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letter from the head of Section VI (Personnel), telling him that it was ‘a very irregular proceeding to mention the words “Secret Service Department” etc., to anybody, and it is even worse to put it in writing. Please be more careful in future.’ In 1918 a Canadian, Colonel Joseph Boyle, purported to do great work in Romania. He claimed that he had ‘got into touch with an organisation of Jews whom he bribed to destroy the Russian Black Sea Fleet’, which it was feared might fall into enemy hands. Boyle promised the saboteurs ‘so much per ton sunk’, and after some ships had been attacked, claiming Cumming’s authority, he wrote IOUs to the tune of £2 million. A memorandum addressed to the Chief of the Service in 1924, however, noted that none of the bonds had by then been redeemed.

Cumming’s organisation had only a tenuous involvement with the Middle East. Like some of the work he did for Naval Intelligence, it appears that he provided administrative and financial support for operations actually run by other departments. Formally, once Egypt had become a British protectorate in December 1914, MI1(c) could have no direct responsibilities there. Nevertheless, Rhys Samson, who became head of the newly created Eastern Mediterranean Special Intelligence Bureau in March 1916, was indisputably a Cumming appointee. In April 1916 Walter Kirke noted that the Mediterranean was ‘all run by Samson, the best man C has’, and Captain Gilbert Clayton, Director of Intelligence at the British military headquarters in Cairo, favoured making Samson’s organisation into a permanent fixture, writing warmly about it to Cumming.42

An espionage operation based in Alexandria which came under the EMSIB ran agents in Palestine and Syria, though the return was patchy. A recent analysis of British intelligence in the Middle East by Yigal Sheffy has concluded that the best information came from signals and air intelligence methods. ‘Human sources’, states Sheffy, ‘generally provided traditional field information,’ derived from train- and road-watching, and ‘they hardly ever obtained reliable or relevant information on high-level policy or intentions’ (though there is no evidence that they were ever asked to do this). There were also problems of getting information out in time to be useful. One network, however, called NILI (an acronym of a Hebrew biblical phrase meaning ‘Eternal One of Isra’el Will Not Lie’) did collect ‘abundant military information through Palestine and south Syria’. Hoping to influence the British into supporting Jewish interests, the group was organised by ‘Mack’ (Aaron Aaronsohn), a fervent Zionist who ran an agricultural experimental station near Haifa, conveniently located for sea pick-ups of couriers and agents. Although Aaronsohn worked for what was then MI1(c)’s Alexandria office from early in the war, the peak period of productivity seems to have come in 1917.43 In May an unidentified intelligence officer in Paris wrote to the Director of EMSIB: ‘You certainly seem to be getting good stuff through Mack.’ In June Cumming noted that ‘they consider him [Aaronsohn] very valuable in Cairo’. Twenty years afterwards, Colonel Walter Gribbon, who had been in charge of Near Eastern Intelligence in the War Office at the time, suggested that it was ‘largely owing to the information’ provided by the Aaronsohn network that General Allenby ‘was able to conduct his campaign in Palestine so successfully’. Unfortunately, in the autumn of 1917, ‘after a very successful period’, one of their couriers ‘was arrested by the Turks and after various tortures gave away some 60 names’. Among these was Aaronsohn’s sister, Sarah, who committed suicide, having been tortured by the Turks. Aaronsohn had attempted to free his man by bribing his Turkish captors with funds supplied by the British. In early October he asked for £5,000 ‘with which to procure the release of this man’. Cumming responded by pointing out that while ‘we did not on principle pay money for the release of agents’, he had sent the still considerable sum of £2,000 ‘to Cairo for Aaronsohn’s