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By Root 2566 0

complete archive of British reporting from the Netherlands has survived, but a broad indication of the type, volume and distribution of material produced can be gained from the 2,500 or so intelligence reports sent by MI1(c) to the British Intelligence Mission at the French General Headquarters between March 1917 and July 1918. The great majority of these comprised train-watching reports, in the first instance telegraphed to London (and to British GHQ in France) by the British military attaché at The Hague. Between March and September 1917 most of these reports were ascribed to CF and WL agents, but from October 1917 there was an increasing number of railway ‘traffic returns’ from clusters of sources coded ‘T’ – ‘TB’, ‘TH’, ‘TO’ and ‘TQ’. Each was also marked with a ‘C.X.’ number, a prefix which Cumming had adopted in October 1915 to indicate cable traffic from his representatives. Plausibly, therefore, these reports came from Tinsley’s networks, including La Dame Blanche. The growing importance of both train-watching and Tinsley’s organisation is confirmed by a comparison of the reports for the first weeks of April in 1917 and 1918. Of the thirty-six reports sent to the French GHQ between 1 and 6 April 1917, twenty-eight concerned ‘movements of troops’, of which eight were derived from railway observation, six each from enemy deserters and unidentified ‘agents’, four from ‘refugees’, three from Belgian workmen and one from an intercepted postcard sent by a German soldier. Over the equivalent period in 1918 there were thirty-four reports, thirty-one dealing with troop movements. Twenty-nine of these were train-watching returns, the vast majority (twenty-five) deriving from T sources. 18

Information on railway traffic was supplemented by a wide range of other material. During June 1917 a particularly productive head agent, ‘B.9’ (Cumming’s agents were letter-coded according to their country, ‘B’ for Belgium, ‘H’ for Holland, ‘D’ for Denmark and so on), reported that a new single-track railway had been built between Heist, Knokke and Westkappelle in northern Belgium. Citing ‘a local inhabitant’ who had just left the district, he reported improved fortifications at the strategically important port of Zeebrugge, including ‘a great number of very deep concrete shelters’, newly constructed along the sea wall. He also sent in a detailed plan of a large ammunition factory at Grossenbaum, between Düsseldorf and Duisburg in western Germany, which had been provided by ‘a deported Belgian’ who had been working there. From an anonymous source Oppenheim got a detailed sketch-map of a new railway at Kinkempois, allowing traffic from Aachen to Brussels and Namur to bypass neighbouring Liège. Some of these reports could clearly inform military action. Zeebrugge, which was a valuable naval base for German units deployed to disrupt British communications across the Channel, was under constant attack, most notably in the famous St George’s Day raid in 1918 when concrete-filled ships were sunk, blocking the entrance to the harbour. Although the Grossenbaum munitions works was just out of range to be bombed from the air, the Kinkempois ‘railway triangle’ was attacked by eleven British bombers on 22 May 1918.19

Sketch map of a new railway line at Kinkempois, near Liège, supplied to British Intelligence in June 1917.

In addition to the occasional low-level reporting on factories and railways in Germany, Cumming’s Rotterdam station had one exceptional, high-grade agent, known variously as ‘Agent VII’, ‘H.16’ or, most commonly, ‘TR/16’ (indicating ‘Tinsley-Rotterdam’, akin to ‘Cameron-Folkestone’ and ‘Wallinger-London’). Henry Landau devoted a whole chapter of his 1934 memoirs to this man, whom he described as ‘the greatest of the Allied war-time spies’. Although Landau asserted that he had met him ‘several times’, the agent denied this when the Service mounted an urgent inquiry to see if the German authorities might be able to identify him from the account in Landau’s book. TR/16 had ‘no recollection of anyone named Landau’ but thought it