The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [8]
The Secret Service Bureau was established at a time of heightened and intensifying international rivalries when British strategic policy-makers were becoming especially concerned about the challenge of an aggressive, ambitious, imperial Germany. For most of the nineteenth century, the United Kingdom had been by far the most powerful country in the world, possessing the greatest empire ever seen, and Britain’s leaders had been able to pursue a policy of so-called splendid isolation, largely impervious to any serious threat from other countries. But by the end of the century Britain’s economic lead over the rest of the world was beginning to be eroded, and as rival countries started to catch up, the very extent of British power - what the historian Paul Kennedy has called ‘imperial overstretch’ - came to be regarded as a potential weakness. In 1906 a Foreign Office official characterised the British Empire as being like ‘some gouty giant’, with fingers and toes spread across the world, which could not be approached ‘without eliciting a scream’. In a series of strategic reassessments in the first decade of the twentieth century Britain sought to ease its international position by coming to terms with potential Great Power rivals. Over a five-year period between 1902 and 1907 agreements were made with Japan, France and Russia which eased British naval commitments in the Pacific and Mediterranean, and (temporarily at least) removed the appalling prospect of having to defend the great British imperial possessions in the Indian subcontinent against Russian aggression. At the same time it was effectively assumed in London that there would never now be a war against the United States, thus further easing the burden of defending Britain’s worldwide empire.2
One major challenge remained, that of imperial Germany, which, not apparently content with being the strongest economic and military power in Continental Europe, by the early 1900s, in evident emulation of Great Britain, had begun to construct a first-class navy and seemed set on carving out a global imperial role. With Britain aligned to Germany’s Continental rivals, France and Russia, in what became known as the Triple Entente, policy-makers and public opinion began to worry about the direct threat that might be posed by Germany. Sensational stories of German spies and underground organisations ready to spring into action in the event of a German attack (or ‘bolt from the blue’) were fuelled by alarmist ‘invasion scare’ books such as William Le Queux’s bestsellers, The Invasion of 1910 (1906) and Spies of the Kaiser (1909), which reinforced widespread concerns about British vulnerability among public and government alike. In the War Office department responsible for army intelligence matters, the Director of Military Operations himself, General John Spencer Ewart, and his colleagues Colonel James Edmonds and Colonel George Macdonogh were all convinced that their opposite numbers in the German General Staff were actively targeting Britain. As Nicholas Hiley and Christopher Andrew have shown, however, the fears of German clandestine networks in Britain were wildly overblown - fantastic even; there were no legions of German spies and saboteurs. Yet they seemed to hit a Zeitgeist in Britain where generalised (and well-founded) concerns about a growing relative international weakness readily fuelled fevered speculations about foreign agents flooding the country and working towards its destruction.3
Such was the strength of public opinion that in March 1909 the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, responded to the spy fever by appointing a high-powered sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence (the main British defence policy-making body) to consider ‘the question of foreign espionage in the United Kingdom’. Chaired by Richard Burdon Haldane, Secretary of State for War, the committee included the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Home Secretary and representatives of the Foreign Office and Treasury, along with Spencer Ewart and his Admiralty