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’s organisation. Cumming was himself conscious of the problems, not least because Cameron’s and Wallinger’s organisations initially enjoyed greater success than his did. ‘During the summer of 1915’, wrote Macdonogh, ‘the G.H.Q. system of train watching was brought to a high pitch of perfection, while the War Office system [Cumming’s, though we can see here Macdonogh asserting his control over it] owing to difficulties with the Dutch police got little information of value.’ On 22 July 1915 (recording in his diary a conference of War Office and Foreign Office representatives) Cumming ‘protested against divided control & many organisations & suggested handing over the whole system in Holland to G.H.Q.’. But this apparently applied only to the military side of his reporting. A few months later, with the army again encroaching, when Cumming drafted his complaint about this to Sir Arthur Nicolson, he noted that in Holland he had ‘created and built up an admirable organisation which has – alone among several rivals – kept clear of arrest or “fusillade”’. The ‘military part of this’ had been handed over to Major Oppenheim, military attaché at The Hague, who had ‘sent in as his own, the reports collected by my agents’. Oppenheim, ‘being on the spot’, had ‘gradually absorbed all my best men for his part of the work and left me the indifferent ones’. Furthermore, it was now proposed that Oppenheim himself should be put under Cameron in Folkestone: ‘in fact one of my most valuable organisations is to be taken away from my control and handed over to my former subordinate [Cameron] – who himself was robbed from me since the war began. My bureau’, added Cumming acidly, ‘is to continue to supply the funds!’ Cumming was prepared to acquiesce in the new arrangement only because his work in Holland had been ‘completely ruined by the interference of other and rival organisations’, but he claimed he was now faced with ‘a similar invasion in other countries’ and feared that being ‘under no adequate control’ this would ‘bring trouble and disorganisation’.8

With Foreign Office backing, Cumming managed to resist some of the army’s more predatory ambitions. Despite concerns about the Dutch government’s attitude, in view of wartime priorities the Foreign Office relaxed its ban on the involvement of diplomatic personnel in intelligence-gathering sufficiently to allow Oppenheim to act as a ‘clearing-house’ and ‘sift’ all military information obtained by Tinsley’s organisation before sending it on to Cumming in London. This arrangement worked increasingly well and improved the quality and reliability of the information coming out of the Low Countries. In November 1915 Macdonogh established a system of ‘zones’ for the rival services, with Cumming broadly given freedom to work in Belgium east of Brussels, while the two GHQ organisations were restricted to the western part of the country. But, as Drake observed, such an artificial arrangement was ‘fundamentally unsound’ and could severely limit the ability of a particular network to collect valuable intelligence. The inevitable overlapping and line-crossing resulting from the rival networks also made for poor security, and disaster struck in 1916 when the Germans arrested a large number of British agents, ‘with the result that our train watching services (both those of G.H.Q. and of the War Office) almost ceased to exist’.9

In May Tinsley was exposed in the Dutch press as a ‘British agent’, and Kirke considered that subsequent, though unsuccessful, efforts to expel him were due to German pressure. The Dutch, in fact, were well aware of both the Allied and enemy intelligence organisations operating on their soil, and it is clear from Walter Kirke’s diary that part of the price the British paid to ensure that their presence continued to be tolerated was the sharing of information with the Dutch authorities. In June reports from Tinsley’s organisation which Oppenheim was forwarding to Cumming were seized by the Germans when they captured the Great Eastern Railway Company’s steamer Brussels, operating the