The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [74]
Lloyd George, meanwhile, had appointed Wiseman ‘liaison officer between the War Cabinet and any special representative they might send out to represent them in the United States’. Colonel House understood that Wiseman was ‘now acting as liaison officer between me personally and the British Government’. Lloyd George was rather inclined to seek policy advice and assistance outside the ‘usual channels’ and this development did not go down very well among established civil servants. When Wiseman asked Cumming for copies of MI1(c)’s political reports ‘for Col. H.’, the answer from Ronald Campbell in the Foreign Office was a blunt ‘No’. Cumming, too, thought that passing raw secret service papers ‘to show to Colonel H. for the P[resident]’ was ‘far too dangerous’. Lord Reading, who replaced Spring Rice as ambassador in January 1918, nevertheless regularly used Wiseman for liaison with the Americans. On a trip back to London in April 1918, Sir William told Cumming ‘many interesting things about his work in America, especially his personal relations with the President, Lord Reading & Col. H.’. For the rest of the war, while retaining some secret service responsibilities, Wiseman’s time was mostly taken up with liaison duties. In October 1918 he returned to Europe, leaving Thwaites in charge in New York. During the Paris Peace Conference he served as A. J. Balfour’s special adviser on Anglo-American affairs, and in March 1919 he provided General Marlborough Churchill, the Chief of United States Military Intelligence, with a personal introduction to Cumming. But with President Wilson and Colonel House in Paris, too, and able to deal directly with their Allied counterparts, Wiseman’s usefulness as a go-between declined sharply, and although they occasionally met during the spring of 1919, he appears to have left Cumming’s organisation by the end of May.30
The Mediterranean and beyond
Since the late eighteenth century Britain’s interests in the Mediterranean and Middle East had been reinforced by its imperial presence in India. A paramount requirement was to prevent any other Great Power – particularly France or Russia – from dominating the region and threatening to interrupt imperial communications with the East, especially after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1877. Agreements with France and Russia in the early twentieth century had eased the problem, but, from the early 1900s, increasing German involvement in the Ottoman Turkish empire, which stretched to Persia (Iran) in the east, included the Arabian lands of Syria, Lebanon and the Arabian peninsula, and even technically encompassed Egypt, raised new fears for Britain’s regional security. From at least 1912 (and through to the end of the war) Secret Service funds had been used by the Foreign Office to purchase a major shareholding in the Constantinople Quays Company, aiming to give the British government covert commercial influence in Turkey.31 Further south, Britain had in practice controlled Egypt since the 1880s, and a series of ‘fortress colonies’ – such as Gibraltar, Malta and Aden – secured its position, but with the outbreak of war in August 1914 nothing could be taken for granted. At the end of October Turkey entered the war on the side of the Central Powers. Britain responded by imposing a protectorate on Egypt, which rapidly became an important military base and remained so for the rest of the war, and by sending troops to Mesopotamia (now Iraq), which turned into a major theatre of operations. Italy, which had been a member of the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary since