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By Root 2497 0

Cumming’s management, however, of the Military Control organisation – which primarily reported to MI5 – reflected his determination to keep charge of all clandestine intelligence and security work in foreign countries. He was not entirely successful in this, having to concede that MI5 could have stations in some Allied countries (such as those in Paris and Rome), though their posts in Washington and New York came partly under his supervision. In February 1918 the Director of Military Intelligence proposed that MI5 take over all Cumming’s ‘organisations in Allied countries’. Although Campbell at the Foreign Office said he ‘ought not to accept this’, Cumming felt that ‘he could not but obey orders’. Neutral countries were a different matter, however, and Cumming kept control of the Military Control Offices in such places as Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm, Berne and Madrid.32

Commercial and economic intelligence

At the beginning of 1915 Campbell of the Foreign Office congratulated Cumming on the excellence of ‘our commercial intelligence’. The Bureau’s reporting on economic and blockade matters, which constituted an important part of its work during the First World War, was useful to Cumming’s military customers, as well as to the War Trade Intelligence Department and the Ministry of Munitions. From about the beginning of 1917 MI1(c) circulated a digest on ‘Economic Conditions (Enemy Countries)’, ‘based exclusively on information received from agents and other confidential sources’. These summaries came out two or three times a month, and drew on reports from Berne, Rotterdam, Italy, from escaped British prisoners-of-war and even from Central America. As Colonel French of the War Office warned a colleague in the Ministry of Munitions in August 1915, information from within the enemy countries themselves was especially hard to obtain. French remarked on ‘the great difficulty of getting anyone into Germany or Austria’. Apparently unaware of the agent TR/16’s existence (though this may reflect a simple lack of communication between Naval and Military Intelligence), French said that such agents ‘as we did succeed in getting there, were people without technical knowledge, only capable of reporting in general terms’. To help remedy this deficiency, the Munitions official agreed to draw up a questionnaire ‘to indicate to the agents employed what they should look for’. French asked that it ‘be of as simple a character as possible as questions of too minute technical a nature would only lead to misleading replies’. In January 1917 a request from Sir Douglas Haig in France for a compilation of ‘the latest information’ concerning German munitions production was prepared in the Ministry of Munitions using a fair proportion of MI1(c) material. Among reports received ‘from the Director of Military Intelligence’ were ones from Copenhagen about Krupp gun production, from Stockholm on Swedish high-explosives manufacture, and a third containing details about working arrangements in the Krupp works. ‘Tiger’ in Stockholm had got the information from ‘a Swedish engineer’ who had ‘just returned from Essen and sold iron to Krupps’.33

Frank Stagg, who handled Russian information at Head Office, had great ambitions for the new economic work. ‘We are’, he told Samuel Hoare, ‘now throwing a network of Commercial Intelligence Systems all over the world and are in a fair way to becoming the Intelligence Service of the new Ministry of Commerce [which he predicted would emerge after the war], which means that we are about to replace the Consular Service and the Board of Trade Representatives in the Colonies.’ Stagg hoped that the Bureau could ‘replace the antiquated hidebound methods of the old Consular Service by such as will give British Traders confidence and pluck to launch out into foreign enterprises with as much vigour as the Germans displayed before the war’. Above all it was necessary to ‘get a firm footing’ in Russia, and he hoped Hoare would be able to produce ‘sufficient information to serve up some tempting dishes not merely to the British