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Service only’, ignoring ‘the Political and Economic Sections of my Bureau’, which, he asserted, would ‘become the most important of all and must be provided for on equal terms with the rest’. If this were done, the cost of the headquarters staff would ‘amount to almost as much as we were allowed for the whole of the Secret Service all over the world before the war’. Moving on to the offensive, he argued that Military Intelligence were not ‘in any sense competent to say what is required for S.S. in peace time. They have’, he declared, ‘no knowledge or experience of the matter at all and are competent only to say what the military requirements will be.’ While Cumming asserted that ‘S.S. should be separate and apart from other Government departments’, implicit in his paper (which appears to have been prepared for Hardinge) was the assumption that the Foreign Office should remain in charge of the Bureau.

Bitter wartime experience meant that Cumming wanted as little to do with the War Office as possible. During the war, he wrote, the War Office had ‘country by country destroyed my Organisation’. If an efficient secret service was to be built up ‘for the much more severe conditions of Peace’, it ‘must be kept clear of War Office interference or there will be no chance of securing efficiency or of maintaining the Secrecy which is an essential of its success or even of its continuance’. Cumming went on to complain about ‘the constant robbery’ of his staff during the war. It was ‘scarcely an exaggeration to say that whenever one of my men displayed unusual capacity he was taken away from me and I was left stranded’. He ‘earnestly’ begged to be allowed to ‘re-organise the S.S. for peace time without the interference of the Military authorities’. Harking back to the arrangement laid down by Sir Arthur Nicolson in November 1915, he asked that the departments concerned should merely inform him of their requirements ‘and leave him to carry them out free from their hindrance’. If, he concluded (and putting his own position on the line), he were not reasonably successful ‘then he should be discharged, but he should be given a fair chance to do his work’.

Inevitably, the debate about intelligence organisation was going to surface at ministerial level. In a general election in December 1918, the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, widely regarded as ‘the man who won the war’, secured a landslide victory and a powerful new mandate for his coalition government. Ultimately, however, he depended for survival on Conservative and Unionist MPs, whose natural disposition towards financial orthodoxy, social conservatism and ‘small government’ limited the extent to which he could follow his own liberal and radical inclinations, especially on the domestic front. Beyond the negotiation of an international settlement at the Paris Peace Conference, which absorbed him for the first half of 1919, was the matter of domestic reconstruction. In Britain, as elsewhere in the world, attitudes to both issues were powerfully coloured by widespread fears of revolution, both at home and abroad. Not only had the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia (preaching, moreover, a gospel of international revolution), but the end of the war had seen the collapse of the Central Powers’ empires – Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey – as well as a wave of revolutionary unrest across the world. Even in the United Kingdom there were worrying portents. There was a sharp rise in industrial unrest (even among the police); revolutionary demonstrations occurred in ‘Red Clydeside’ and other industrial centres; in Dublin Irish republicans met in the first Dáil (parliament) and declared independence; and in army camps in Britain and abroad war-weary soldiers agitated mutinously for quicker demobilisation.2

In January 1919, within a week of his appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty, Walter Long (a senior Conservative politician) circulated a paper on the ‘Secret Service’. During the last year of the war, Long (who had been Colonial Secretary between 1916 and 1919) increasingly nursed