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(though personally well-regarded) ex-officer, unable easily to rejoin the army at the beginning of the war, he was perhaps an ideal candidate for secret service, and this helps explain why Cumming had taken him on at the end of July 1914. But potential revelations about his past remained a liability. Late in 1915 Walter Kirke worried that Lieutenant O’Caffrey, who worked under Cumming running agents through the Netherlands into Belgium targeting aviation intelligence for the Admiralty, had been told of Cameron’s history. Since Cameron’s agents had complained about O’Caffrey’s activities, Kirke feared he might use his knowledge ‘to damage Cam’s prestige in Holland. In fact’, he wrote, ‘O’C is likely to be at the root of any trouble, being a Jesuit priest, & not having our ideas of what is correct.’3

Cameron’s Folkestone bureau soon established an organisation in German-occupied Belgium which concentrated mainly on train-watching. ‘It met with considerable success,’ noted Macdonogh, ‘and we were able to check to a considerable extent enemy movements between Germany and Belgium and thus to prove the falsity of many reports which reached us from London of enormous concentrations of troops in Belgium.’ Macdonogh concluded that these reports (which were sent in to the Foreign Office by consular officers in the Netherlands) had all been spread by German propagandists with the deliberate intention of misleading the British. During the autumn and winter of 1914, Cumming’s Dutch organisation provided very little useful intelligence, which Macdonogh put down to the fact that Cumming’s officers ‘had no experience either of war or of S.S.’. Cumming’s (and Kell’s) prewar man in Brussels, Henry Dale Long, was also a disappointment. Although Cumming paid him money in August and took him on for a further six months in September 1914, by December doubts were beginning to emerge and Cumming noted in his diary a ‘warm discussion’ of Long’s ‘merits’. In March 1915 he told Kirke that Long was a ‘stumer’ (failure), and his contract does not seem to have been renewed.4

Responding to growing demands for information, Macdonogh set up an additional organisation, based in London under Major Ernest Wallinger, an artilleryman who had lost a foot at the Battle of Le Cateau in August 1914. Thus by early 1915 three distinct British clandestine intelligence organisations were operating in the Low Countries. Two of them, Cameron’s at Folkestone (known as ‘CF’) and Wallinger’s in London (‘WL’), came directly under Macdonogh at GHQ, by now situated at Saint-Omer in northern France. The third, run by Tinsley in the Netherlands (and known as the ‘T Service’), reported to Cumming in London. At this stage Tinsley’s organisation was Cumming’s largest single commitment by far, at least in financial terms. In a list of (apparently) monthly payments for intelligence networks drawn up in April 1915, some £3,000 for ‘Tin’ was nearly half of the total outgoings of £6,313. The next largest expenditure was £1,000 for Colonel Rhys Samson’s office in Athens. By November 1915 (according to Kirke) Tinsley’s ‘show’ was costing £5,000 a month.5 In his diary the same month Cumming recorded an annotated list of ‘R.B.T.’s staff’, which was twenty-six strong (including two women, one a typist). The list appears to comprise both office assistants and actual agents. Against two names are ‘contraband, political’ and ‘naval questionnaire’. Three others are marked ‘Russian’, ‘Hungarian’ and ‘Ruthenian’ respectively. Nine individuals are identified as ‘Belgian’ (one ‘in Germany’); and there are four Germans, including ‘Krupp works’, ‘Koln’ and ‘Augsburg’.

What did these agents do? A postwar history of British Military Intelligence in France during the latter part of the war written by Colonel Reginald Drake (Walter Kirke’s successor at GHQ) noted that ‘the bulk of the work of Secret Service in occupied territory was devoted to train watching’, in order to trace the movements of enemy units – information ‘of vital importance in drawing up the enemy’s order of battle’. This ‘had a direct