The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [93]
In fact, the unsettled conditions across the postwar world intensified demands for good intelligence. On 7 April 1919 a conference called by Hardinge of Cumming, Kell and the Directors of Military and Naval Intelligence agreed to ask the Treasury for a ‘special allowance of £18,000 a month’ for Cumming’s ‘War Office’ work, which, ‘with his normal annual expenditure of £30,000, would bring the cost of his branch alone to approximately £250,000 for the year’. By contrast Kell needed only £60,000. Reporting on a visit to London the same month to discuss the future of the New York organisation, William Wiseman wrote to his colleague Norman Thwaites that, although Cumming had ‘been reduced financially to a peace basis’, the Foreign Office ‘was already beginning to find this is an impracticable position’. Information was being requested ‘by various departments as to enemy activity in all parts of the world, and the authorities are realising that a good Intelligence service is more than ever necessary at the present juncture’. In May 1919 Cumming told Compton Mackenzie that ‘far from closing down – as we thought we should have to do after the war – we are actually expanding, and we have any amount of work to do in the immediate future’.8
In mid-1919 Cumming and his colleagues began work on a scheme to use the Military Control Organisation both as a means of providing cover for intelligence work and as a source of income. During May it was proposed to give Cumming’s Military Control Officers in foreign countries the status of vice consuls and allocate responsibility to Cumming for the ‘Anti-Bolshevik’ Secret Service (providing reports for Basil Thomson) as well as ‘Passport Control’. It was calculated that the cost of these two functions of some £75,000 a year could be met by ‘a 5/- [25 pence] rate’ (presumably for each visa issued).9 In September the arrangements were hammered out between Cumming and Lord Curzon’s private secretary, Ronald Campbell. Cumming promised Campbell that ‘all political reports sent home by my P.C. man’ would ‘go through the Minister’ and that ‘my man should not deal directly with agents’, thus reassuring Campbell that there would be no risk of the regular diplomats being mixed up directly with ‘secret service work’. Cumming secured an agreement from Campbell that reports could be cabled back to London ‘over the Minister’s signature’, thus giving them privileged protection over the public cable or mail. It was settled that Cumming’s representatives would be given the title of Passport Control Officer and Major Herbert Spencer from Cumming’s staff was appointed first Director of Passport Control Department.
The vital financial contribution which Passport Control made to Cumming’s organisation is illustrated by a set of accounts he drew up at the end of October 1919. This detailed twenty-four officers and twenty-five clerical and support staff at Head Office, along with five officers under Major Spencer running the Passport Control section. Abroad there were thirty Passport Control Offices, most of which had only two or three staff, and a total overseas staff of some eighty or so. Of his total expenditure of £295,256 (some £9.7 million in current terms), £235,700 was devoted to ‘S.S.’, of which £45,500 was ‘PC SS’, presumably the anti-Bolshevik reporting conducted for Basil Thomson. Passport Control itself cost £56,690 and the remaining £2,866