The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [62]
Russian allies
Although Cumming’s prewar plans to establish a representative in Russia were interrupted by the outbreak of the war, the new situation in which Britain, Russia and France were now active co-belligerents against Germany and Austria-Hungary underpinned the establishment of formal liaison arrangements between their intelligence agencies. During September 1914 Cumming had several meetings with General Yermaloff, the Russian military attaché in London, prepared himself to visit Russia and selected Captain Archibald Campbell to be his representative in Petrograd. There is no clue in Cumming’s diary to why he chose Campbell, whom he engaged on 13 August – ‘K. [possibly Kell] called & brought him.’ Reflecting in 1917 on the wartime development of intelligence work in Russia, General Macdonogh, the Director of Military Intelligence, described Campbell as ‘an officer of considerable ingenuity, ability and push, but of singularly unattractive personality’. But this was with the benefit of hindsight and followed the painful experience of a difficult posting in Russia during which Campbell had ruffled feathers among both diplomats and other military liaison officers serving in the country, among whom were Colonel Alfred ‘Flurry’ Knox, a prickly Ulsterman who had been military attaché since May 1914, and General Sir John Hanbury-Williams, who had been sent out by the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, to head a mission at the Russian General Headquarters and ‘to report to him direct’.
The War Office had approved Cumming’s planned visit to Russia, but at the last moment Admiral Oliver at the Admiralty prohibited him from going. So it was that Campbell, accompanied by (among others) Lieutenant Stephen Alley (who had been born and brought up in Russia), set off for Petrograd on 26 September 1914. The duty of the mission was ‘to get in touch with the officers of the Russian General Staff dealing with Secret service, and so to obtain information from the Russian Intelligence Department about the enemy’. One of the advantages of placing the mission under Cumming was (as a wartime account of the ‘British Intelligence Organisation in Russia’ rather delicately put it) ‘that it involved no reference to the finance branches of the War Office and that it admitted of great elasticity as regards both numbers and classes of person employed’. Although working under the Secret Service Bureau and charged with liaising on secret service matters, Campbell’s mission was scarcely clandestine and had no direct involvement with espionage. The officers all wore uniform and were given a room in the Russian War Office where they had ‘somewhat exceptional facilities as regards access to the Russian military authorities’. As a postwar report recorded, their main function was simply to pass on to London Russian-acquired intelligence about the enemy. Alley, for example, ‘held no written communication with C, but telegraphed identifications of German forces and situation reports at great length. He employed no agents.’1
The history of Cumming’s intelligence mission in Russia confirms the sometimes very difficult relationships between secret service personnel and orthodox diplomatic and military representatives, even within the context of a wartime alliance. Here, too, clashes of personality exacerbated the problems, as Knox’s touchy amour propre collided with Campbell’s blunter and more unsubtle approach. The ad-hoc nature of Campbell’s mission, its indeterminate responsibilities and, above all, its embedding in the Russian War Office had the result that Russian General Staff officers began to approach him with matters which properly should have been communicated through Knox or Hanbury-Williams. These included a request for technically