The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [90]
Whatever his organisation was called, Cumming had not seen the last amalgamation scheme. Towards the end of 1919 Thwaites returned to the attack, enlisting the support of Commodore Hugh Sinclair (who had succeeded Blinker Hall as Director of Naval Intelligence in January 1919). This time the scheme was not to integrate the ‘Espionage and Counter Espionage Services’ but to join them ‘under one head’ and administer them as one Secret Intelligence Service. The head of this service would be superior to both Cumming and Kell, and would himself be answerable to a committee comprising the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office and the three armed service Directors of Intelligence. Efficiency savings could be made by combining ‘administrative, secretarial, record, legal and technical services’, as well as ‘fusion of records’. While he had ‘an open mind on the subject’, Sinclair allowed himself to be associated with the proposal, and pressed Hardinge to override Cumming’s hitherto obstructive attitude. ‘I hope’, he urged, ‘you will see your way to order C—to explore the possibilities in close co-operation with K—.’
Cumming was no more enamoured of this scheme than the last. Writing to Hardinge’s private secretary, Nevile Bland (a man who was intermittently to play an important role in the development of SIS over the next twenty-five years), Cumming bluntly said that there were no further administrative economies to be made and ‘no records to fuse’, since ‘the C.E. [counter-espionage] service is not concerned with the obtaining of knowledge and information (if it is obeying the rules laid down)’. Above all he resented being superseded by any other individual. ‘Unless the authorities are dissatisfied with the present C.S.S.,’ he wrote, ‘some considerable gain ought to be indicated to make up for putting him under some unknown person who cannot have equal experience, and whose interference therefore will in all probability be prejudicial both to efficiency and economy, to say nothing of secrecy and safety.’ If Hardinge insisted, he would ‘of course, co-operate with Colonel Kell as suggested’, but he protested ‘against disclosing the details of my secret organisation to anyone’. He worried lest the scheme was merely a device to save MI5, arguing that ‘from the time Sir Basil Thomson was given charge of anti-Bolshevik and undesirable-alien control in this country the work of MI5 practically ceased’. These ‘persistent proposals’ were, he suggested, ‘intended to enable the very expensive staff of M.I.5 to find new spheres of activity in my office where they are not required. This’, he continued, ‘would be unwise and an unfair burden to me, and prejudicial to my staff who are highly trained and experienced.’ Cumming also hoped that Hardinge might ‘consider the proposals in the light of the position that would arise when the present C.S.S. retires’, after which ‘a determined effort would be made to put Colonel Kell into the position, to the prejudice of the present loyal and trained staff and the lasting detriment of the S.S. whose ten years experience would be entirely lost’. In a separate minute to Bland, Cumming observed that it was ‘the third scheme put forward since the Armistice’, each of which had been ‘aimed at diminishing the authority & command of the C.S.S.’, and he acidly commented that the proposed date for implementing the scheme – 1 April 1920 – ‘seems