The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [91]
Various other intelligence reorganisation schemes circulated during 1920. One envisaged amalgamating ‘the S.S. with M.I.5 under the Assistant Commissioner of Police’ (Basil Thomson). Another proposed that ‘all British Governmental S.S. Organisations’, including Cumming’s and Kell’s departments, signals intelligence, Indian Political Intelligence and parts of the police Special Branch, as well as the ‘Post Office Officials concerned in the examination of correspondence’, should be ‘placed under one executive Chief ’. In the end, departmental interests (it was never likely that the Foreign Office would willingly relinquish control of Cumming’s Bureau) and personal factors (Basil Thomson, for example, was widely regarded as being dangerously over-mighty), together with the clear practical difficulties of imposing any significant reorganisation, meant that nothing much was done.
For Cumming, meanwhile, the debate prompted him to think hard about the purpose of his organisation and, drawing on his ten years’ experience, in early 1920 he noted down some thoughts about ‘the essentials of the Secret Service’. The ‘first, last and most necessary essential of a S.S.’, he wrote, ‘is that it should be SECRET’. This, he lamented, ‘is the first thing to be forgotten in any scheme and the last thing to be remembered in putting it into practice’. The second essential was that ‘the S.S. at home must be small and self-contained and its personnel must be independent of any control other than that of its Chief. No one should have power to take away his trained staff or to give them orders.’ The third requirement was the reiteration of Nicolson’s minute of November 1915 confirming the functional autonomy of the Chief of the Secret Service, and giving him sole control of ‘all espionage and Counter-espionage agents abroad’. While he would be independent of the War Office and the Admiralty, he would ‘keep in constant touch’ with those departments, who would ‘inform him of their requirements as occasion demands and furnish him with criticisms of his reports in a manner to help towards their improvement where necessary’. Finally, the ‘C.S.S.’ would provide a monthly financial report to the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, and would be subject to his sole control ‘in all matters connected with the expenditure of Secret Service funds’. In a supplementary paper, clearly reflecting on his recent wartime experience, Cumming allowed that the Service should be organised in peacetime so that the personnel and records in any particular district could be handed over ‘complete as a going concern’ when that area fell ‘within the zone of Military operations’. Nevertheless, ‘in Neutral countries or Allied countries not in a fighting zone, the S.S. should be left to do its work without interference’.
By the end of 1920 Cumming had secured – at least in the medium term – the survival of the Secret Service as an autonomous department under the Foreign Office. Briefing Sir Eyre Crowe about his work on 17 October, just before Crowe succeeded Hardinge as Permanent Under-Secretary, Cumming assured him that, ‘in the accepted meaning of the words Secret Service’, there was ‘no such thing in this country’. He maintained that ‘we have never practised any of the black arts usually ascribed to S.S. and which have been adopted elsewhere’, and he asserted the value of his organisation for the Foreign Office. It dealt, he said, ‘with classes of society which the Embassies cannot touch’, and the Service’s reports represented ‘a valuable supplement to those obtained from official sources’, as well as ‘the main source of information of the great social conspiracies which are rife throughout the world’. Although there is no hint of it in Cumming’s diary, Crowe’s initial response to the reports he received from the Secret Service was not at all favourable. In a note to his private secretary, Nevile Bland, who was evidently away from the office, Crowe complained that he was ‘snowed under! Also daily irritated by your S.S. reports, which are a mass of rubbishy