The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [78]
By the late summer of 1915, Samson’s organisation, by now known as the Bureau of Military Information, was also focusing on economic and blockade intelligence, and had begun to take on some counter-espionage work, to investigate both German political intrigues in Greece and arrangements for the supply of enemy submarines operating in the Eastern Mediterranean. Towards the end of 1915 Captain Compton Mackenzie, who had been serving as an intelligence officer at Gallipoli, was sent on sick leave to Athens and ended up being seconded to work under Samson. The thirty-two-year-old Mackenzie was already a well-known novelist who over the next two years brought a creative writer’s sensibility to his duties in Cumming’s Bureau. After the war he wrote entertainingly about his intelligence experiences in three volumes of memoirs, First Athenian Memories, Greek Memories and Ægean Memories, the second of which was banned for contravening the Official Secrets Act. During the war he was reputed to have sent in some reports in blank verse, which ‘pleased the old man’. ‘We like your poetical reports immensely,’ wrote Cumming in February 1917. ‘Please send us some more.’36 Not everyone was so admiring. Commenting on a report submitted in the summer of 1916, Colonel French of MI1 declared that, ‘as a soldier’, he was ‘perhaps prejudiced in favour of a simpler and less melodramatic literary style’.
Whatever the literary merits of his reports, after Samson (now promoted to colonel) had moved on at the end of 1915 to head the Eastern Mediterranean Special Intelligence Bureau (EMSIB) in Alexandria – established as a joint MI1(c)-MI5 headquarters37 – and Mackenzie had taken charge, he built up rather a successful operation, on both the intelligence and counter-intelligence sides. Mackenzie was operating in a very unstable political environment. While the Greek King Constantine I was strongly pro-German, the Prime Minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, was equally pro-Ally. After the latter won an election in June 1915 he allowed the Allies to base substantial forces at Salonika to help with the defence of Serbia and attack Bulgaria, which joined the Central Powers in October. With British forces in Greece, counter-intelligence work (which came to take up most of Mackenzie’s time and part of which developed into a full-scale Military Control Office) naturally became of direct interest to Vernon Kell’s organisation. In August 1916, while deprecating Mackenzie’s ‘well known extravagant verbiage’, Eric Holt-Wilson of MI5 noted operations in which Mackenzie had foiled the escape from Greece of some ‘dangerous Germans’ and also prevented ‘coastal contraband work’. He thought that there was no doubt at all ‘that, however flamboyant his methods, they irritate and unsettle the painstaking local Boche’ to such an extent that he thought they might ‘shortly assassinate him, if we do not’. Kell and Macdonogh agreed, the former remarking that Mackenzie was ‘a thorn in the Boche’s flesh’, and since ‘he gets apparently all the information the Minister and the M.A. [military attaché] require’, he should be left where he was.
Mackenzie was closely identified with the Venizelists and when in December 1916 the political situation deteriorated in Athens he had to move his headquarters to the island of Syra (Siros) in the Cyclades, south-east of the capital. Here for a few months he led an exciting if unorthodox intelligence life. Provided with an effective blank cheque from Cumming, by the early summer of 1917 Mackenzie had created a lavishly resourced Aegean Intelligence Service, with a staff of thirty-nine officers, a 200-ton ex-royal yacht and a budget of £5,000 (equivalent to something over £200,000 today) per month. He had ambitious plans for his organisation. In March he told Cumming that two of his officers, Machray and Dewhurst, would go to Volo (Volos) ‘and while nominally controlling passports (more or less a sinecure at Volo) would run an active espionage