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and contre-espionage organisation from Volo to Yannina [Ioannina]’. Another officer was to concentrate on air force intelligence, and Asia Minor as a whole was to be targeted from a series of bases in the Dodecanese Islands. Mackenzie’s office at Syra would ‘occupy itself solely with information about the interior of Greece’. Much of this derived from Military Control, passport and visa work. By the summer of 1917 Mackenzie’s ‘so-called passport records’ included some ‘20,000 names on cards’, comprising ‘a general index of every kind of activity out here’, which, with associated records, formed ‘a complete history of Greece from the beginning of the Dardanelles expedition to the present time’. Mackenzie appears to have run a very effective outfit, but he did so in an idiosyncratic and individualistic fashion which did not suit more conventionally minded colleagues. There was also the more general difficulty, which afflicted Cumming’s officers in a number of places, of where (and how) they fitted into orthodox military and diplomatic hierarchies. Mackenzie’s operation served both Cumming’s and Kell’s departments, and, as such, was ‘a branch of the E.M.S.I.B.’, based in Cairo. Meanwhile Mackenzie submitted regular reports on political matters to the British minister at Athens; Turkish intelligence was sent directly to the Military Intelligence department at General Headquarters in Cairo; and naval information was given to the Vice Admiral Commanding the Eastern Mediterranean Squadron, at Mudros on the island of Lemnos. In July 1917 the vice admiral took over the operation and began to break it up. Mackenzie’s adventure ended when Cumming recalled him at the end of the following month.38

Cumming retained some residual interests in Greece, which had come into the war on the Allied side in June 1917 after King Constantine was forced to abdicate and Venizelos formed a new government. Lieutenant Commander John Myres, who had been in Mackenzie’s organisation,39 stayed on in Athens working on counter-intelligence. Reflecting how confused the situation was, however, in September 1917 Blinker Hall told Cumming he ‘now wanted Myres to be under the Admiral’, while the British minister in Athens, Lord Granville, disagreed. In February 1918 Cumming raised the matter of Myres’s status with Hall, but could record only that ‘no one knows under whom he is serving’. In March the Director of Military Intelligence raised the possibility that MI5 should take over work in Greece (which was now almost entirely counter-intelligence under Military Control Office cover), but nothing came of this and in June Hall told Cumming that he had to keep Myres on ‘as he was persona grata to Venizelos’.

One of Mackenzie’s proposals to Cumming in July 1917 was that ‘good information’ from Turkey could be obtained by sending agents in ‘via Switzerland and get them out by our own routes in Asia Minor’.40 Cumming was not very keen on this. In April he had told Mackenzie to ‘drop Turkish and Syrian matters as part of your main objective’, since ‘we are getting Turkish information through Switzerland’, which was dealt with by ‘a large Bureau in Paris’ (presumably the Bureau Central Interallié). A few relevant reports have survived. In December 1916 Berne forwarded an assessment of the Turkish situation ‘from a new Agent, who has gathered this information from friends in Constantinople’. The government’s financial position was precarious, agricultural production ‘mediocre’ and food supplies unreliable. Volatile public opinion was increasingly antagonistic towards the Germans: ‘sacrificed to the interests of foreign allies, whose names they can neither pronounce nor remember, their [the people’s] resignation of the beginning is now giving place little by little to complaints against the much detested Germans’. In August 1917 Geneva provided a thirty-two-page update, based on interviews with ‘some 20 prominent and well-known Ottomans’ in Switzerland and a similar number of Greeks and Americans ‘lately arrived here from many parts of Asia Minor’. This covered such topics