The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [9]
‘System’ was in fact putting it rather strongly, since the existing arrangements for acquiring foreign intelligence were notably haphazard and unsystematic. British army and navy requirements fell into two clear categories: first was primarily technical information about new weapons developments and German military capabilities generally; second was the establishment of some reliable system to give early warning of a German attack. In 1903 William Melville, the Kerry-born former head of the Special Branch in the Metropolitan Police, had been taken on by the Directorate of Military Operations primarily to tackle German espionage in Britain, but he also sent his assistant, Henry Dale Long, on missions to Germany under commercial cover apparently to investigate naval construction. From time to time foreign nationals offered to sell information to the British. Army officers also did some of their own intelligence work. In 1905 James Grierson, Ewart’s predecessor as Director of Military Operations, himself visited the Franco-Belgian frontier, and between 1908 and 1911 Ewart’s successor, Henry Wilson, accompanied by fellow officers, cycled up and down both sides of France’s eastern frontier with Belgium and Germany, exploring possible lines of attack for a German invasion as well as noting (among other things) German railway construction close to the Belgian border.4
Between March and July 1909 the Committee of Imperial Defence sub-committee met three times. It heard Edmonds describe how both the French and the Germans had well-organised secret services. His evidence ‘left no doubt in the minds of the Sub-Committee that an extensive system of German espionage exists in this country’ and that Britain had ‘no organisation for keeping in touch with that espionage and for accurately determining its extent or objectives’. The committee were also told that Britain’s organisation for acquiring information about developments in foreign ports and dockyards was ‘defective’, particularly regarding Germany, ‘where it is difficult to obtain accurate information’. Both the Admiralty and the War Office observed that they were ‘in a difficult position when dealing with foreign spies who may have information to sell, since their dealings have to be direct and not through intermediaries’. At the committee’s second meeting (on 20 April) Ewart asked ‘whether a small secret service bureau could not be established’, and a further sub-committee, chaired by Sir Charles Hardinge (Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office) and comprising Ewart, Bethell, Sir Edward Henry (Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police) and Archibald Murray (Director of Military Training) was deputed to look into the matter.
On 28 April 1909 Hardinge’s sub-committee submitted a report which ‘in order to ensure secrecy’ was not printed ‘and only one copy was in existence’. Their proposals effectively constitute the founding charter of the modern British intelligence community. They recommended that an independent ‘secret service bureau’ be established which ‘must at the same time be in close touch with the Admiralty, the War Office and the Home Office’. It should have three objects. It would first ‘serve as a screen between the Admiralty and the War Office and foreign spies who may have information that they wish to sell to the Government’. Second, it would ‘send agents to various parts of Great Britain and keep [in] touch with the country police with a view to ascertaining the nature and scope of the espionage that is being carried on by foreign agents’; and third, it would ‘act as an intermediate agent between the Admiralty and the War Office and a permanent foreign agent who should be established abroad, with the view of obtaining information