• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2626 0

was for unspecified ‘A. B.’ (Anti-Bolshevik) work of some sort. On the revenue side, £132,000 was ascribed to the Secret Service Vote; £5,000 to the ‘P.I.D.’ (the Foreign Office’s Political Intelligence Department); £56,690 for overt Passport Control work (balancing the equivalent sum on the expenditure side); and £103,700 for ‘PC SS’. There are three significant features of these accounts. First, Cumming’s core overseas office costs, amounting to nearly £57,000 a year, were covered by the Passport Control budget. Second, a substantial proportion (35 per cent) of his income (the proportion not covered by the Secret Service Vote – passed annually by parliament – and the PID money) came from apparently unattributable (and unexplained) ‘PC SS’ sources. Third, the £58,200 surplus of this income over ‘PC SS’ expenditure appears to have been available to fund secret service work generally.

The cross – subsidy from the Passport Control Organisation was to remain an important component of Secret Service funding throughout the interwar years. Among other advantages, it could help ease pressure on the Secret Service Vote, the single most public acknowledgement of British covert intelligence work, and which both ministers and officials felt could be a hostage to fortune for critics of the security and intelligence services.10 Fears in the autumn of 1918 that parliament might not ‘continue to vote an adequate sum for Secret Services after the war, more especially if a Labour Government comes into power’, led to the remarkable suggestion that ‘a capital sum, say of £1,000,000, should be invested in War Loan in the name of trustees, and the interest used for maintaining the [Secret] Services’. This idea of providing an endowment so that secret agencies would no longer be dependent on (or accountable to) parliament found its way into the February 1919 Secret Service Committee report, where the suggestion was commended ‘to the favourable consideration of the Treasury and the Cabinet’.11

But the real challenge to the postwar intelligence community came less from critical Labour politicians than from the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer urging retrenchment. British public finances were further affected by a sharp decline in the country’s economic situation. From the winter of 1919-20, inflation, pay cuts, a fall in industrial production and rising unemployment came to dominate the scene and reinforced the pressure for government spending cuts. On his return from Paris after the Treaty of Versailles had been signed with Germany on 28 June 1919, Lloyd George initiated a wide-ranging review of government policy, telling the Cabinet on 5 August that scarce resources had to be diverted away from military spending and towards social and industrial reconstruction. British forces, he observed, ‘had destroyed the only enemy we had in Europe’, but if the country now ‘maintained a larger Army and Navy and Air Force than we had before we entered the War, people would say, either that the War had been a failure, or that we were making provision to fight an imaginary foe’. The consequent reassessment of national priorities led to massive budget cuts for the armed services and the definition of the famous ‘ten-year rule’, by which the service ministries in framing their estimates were to assume that ‘the British Empire will not be engaged in any great war during the next ten years’.12

Cumming was well aware of the economic realities. As early as 8 March 1919 he reported that he had reduced his ‘expenditure from the £80,000 at the time of the Armistice to £40,000 a month’. Lord Hardinge responded by noting that the Treasury ‘will press strongly for a stringent retrenchment’ and that Cumming would have to budget for a figure of £60,000 a year. In July 1919 Lord Drogheda of the Foreign Office told Cumming of Lord Curzon’s opinion that ‘he considered S.S. a luxury we could not afford in the present state of our finances as it did not produce value for the money spent on it’. During the second half of 1919 Cumming continued to economise.