The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [55]
After the war, individuals who had assisted British intelligence organisations pressed for and obtained public recognition of their war service. The British government published long lists of agents who had worked for Cameron’s and Wallinger’s networks, as well as La Dame Blanche. In August 1919 Walthère Dewé, Herman Chauvin and 727 other Belgians (including 210 women) were listed as ‘mentioned in despatches’, ten posthumously. During January 1920 the Director of Military Intelligence, General Sir William Thwaites (accompanied by Landau and Wallinger), awarded over seven hundred orders and medals to Belgian and French citizens in a series of public investitures at Ghent, Lille, Brussels and Liège.23 For these people their wartime secret intelligence work was a matter of great pride, as well as a demonstration that on the so-called home front they had also done their bit, and they were glad for it to receive such public notice. It represented, moreover, a further important dimension of the human intelligence work of Cumming’s Bureau, moving beyond the engagement of foreign citizens – often from crude financial motives – to spy in foreign states and sometimes against their own country. Those Belgians and French who worked in occupied territory during the First World War saw themselves as working not only for the British but also on behalf of their own country against a common enemy. This was a crucial distinction and made the engagement of such people a very different exercise from that of finding agents in peacetime. In meeting this desire for public recognition, however, the British authorities jeopardised the future safety of such civilians taking part in intelligence work (though no one at the time anticipated that this might be a problem).
Scandinavia
In contrast to the Low Countries, where much of the information gathered was military, Cumming’s initial focus in Scandinavia concerned naval intelligence. Prewar efforts to follow German warship movements were renewed, and with the imposition of a wartime blockade on the enemy powers his Bureau was also deployed to monitor this and help plug gaps which the Germans might exploit. Evidence is scanty as to Cumming’s precise deployments, but there is enough to demonstrate a fair range of activity. Some of his prewar ship-reporting arrangements appear to have survived. On 22 August 1914 he noted in his diary that ‘Norseman’ left for Esbjerg (on the west coast of Denmark). On 2 January 1915 Norseman was included on an ‘Agents pay list’ for a sizeable monthly payment of £300, while Cumming’s representative in Copenhagen had a total budget of only £250. The following March Blinker Hall in the Admiralty agreed ‘to a trial of Norseman’s fishing boat temporarily’. In July, by which time he had been included in the Copenhagen budget, Norseman came to London where Cumming met him in the Metropole Hotel and ‘agreed to pay him £50 a month to include everything except rail fares’. He featured on the Copenhagen estimate (which by now totalled £1,080) in November 1915 and thereafter disappears from the record. Another agent in Denmark was a Danish naval officer, Captain Walter Christmas, who had been Naval Officer in Charge at the Skaw, on the northernmost tip of the country. According to Frank Stagg, who between September 1915 and June 1917 handled all naval reporting in Head Office, Christmas ‘gave us all his navy’s coastwatching reports’. The agent apparently stipulated ‘that a pretty girl was always at a Skaw hotel as go-between’. But late in 1915 one of these ‘inadvertently gave him away’ and he had to be evacuated to London. Cumming’s man in Copenhagen, too, was rumbled by the Danish authorities and, although