The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [76]
Italy came into the war in stages. Following the Treaty of London in April 1915, when the Allies offered substantial military and financial aid and granted Italian claims to territory in the South Tyrol, along the Adriatic coast, in North Africa and western Turkey, Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary (23 May) and Turkey (20 August), though it did not go to war against Germany until 28 August 1916. Allied intelligence co-operation in the Mediterranean (mostly relating to counter-espionage) was explored at an Anglo-French-Italian conference attended by Cumming in Malta in early March 1916. Afterwards it was reported that ‘our several Intelligence Bureaux are now very much clearer about their share of the special work discussed, and a much closer co-operation with the Italians will result’. Liaison between the British and the French ‘was already close’, and Captain Smith-Cumming had ‘been able to get into much closer contact with the allied work in the Mediterranean generally and its special needs’.33
From June 1916 a formal intelligence mission was established in Italy in which Kell’s organisation had an interest. In July 1917, Sir Samuel Hoare, who had done a similar job in Russia, was appointed by Cumming to head ‘the Special Intelligence Section of the British Mission with the Italian General Staff’, an appointment representing both MI1(c) and Vernon Kell’s MI5. Put in charge of offices at Rome, Milan and Genoa, Hoare was to ‘maintain close touch with the Information Branch of the Italian General Staff’ and ‘co-operate closely with the head of the “Field Intelligence Section” of the British Mission’ (responsible for operational military information). Hoare did not at first run any agents, though he did report on political matters. In December 1917 Macdonogh in London approved Hoare’s proposal to obtain political information through The Times’s correspondent, ‘as it is of course his proper business’. Hoare also dabbled in what became known as ‘special operations’, telling Macdonogh in January 1918 that he had given £100 to help fund a ‘big pro-war demonstration’ being organised to coincide with the opening of the Italian parliament. By this stage Hoare and his colleagues were reporting directly to the Directorate of Military Intelligence in the War Office and Cumming had been cut out of the work altogether. In March 1918, indeed, Cumming had met the Italian head of Naval Intelligence and had ‘had to admit with some shame that I had now no organisation in Italy’.34
Reviewing his work overall in August 1918, he noted that the ‘Italian Military Intelligence service, upon which we have had to depend, is from the point of view of personnel and influence entirely inadequate’. Rivalries between different Italian agencies, moreover, gravely handicapped security and counter-espionage work. From the spring of 1918 officers in Hoare’s mission began exploring the possibility of sending agents into Austria and Turkey. Liaison was established with Czechoslovak elements who already had train-watching agents in enemy territory. It was also hoped to recruit ‘Southern Slavs’, such as Istrians, Croats and Dalmatians, though their employment raised difficulties with the Italians, who heartily distrusted them. ‘None the less,’ wrote Hoare, ‘it is hoped in course of time to develop a Jugo-Slav service for Croatia and Dalmatia.’ Writing as he was just three months before the unexpectedly rapid end of the war, however, it is unlikely that Hoare’s team were able to make much progress on this front.35
Cumming’s most extensive commitments in the Mediterranean region focused on Greece and Turkey. Concerned about information from ‘Asia’, in January 1915 Callwell told Cumming that he was ‘starting an organisation in Athens’. It would have to be squared with the British army commander in Egypt, but Cumming noted that Callwell would ‘hand his people over to me when organised’. Callwell agreed that Cumming