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Govt but to big financial and commercial interests in the City’. He suggested that Hoare contact ‘respectable pushing British firms in such towns as Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, Nijni, Batoum &c who would gladly send you reports on openings for British Finance and . . . Trade’. This was a global challenge. ‘We are doing it in South America and getting excellent results,’ wrote Stagg, ‘are just getting our toes in Africa, have correspondents in the Far East and of course the European neutrals are being sucked dry of all the information within their frontiers.’ Perhaps a little over-excited by the possibilities (yet also aware of the sensitivities in Moscow), Stagg told Hoare that if he saw ‘a favourable opportunity’ to go ahead with what Stagg called ‘the Russo-British Economic Problem Solution’, he should do so, ‘whilst keeping all the time within the instructions the Chief has given you (or if you do go beyond them to take good care that you are not found out, more especially by the Embassy)’. He was ‘quite certain’ that any positive result would leave the War Trade Intelligence Department ‘in raptures’; the Foreign Office would ‘make no demur’; and ‘the Chief will give you all the funds and assistance you ask for’.34

A caricature by H. F. Crowther Smith of Frank Stagg, the officer at Head Office responsible for Russian information. Here we see him inspecting a Bolshevik.

The acquisition of economic and commercial information demonstrates that the contribution of Cumming’s organisation to intelligence generally during the First World War has to be seen as part of a range of organisations and sources. The same applies to naval and military intelligence. Beyond TR/16’s extremely impressive reporting on German naval matters, on balance MI1(c)’s most significant contribution in the western theatre of operations during 1914-18 was through Tinsley’s train-watching and other networks in the Low Countries, which, while they improved steadily in the last year or so of the conflict, were to the very end complemented by the army’s own networks. Despite successive attempts by the War Office to take over Cumming’s operations, that there was a proposal in the last months of the war to place all this reporting under MI1(c) strongly suggests that the wartime performance of the Bureau had been sufficiently successful to ensure its survival as an independent agency.

4

Working further afield

Although the British intelligence effort, like the war effort generally, was more focused on the Western Front than anywhere else, the worldwide ramifications of the conflict meant that Cumming’s organisation took on ever expanding responsibilities. From early in the war liaison with the Russians was underpinned by the establishment of a mission in Petrograd. While in the west ‘gallant little Belgium’ had become a rallying-cry for Allied opposition to German militarism, in south-central Europe ‘gallant little Serbia’ seemed equally threatened by Germany’s ally Austria-Hungary. Vienna’s desire to crush Serbia, and Russia’s equal determination to resist it, meant that the Balkans became another important theatre of operations. The entry into the war on the enemy side at the end of October 1914 of the Ottoman empire, which stretched from European Turkey through the Middle East and Arabia, widened the conflict even further and required the Allies to deploy forces in the Mediterranean and across the region. In the western hemisphere, while the traditionally isolationist United States at first remained neutral, it too became a focus for Allied and enemy activities. The Allies and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria and Turkey) mounted propaganda campaigns to mobilise American opinion behind their causes, and both sides worked actively to cut off American economic support from the other. As the United States moved closer and closer to the Allies – eventually declaring war on Germany in April 1917 – this developed into a struggle mainly between the British, endeavouring to plug any American gaps in their blockade against the enemy, and the Germans, themselves