, thus missing ‘the best people’. Tinsley, indeed, seemed to fit Cumming’s category of ‘scallywag’. Ivone Kirkpatrick, who worked for GHQ intelligence in Holland during the latter part of the war, described him as ‘a liar and a first-class intriguer with few scruples’, while another colleague, Sigismund Payne Best (who was later to serve in SIS), claimed – albeit with the benefit of considerable hindsight – that Cumming himself had told him Tinsley was ‘an absolute scoundrel’. Best also reported that Tinsley ‘was said to have made something like 200,000 pounds by blackmailing firms in Holland’, threatening to have them placed on the British ‘Black Book’ of companies who were ‘dealing with the Germans and who, consequently, were debarred from any commercial dealing with England’. But Tinsley had admirers, too, including Henry Landau, who worked for him in 1917-18. Landau described him as ‘a shrewd executive’, with ‘a great number of powerful friends’, who ‘helped to keep the various branches of the Service under him in close co-operation. His chief function, the handling of the Dutch authorities, he carried out admirably. ’2 In September 1918, Major Laurie ‘Oppy’ Oppenheim, who had been the British military attaché at The Hague since January 1915, gave Cumming ‘a good account of T whom he considers perfectly honest & conscientious’.
As the front line stabilised, and opportunities for running agents from France into enemy-occupied territory disappeared, Macdonogh thought of exploiting the thousands of Belgian refugees who were pouring into England, both ‘to find out what they knew of the enemy, and, if possible, to recruit from among them agents who would return to their own country’. This was work which ‘could have been left to the S.S. Bureau in London’, but with Cumming temporarily out of action following his motor accident at the beginning of October 1914, his subordinates, ‘though very energetic, had no proper guidance’ and, in Macdonogh’s opinion, ‘were incapable of doing what was required of them’. Macdonogh therefore appointed Major Cameron to work in the Channel port of Folkestone, where, in co-operation with French and Belgian officers, he developed a very extensive intelligence organisation. While he made a success of his job, Cameron was another man with a slightly murky background. He was the son of a distinguished soldier who had won a VC in India and had been head of the War Office Intelligence Department in the 1880s. In 1911 he and his wife (who was a morphine addict) had been convicted of fraud over a bogus insurance claim for a valuable pearl necklace. Cameron had served a jail sentence, but was widely believed to have sacrificed himself by loyally standing by his wife, who had submitted the claim. As a disgraced