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the Royal Irish Constabulary. Items of information were passed to the Americans through the head of the Canadian Government Police, Colonel Percy Sherwood. Wiseman remained in charge of MI1(c)’s operations in North America for the rest of the war, and, reflecting the semi-public roles which some of Cumming’s other wartime representatives enjoyed, his position became progressively less clandestine. When he first landed in October 1915, he described himself to the United States immigration authorities as a ‘merchant’. In January 1916 he had become a ‘soldier’, and in November a ‘courier’. In November 1917, by which time the USA had entered the war, he arrived (with, among others, the economist John Maynard Keynes) in New York as part of Lord Reading’s high-level mission to the United States, sent to reinforce the relationship between the wartime allies. By now he was ‘on official business to U.S. government’. Thwaites (who had described himself as an ‘author’ in January 1916), also travelled with the Reading Mission, and by then was openly ‘on Captain Wiseman’s staff’.16

Wiseman’s instructions from Cumming were to concentrate on ‘Contre-Espionage’, including ‘the investigation of suspects about whom the authorities at home required information’, ‘a general watch on the Irish movement in the United States’ and ‘investigation into Hindu Sedition in America’. Once established in New York, he was also given some propaganda work, and Wiseman found that his office ‘soon became a general information bureau for all Britishers’, called on to serve the needs of the embassy, consulates and other British missions. Work on Indian seditionists was shared with the India Office, whose representative Sir Robert Nathan was based in Vancouver from May 1916. In the summer of 1916 Wiseman’s office was strengthened by the addition of a naval officer, Lieutenant Henry Fitzroy, as Permit Officer (who carried out the Military Control work), though his arrival was followed by a dispute over whether he was responsible to Captain Gaunt, the consul-general in New York, or Wiseman. In the event Fitzroy’s ‘unfortunate manner’ in dealing with Americans led to his being recalled. Wiseman held on to the Military Control work. Before Fitzroy went, however, he had managed to extend the surveillance of passenger traffic through New York by roping in ‘every would-be traveller who desired to go to South American ports . . . even when a British visa was not absolutely necessary’. In October 1916 Cumming noted eight ‘staff and agents’ in New York. By January 1918 MI1(c) had ten regular officers, plus an office staff, as well as a ‘Western Organization’ of ten full-time and some part-time agents (of whom two were German), the entire operation costing $8,816 ($121,400 in current prices) a month.17

Cumming’s organisation in the USA had some successes. In the spring of 1916 information from an agent helped thwart a German plan to sabotage the important Welland Canal in Ontario, and Thwaites headed investigations leading to the discovery of a bomb factory in New York harbour set up by the German saboteur Franz von Kleist Rintelen. Wiseman was able to help Robert Nathan cripple an émigré Indian seditionist organisation, the Ghadr (‘revolt’) Party, operating on the west coast of the United States. Supported by locally based German agents, the conspirators planned to send a ship loaded with arms to India to foment rebellion. But, with information supplied by Nathan and others, the authorities rounded up and tried nearly a hundred individuals in San Francisco between November 1917 and July 1918. With his press contacts and experience Norman Thwaites was able to do much on the propaganda side. One unusual coup occurred after he and Wiseman had been entertained to dinner by an anglophile millionaire industrialist, Oscar Lewisohn, at his Long Island mansion. During the evening their host passed round some holiday photographs in one of which Thwaites recognised the German ambassador Count Johann von Bernsdorff in a swimming costume with his arms round two similarly dressed