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men to Central Asia where they could watch the Trans-Siberian Railway ‘& report any military preparations on it’. In May the Director of Military Intelligence summoned Cumming to see General Frederick Poole, commanding the British troops in Archangel, who wanted him to send Colonel Boyle out to ‘take charge of the Russian part of Scale’s organisation’. In June Cumming noted that there were still a dozen British intelligence officers (not all of whom were working for him), some in uniform, stationed in Russia. But there was clandestine work too. On 27 July he interviewed a man who was aiming to ‘travel in Russia in peasants dress’. Two days later he noted that ‘Mr Dukes arrived from Russia unexpectedly.’ He seemed ‘a first rate man for our job ’tho a little independent in spirit’. A talented musician, Paul Dukes, who was to become ‘ST/25’ and work undercover for Cumming in 1918-19, had been living in Russia since 1908 and had been an assistant conductor with the Imperial Mariinsky Opera at the outbreak of the war. During the first half of 1918, ostensibly serving as a King’s Messenger (an official British government courier), he had been reporting back to the Foreign Office on internal conditions in Russia.47

On 31 August 1918, responding to the murder of Moisei Uritsky, head of the Petrograd Cheka, and the attempted murder of Lenin, both of which were falsely blamed on Allied intrigues, the Cheka stormed the British embassy in Petrograd, killing the naval attaché, Captain Cromie, in the process. Lockhart was arrested and briefly held at the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, while Reilly evaded arrest by going underground and eventually escaping in disguise through Petrograd, German-occupied Estonia and Finland. The attack on the British embassy marked the final breakdown of diplomatic relations between the two countries. For the next eighteen months or so, with direct military intervention in Russia and sustained support for White Russian forces in the Russian Civil War, Britain and Soviet Russia were openly at war. For much longer afterwards, and with varying intensity over the succeeding seven decades, the perceived threat of Soviet Communism powerfully coloured the attitudes of Britain’s policy-makers in general and its intelligence community in particular.

PART THREE

THE INTERWAR YEARS

5

The emergence of SIS

In 1917 Mansfield Cumming famously remarked to Compton Mackenzie that after the war he should come to work with him in the Secret Service. He told him the business was ‘capital sport’ and ‘much more fun in peacetime than in war-time’.1 Perhaps so, and no doubt Cumming was not the only person during those sombre wartime days to hark nostalgically back to some idyllic prewar existence which, they hoped, might return in the future, but for the Secret Service the actuality of the transition from war to peace, and the troubled years which followed, was not much ‘fun’. As had been the case during the war, the independent existence of the Service was threatened, and, although the Foreign Office was confirmed as the Service’s parent department, relations between the diplomats and their clandestine colleagues were sometimes difficult, especially over the question of cover. Above all, for almost two decades financial stringency dominated the Service’s work and meant that it had to operate on a shoestring at a time when the new revolutionary regime in Soviet Russia appeared to pose a major threat, and, in the 1930s, when the rise of aggressive and ambitious governments in Italy, Germany and Japan further challenged Britain’s worldwide interests.

Postwar reorganisation schemes

With the end of the shooting war in 1918, Cumming had to face a more insidious, though less lethal, battle in Whitehall for the independent survival of his Bureau. Crucial (and enduring) issues relating to the nature and organisation of British secret intelligence were fiercely debated, and although Cumming ultimately achieved his aim of keeping Whitehall departments – especially the service ministries – at arm’s length and securing autonomy