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in peace time than in war, for in war time acts are committed and measures taken in neutral countries that would hardly be tolerated in times of peace’. Foreign Office control, he wrote, was ‘secured by holding the purse strings’. Glossing over Cumming’s bitter opinions about his wartime relations with the service ministries, Hardinge asserted that the Foreign Office had kept in ‘the closest possible touch with the Directors of Naval and Military Intelligence’ and that during the war ‘the operations of the Secret Service, thanks to the most able co-operation of General Macdonogh and Admiral Hall’, had ‘been worked with very happy results’, and he believed ‘it may truly be said that its success has been second to none’. Hardinge finally put in a word on behalf of Cumming himself, whose work and duties were ‘exceedingly technical, requiring very special qualities which are not easy to find’. The Foreign Office had ‘been extremely fortunate in securing the services of the present Chief ’ who had now served ‘for nearly ten years’ and had ‘a unique experience of Secret Service both in peace and war’.

These representations had the intended effect, at least in delaying any decision about the future of Cumming’s organisation. When Curzon’s committee met, while it reviewed the recent history of covert intelligence work (mentioning in particular the success of the ‘Foreign Office service’ during the war), it focused mainly on domestic, civil intelligence, endorsing Long’s recommendation for an amalgamated Secret Service Department to be formed with Basil Thomson as head. This had more serious implications for Kell than for Cumming, as, despite the fact that MI5 remained responsible for counter-espionage and military security, Thomson’s expanding department threatened to take over any wider duties on the counter-subversion side. Cumming, for his part, managed to block any ambitions Thomson had to operate overseas, securing agreement that ‘all anti-Bolshevik work abroad’ would be his responsibility alone. As for ‘the military and naval branches of the secret service’, Curzon’s committee thought that the question of reorganisation should be left for consideration by the Committee of Imperial Defence (or some similar body) until after the peace treaty had been signed. While the committee thought ‘that it would be desirable to co-ordinate all intelligence for military purposes and to establish one organization which will serve alike the War Office, Admiralty and Air Force’, crucially, however, they suggested that it would ‘probably be found convenient to maintain the distinction between military and civil intelligence’, which appeared to leave the option open for Cumming’s ‘Foreign Office’ Bureau to continue as a separate entity.6

But the War Office snake was only scotched, not killed. Towards the end of February 1919 Cumming reported that the Director of Military Intelligence was ‘still firmly set upon the idea of amalgamation between my department and MI5’. Appalled by the prospect of combining domestic and foreign intelligence-gathering, Cumming deployed a fresh argument against the idea. Raising ‘the prospect of a Labour Government in the near future’ (a striking prediction, since at this stage Labour had fewer than seventy out of 700 MPs in the House of Commons and the first British Labour government was as yet five years away), and revealing a shrewd appreciation of how secret service matters might be interpreted by both politicians and the general public, he argued that this made it ‘necessary that the S. of S. for Foreign Affairs, with his hand on his heart, should be able to declare that the Secret Service has no connection with the control of labour unrest’. Since it had ‘been clearly proved that money from these strikes’ had been ‘supplied by Bolsheviks’, MI5 would inevitably ‘be connected with labour and Bolshevik troubles’. In April 1919 he prepared a further series of criticisms on specific aspects of the War Office amalgamation scheme. The proposal focused purely on military intelligence and entirely ignored ‘the important