The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [64]
In May 1915 Campbell was replaced by Major Cudbert Thornhill, an Indian Army officer, ‘first class Russian scholar’ and ‘a good shot with rifle, catapult, shot-gun and blow-pipe’.5 Relations improved in Petrograd. Although ‘at first somewhat grudgingly accepted by Knox’, as Thornhill ‘confined himself strictly to his duties and proved himself a very good intelligence officer’, he ‘succeeded in placing the Mission on thoroughly good terms with the Embassy, and everything went perfectly smoothly’. Over the succeeding twelve months or so, however, and for reasons that are unclear, relations between Thornhill and Cumming became ‘somewhat strained’. Macdonogh thought it was ‘mainly owing . . . to injudicious letters written by both of them’. In any case, the continuing pressure to take over the mission, both from Knox at the embassy and from the War Office, made Thornhill’s job something of a poisoned chalice. The fact that the actual work was hardly clandestine made it difficult for Cumming to defend his control over it. In February 1916, after a visit to Petrograd, General Callwell proposed (though this was not acted on) that the mission be placed under Knox. Cumming was ‘much upset’, but, as Walter Kirke argued, ‘his man was doing no S.S. work in Russia, and was merely transmitting information from the Russian Int. Branch . . . If he worked his own agents into Germany from Russia that was another matter, but apparently he did not.’ Reflecting in May 1916 on the ‘stormy times’ of his Bureau’s Russian experience, Cumming mused that his people had been ‘alternately kicked and caressed by the M.A. and Embassy’.6
During 1916 there was another change in personnel when Thornhill was transferred to the embassy as assistant military attaché (where he was given special responsibility for ‘enemy identifications’) and Sir Samuel Hoare (with the rank of lieutenant-colonel) was appointed in his place. The thirty-six-year-old Hoare came from a wealthy banking family and had been a Conservative MP since 1910. Commissioned into the Norfolk Yeomanry at the beginning of the war, following serious ill-health at the end of 1914 which prevented him going to the front, he had been languishing as a recruiting officer in Norwich. Here he started to learn Russian (he was a talented linguist) in the hope of finding work with one of the various military missions in Russia. Early in 1916 a fellow Conservative MP and former diplomat, John Baird (later Viscount Stonehaven), who was working in the Secret Service Bureau, put him in touch with Cumming, who initially engaged him to develop war trade information and also report on the general situation of the Russian mission. Hoare did this so satisfactorily that in May 1916 Cumming told him that he was to take over the mission from Thornhill. Cumming wanted him to work on a ‘new branch of our business’ – ‘Enemy Trading’ – which he conceived as more than just reporting on blockade and general economic matters, but as also involving ‘questions affecting the improvement of our own trade, which would otherwise be taken by the enemy’.7
Cumming’s formal instructions to Hoare emphasised that he was to supply information to the Admiralty and the War Office, as well as the War Trade Intelligence Department, and was also to be in charge of the Military Control Office, issuing passport visas for travel to the United Kingdom. He would be directly responsible to the Chief of the Secret Service – ‘C.S.S.’ – and as far as he could, ‘without risk of causing annoyance to our Ally’, was to ‘obtain information from Russian unofficial sources, taking care that you shall never appear to be doing anything prejudicial to their interests or that could be in any way mistaken for espionage’. Privately, Cumming hoped Hoare would ‘succeed in keeping on friendly terms with the M.A.’ (Knox) but would ‘resist attempts on anyone’s part to absorb the Mission, which, as you will