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effect on the operations and movements of our own forces, and became therefore the first objective of our Secret Service system’. Drake added that ‘subsidiary efforts’ were devoted to reports on defensive works, shipping movements from the Belgian ports of Zeebrugge and Ostend, and ‘technical details as to artillery, aviation, aerodromes and similar matters’, as well as ‘the acquisition by theft or purchase of German military compilations, and all military information generally’. Tinsley’s organisation also kept an eye out for enemy agents seeking to get to the United Kingdom or travel further afield. Information from Cumming’s Rotterdam station contributed to the detection of five German agents in 1915 and one in 1916. In June 1916 Tinsley identified a German intelligence cover-address in The Hague, from where a number of United States journalists had been recruited by the Germans. One of these men, George Bacon, was arrested in England, court-martialled and in March 1917 sentenced to death. This was later commuted to life imprisonment and Bacon was deported to the United States where he provided evidence leading to the conviction in New York of the network’s two leaders.6

Little raw intelligence from Cumming’s agents during the first two years of the war has survived in the SIS archive, but there are some fragments of information from an agent code-named ‘Horse’ who was based in Maastricht in 1916. A message dated 31 August (circulated by London on 9 September) reported that the Germans were building a new railway line to improve communications between Visé in eastern Belgium and Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen). A week later Horse told London that ‘all available barges’ had been requisitioned in Belgium, ‘filled with gravel and sent in direction of S. Quentin about front present line of trenches’. Another agent, ‘20017’, was a Continental European who had lived in England before the war, but had been deported following a conviction for ‘obtaining credit by fraud from London boarding house keepers’. In 1916, having deserted (he said) from a German air force unit on the Eastern Front, he made contact with Cumming’s representative at The Hague and handed over documents signed by General von Linsingen, head of the Militär Luftstreitkräfte (army air corps). According to a report from 1927 (when he once again offered his services to SIS) he was ‘taken on by the Military Section of the “T” Organisation and was sent back to Germany 5 or 6 times, coming out each time with useful material, particularly on his last visit when he brought back part of the contents of von Linsingen’s safe’. His information, however, was ‘considered too good to be genuine (although later it proved to be absolutely correct)’, so he was not permitted to return to Germany. He remained in the Netherlands and was ‘reduced to recruiting deserters, for whom he was paid according to their value’. Early in 1917 he unwisely attempted to re-enter Germany, was arrested at the frontier, court-martialled by the Germans and sentenced to fifteen years’ penal servitude.

Drake observed that the two GHQ organisations – Cameron’s CF and Wallinger’s WL – ‘were, in fact, not only in actual if unconscious competition with each other, but also with parallel systems controlled by the War Office [Cumming] and our French and Belgian Allies’. Inter-service rivalry, moreover, was unhealthy, and in some cases ‘disastrous’, as it led to ‘denunciations, buying up of other services’ agents, duplication of reports, and collaboration between agents of the various Allied systems’, so that ‘information arrived at the various Headquarters in a manner which was not only confusing but sometimes unreliable and apt to be dangerous’. Double reporting was a particular problem, in that there could be ‘an apparent confirmation of news really originating from the same source’, owing to its having being received from ‘what appeared to be different and independent places of origin’.7

Attempts to systematise the position were reflected in the War Office’s successive efforts to take over all or part of Cumming