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as Turkish military intentions in Mesopotamia, Palestine and Arabia; agricultural production; reported attacks on ‘Non-Turkish races in Syria and Asia Minor’ (including the removal of Greek Christians from coastal areas); and the political situation in Constantinople. The general conclusion was that, with German support, there was ‘going to be a strong Turkish Offensive in Mesopotamia’, with a ‘violent preliminary attack in Palestine preceding an, if necessary, vigorous defence of Jerusalem’. In October 1917 ‘G.23’ reported that the Kaiser, on a visit to Constantinople, had reviewed a German division said to be en route to Mesopotamia. This information tied in with other reports which the War Office had received regarding a possible Turco-German offensive and informed a modest (though generally successful) British push in Mesopotamia and a renewed advance in Palestine, where Jerusalem was captured in December.41

Romania, which occupied a pivotal geographical position in the Balkans, had been an important intelligence target from the start of the war. Courted by both sides, and ruled by a royal family with significant Austro-German connections, Romania remained neutral in August 1914. Under the liberal, francophile Prime Minister, Ion Brătianu, however, the country increasingly leaned towards the Allies. In December 1915 Cumming hired an Englishman called Bertie Maw, who had been in the Romanian oil business before the war, to go out to collect military and economic intelligence. According to a postwar account prepared in SIS, he drew on his own knowledge of the country, exploited prewar contacts and built up a useful network of agents from Romanian railway and customs personnel, who provided ‘reports about goods passing into Austria-Hungary’. In February 1916 Cumming also sent Captain Laycock (who had acted as his deputy in 1914) to Bucharest ‘where he commenced operations parallel to Mr Maw’, though evidently concentrating on military information. In April 1916, however, Cumming told Samuel Hoare in Petrograd that the Director of Military Intelligence was ‘very disappointed with the quality and quantity of news received from Roumania’. The DMI had been hoping for intelligence on ‘troop movements in and out of Bulgaria and military information from Servia’, but hitherto the results had been poor. Laycock, wrote Cumming, ‘is a very able man and from his long service in this Office he knows exactly what is required’. But both Maw’s and Laycock’s work was overtaken by events. After Romania entered the war on the Allied side in August 1916 it was quickly overrun by the Central Powers. Maw’s network collapsed and Laycock’s organisation, which had become an overt military mission linked to the British military attaché, had to withdraw with the Romanian government to Jassy (Iaşi) in the north-east of the country where they clung on with Russian support.

Laycock stayed with the Romanians at least until the spring of 1918. Little evidence survives of his work, though his ambiguous position in the British Military Mission to the Romanian army evidently caused some problems. A colleague reported to Cumming in January 1918 about ‘the difficulties put in Laycock’s way in Roumania & the antagonism shown by our own people to the office there’. In December 1917 Admiral Hall (‘decidedly seedy and irritable’) scolded Cumming ‘about lack of information from Roumania & was not satisfied with my reply that Laycock was Chef de Mission to the M.A. for a long time & his S.S. work spoiled’. Cumming ‘refrained from saying that my N.E. [Near East] organisation had been broken up & taken away by Adml Aegean’. From September 1917 to March 1918 Laycock had some sort of subsidiary operation at Galatz (Galaţi), south of Jassy, under a colleague who spoke six languages (including Romanian) and had enlisted as a trooper in the Imperial Russian Horse Artillery in June 1915. Granted an honorary commission in the British army in February 1918, he got into trouble for telling his bank that he was paid by the ‘Secret Service Department’. This provoked a sharp