The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [68]
Crowther Smith’s caricature of Sir William Wiseman, Cumming’s influential representative in the USA, 1916-18.
On 15 September Cumming engaged the thirty-year-old Captain Sir William Wiseman, who was to become one of the most significant British intelligence officers during the First World War. Wiseman was a baronet – a title first awarded to an ancestor in 1628, to which he had succeeded in 1893. He was educated at Winchester College and Jesus College, Cambridge (where he won a boxing Blue for representing the university against Oxford), though he left without taking a degree. He then worked first as a journalist and later as a businessman in Mexico and Canada. At the beginning of the war he returned to England to join the army, but was incapacitated for further active service after being gassed and temporarily blinded near Ypres in July 1915. Later that year, seeking employment in the War Office, he ran into Cumming, who had served alongside his father in the Royal Navy. ‘Willie’ Wiseman evidently impressed sufficiently to be taken on ‘for general work’. By the end of September, Cumming had earmarked Wiseman and an older man to be his representatives in North America. He brought them both round to be briefed in the Admiralty and War Office and on 20 October 1915 the two men departed for New York. It seems that Wiseman’s forty-four-year-old colleague, who was promised an allowance of £500 a year and for whom Cumming arranged a diplomatic passport, was to be the senior partner of the two. Since Cumming had initially taken the older man to see Blinker Hall at the Admiralty (and had only afterwards taken Wiseman too), it is most likely that his primary duty was naval intelligence concerning the security of war supplies from east-coast United States ports.15
Following their arrival in New York on 28 October, however, Cumming’s men encountered a familiar problem of co-ordination with the Admiralty’s existing information-gathering arrangements. Captain Guy Gaunt, British naval attaché to the United States since January 1914, had already established a network of agents to collect intelligence in North America and also to counter enemy activities such as sabotage and propaganda. Although his diplomatic status made this work potentially very problematic with the American authorities, Gaunt felt he had matters well in hand and clearly objected to Wiseman and his companion muscling in on his territory. Wiseman remained in New York for less than three weeks. His colleague stayed on for another month before returning to London. There Hall decided that he was not now needed in New York and Cumming redeployed him for counter-espionage work in the Eastern Mediterranean. Wiseman, however, was retained to head Cumming’s North American organisation, along with a newly recruited assistant, Captain Norman Thwaites. Thwaites (who had been wounded and invalided out of active service at the front) had worked before the war as a journalist in the United States, and not only spoke fluent German but, having been private secretary to the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer for ten years, was also very well connected in American press and political circles. From January 1916 the two men established themselves in New York, ostensibly as part of the Transport Department of the Ministry of Munitions, where Thwaites took on Military Control duties.
While the USA remained neutral, Wiseman and his colleagues managed to keep their work largely hidden from the authorities, though they liaised with American officers on an individual basis, including Thwaites’s friend Captain Thomas J. Tunney, head of the New York Police Department bomb squad. Tunney came from Irish Protestant stock and had a brother in