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By Root 2499 0

qualified signals personnel and a scheme to send Cossacks to the Western Front. Campbell had scarcely arrived in Petrograd before the British naval and military attachés began to complain about him. Leaving Alley to hold the fort, Campbell was summoned back to London. He arrived with evidently welcome reports of the situation in Russia. Cumming took him to see General Callwell (Director of Military Operations) who during a long interview ‘quite abandoned’ his hitherto hostile attitude. Callwell told Henry Wilson that Campbell had provided ‘much interesting information’ about ‘the condition of things in the Russian Army’, especially regarding ‘their deficiency in electric communications in all forms, and the ignorance of their use. He says that the disaster which happened earlier in the war to General Samsonov [killed at the Battle of Tannenberg in August 1914] was entirely due to all their messages being sent by wireless and en clair, to these being taken up by the Germans, and to the Germans actually sending them orders in reply.’2 With the DMO’s approval, Cumming’s officers began interviewing and selecting a ‘corps of telegraphists’ to go to Russia. Cumming (and perhaps Callwell too) had ambitions for Campbell’s mission beyond mere secret service liaison. Among the topics noted in his diary for a War Office meeting on 14 December about Petrograd was the ‘influencing of plans to conform to our desires. Russia’, he added, ‘will be the most important country for us in future & we shd sow seed & strike roots now.’

Meanwhile both Sir George Buchanan, the ambassador in Petrograd, and Colonel Knox had written to the Foreign Office to complain about Campbell’s mission. The arrangement put Knox in an ‘anomalous and very unpleasant position’, as he was ‘unaware’ of the scope of the mission’s work, yet its members were in British uniform and subordinate to him in rank. Campbell’s methods, moreover, had been ‘the reverse of tactful’. The ambassador asserted that much of the information sent back was common knowledge and not worth the ‘unnecessary expense’ of maintaining the mission. Besides, they had also provided unreliable ‘political gossip’ which Buchanan himself had been obliged to refute. Faced with these criticisms, Callwell accepted that Campbell had ‘not been a success’ and would be allowed to return to Russia only in order to get the proposed ‘corps of telegraphists’ up and running. While all information regarding the enemy was to be transmitted in consultation with the military attaché (with whom he was to ‘work on terms of the closest co-operation’) Campbell would continue to ‘work directly under the orders of “C” and communicate through him, and would obtain from him instructions as to the special points on which information was required’.3

Inevitably this rather Byzantine arrangement failed to work. Part of Campbell’s raison d’être was removed when the Russians decided that they did not, after all, want the telegraphists, and in March 1915 Buchanan complained again about Campbell’s ill-defined position, noting that he was failing to submit his telegrams through him. He proposed that the mission be reconstituted or placed entirely under the military attaché. This was firmly resisted by the War Office on the grounds that ‘if the ambassador were to be placed in full control of the Mission (a course which was strongly to be deprecated) it was for him to devise a practical scheme; but’, they added trenchantly, ‘Secret Service was not a matter with which amateurs could be entrusted, and in addition the fact that “C” provided the necessary funds made it seem inadvisable that the Mission should be cut off from direct communication with him’. Understandably, the Foreign Office did not pass on these views to Petrograd, but merely offered to withdraw Campbell and his mission as a last resort, while observing that to do so would deprive the Admiralty and the War Office ‘of much useful information which was conveyed to them through “C”’. They did concede, however, that the complaints about Campbell ‘were not just confined to his