The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [86]
Three days after the Armistice, General William Thwaites, who had been George Macdonogh’s successor as Director of Military Intelligence for barely a month, proposed amalgamating Cumming’s and Kell’s organisations into a Special Intelligence Service under a single chief. He further proposed that a significant number of army, navy and air force officers should be seconded to the Service to avoid stagnation and a loss of touch with realities. Liaison between the new SIS and the armed service Directorates of Intelligence would be provided by the ‘formation of a joint naval, military and air intelligence section to consist of three or six officers from the three services’. Clearly envisaging a supervisory role for this section over the amalgamated Secret Service, Thwaites said that it ‘would consider and work out in conjunction with that Service any developments in its organization’. Writing to the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral Blinker Hall, Thwaites also proposed that ‘our two cryptographic branches’ (the War Office’s MI1(b) and the Admiralty’s Room 40) should ‘be amalgamated and placed under this section’.
Lord Hardinge, Permanent Under – Secretary at the Foreign Office, responded cautiously. ‘The present system’, he wrote on 25 November, ‘has had all the defects of every condominium; but it has worked, and all things considered has survived the test of four years of war with a fair measure of success.’ He agreed that ‘some change will be necessary’, but he felt that now was not the time. ‘It would’, he argued, ‘be premature to make any alteration until Peace is signed and we can see our way a little clearer.’ Hall, too, wanted to wait. ‘I should like more time to think it over,’ he told Thwaites. While he agreed that ‘amalgamation should eventually take place . . . at the present moment when all the Heads of the Government are full of peace resolutions and the coming [Peace] Conference’, he did not think that there was ‘much chance of putting a big scheme through successfully’. Cumming initially kept his opinion to himself. On 30 November Thwaites complained to him that he ‘had not replied to his Minute re amalgamation’, but (as Cumming noted in his diary), when he ‘asked my opinion on the scheme’, he ‘did not appear to give consideration to what I did say’. What he said would have been negative. An unsigned internal memorandum, ‘Personal for “C”’, on 15 November had dismissed Thwaites’s scheme on three grounds. First: ‘that the methods, personnel and venue for the two services are entirely different’ – counter-espionage work ‘is done in England . . . Espionage is conducted abroad.’ Second was ‘a practical consideration’, since it seemed ‘impossible that MI5 should continue as a strictly military organisation’. In peacetime its work ‘will be police work’; the Home Office would certainly be involved and ‘obviously the Home Office could not touch espionage’. The third argument was that the Foreign Office ‘must remain the only department that can be responsible for the espionage side of Secret Service’. As it ‘involves operations abroad, and though the F.O. will always disavow them, for that very reason (paradoxical as it may seem) they must have full cognisance of what is being done, and power to check it, so that at the very least they may know what they are to disavow’.
In January 1919 Cumming combined these points in a forcefully argued paper against the amalgamation proposal. Sensing that financial retrenchment was in the air, he smartly argued that the scheme appeared ‘to be far too extravagant and expensive for acceptance as a practical measure’. Whereas before the war the central Secret Service staff had ‘consisted of three persons’, the new proposal provided ‘for six or twelve officers for the Naval, Military and Air Services alone’. He reaffirmed the principle that the Chief of the Service ‘must be in supreme control’, and noted that the scheme dealt with the ‘Army, Navy and Air