The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [75]
The first indication that Cumming was developing work against Turkey comes at the end of 1914. On 29 December, his deputy, Captain Laycock, interviewed an Englishman formerly resident in Constantinople (Istanbul) and on New Year’s Eve there was a flurry of activity relating to a new organisation in the Aegean Sea at the entrance to the strategically important Dardanelles. Deposits of five and eight thousand francs respectively were arranged for banks in Corfu and Salonika. Supplies were to be sent to an island off the Turkish coast near Smyrna (İzmir), and a Libyan from Tripoli was earmarked to go to Constantinople itself to make contacts there. During January 1915 Cumming was instructed by Blinker Hall at the Admiralty to provide back-up for a scheme (proposed by Maurice Hankey) to bribe Turkey out of the war. Hall, typically without referring to any higher authority, authorised that up to four million pounds be offered to the Turks, selecting Edwin Whittall and George Griffin Eady to negotiate with the Turks. Whittall came from a family long resident in the Near East and Eady was a civil engineer who had been engaged in railway construction in Turkey before the war. Cumming provided funds and administrative support and arranged secure communications to Dedeagach (Alexandroupolis) in north-eastern Greece near the Turkish frontier. Whittall, however, told Cumming in January that the project was a ‘forlorn hope’, and so it turned out. Whatever prospects there might have been were swept away by the Allied naval bombardments launched in February 1915 on Gallipoli which it was hoped would force the Dardanelles and open the way to Constantinople. When Eady returned in April he reported to Cumming that ‘the day he opened nego[tiatio]ns we bombarded Dardanelles. The day his man landed at Smyrna we bombarded it! Money no use.’ Eady thought that he might be able to get an agreement if Constantinople was ‘internationalised – ie left in nominal Turkish possession under international control’, but the landings at Gallipoli on 25 April and the subsequent fierce campaign, which lasted until the ignominious Allied withdrawal in January 1916, destroyed any hope of a negotiated agreement.32
The Turkish venture illustrates the extent to which, at this stage of the war (and evidently so far as Hall was concerned), Cumming’s main function appears simply to have been to provide operational support. This is further illustrated by a scheme mounted in the spring of 1915 to track German efforts to supply submarines. On 22 February Hall showed Cumming a signal ‘stating that a vessel known to be in the Balearics may be supplying Tr [German] Subs’. Cumming acquired the 1,300 – ton yacht Beryl to investigate this and it set off on a cruise from San Sebastián in north-west Spain, along the Iberian coast and to the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean, before reaching Barcelona. Cumming lent the yacht’s skipper, Captain Cullen, his ‘telephoto camera in two cases’, a ‘Battery of Lenses’ and ‘two pairs Zeiss glasses’ and ‘promised him [a] Ross telescope’. When Hall told Cumming that he was in search of some tugs, Cumming organised their purchase. In April 1915 Cumming sent the keen yachtsman Shelley Scarlett (Lord Abinger) and his yacht St George to Gibraltar to work with the Beryl. Before he went Scarlett was provided with a code, a safe and a pair of Zeiss glasses. No evidence has survived in the SIS archive of what intelligence (if any) these ventures may have produced. Intelligence-gathering efforts in other parts of the Mediterranean are indicated by Cumming’s diary notes of individuals being despatched from London. On 9 March 1915, Colonel Callwell ‘approved idea of sending a good man to Genoa’. In May Hall introduced Cumming to a husband-and-wife team, who within four days had been taken on for some unspecified