The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [82]
In October 1917 Cumming’s contacts with the Aaronsohns also provided the British government with back-channel communications to Jewish groups in Palestine. In November 1917 Aaron Aaronsohn’s brother Samuel (who was then in London) was given an advance copy of the Balfour Declaration (in which the British government stated that they viewed ‘with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’) for him to smuggle into Palestine in order to encourage Jews with their work in support of the Allied war effort. Cumming, too, liaised with the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, meeting him several times in 1917 and 1918 to discuss Jewish affairs. The advance of Allenby’s forces northwards into Palestine in 1917 and 1918 overran whatever remained of Cumming’s operations there. On 18 September 1918, by which stage British forces had reached Syria and some six weeks before Turkey signed an armistice, Cumming noted in his diary that his organisation in Palestine had now been ‘transferred to [the] military’.
There is very little evidence of activity by MI1(c) in further-flung areas such as South America and the Far East. In February 1915 Blinker Hall instructed him ‘to send a good man to Santiago & Punta Arenas’ in Chile for an unspecified ‘certain purpose’ and with a generous budget of ‘up to £2000’. The Admiralty were concerned about German commerce raiders operating in the seas around South America, and there was need, too, for economic intelligence in support of the Allied blockade of the Central Powers. Cumming noted another ‘S. American scheme’ in his diary in October 1915, and in 1916-17 several officers (some by the specific request of Admiralty Intelligence) were despatched to the Continent. From May 1917 A. H. A. Knox-Little took charge of South America in Head Office. He was described as a ‘member of an important firm trading in that continent’, and had sole charge of ‘a large agency which he worked entirely on his own until the end of the war’. Although there was British intelligence activity in the Far East during the war (mainly keeping track of covert German intrigues), most of this was handled by the military and naval authorities on the spot, in collaboration with Indian agencies and the local colonial police.44 In January 1917 Cumming was consulted about a scheme to develop work in China proposed by General Dudley Ridout, the senior army officer at Singapore. Cumming was evidently not averse to expanding into the Far East. When in November 1917 a candidate approached him ‘wanting a job connected with Japan’, Cumming rejected him on the grounds that he was ‘too old & set’. During 1918, however, a number of possible officers were interviewed to work in China, and one was actually sent out under business cover, but was recalled by telegram immediately on his arrival at Shanghai ‘since it had been reported that he had been indiscreet on board ship so that his mission was known’. In July 1918 Cumming sent out another individual, with cover as a furniture-dealer. He was recalled after a month when it was ‘discovered that he had merely obtained a passage to the Far East for his own purposes and did not intend to work’. No further efforts to start an organisation in the Far East were made until 1920.
Russian enemies
SIS’s coverage of Russia during the revolutionary period is illustrated in a collection of documents which Captain William James, Assistant Director of Naval Intelligence under Blinker Hall during the war, assembled in March 1919. He had the Naval Intelligence Department collect together ‘all the reports sent in from 1914 to 1919 by our agents through “C”, which appear to be of historical value’. It was noted that there was