The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [95]
Cumming acquired a substantial Victorian villa, West House, at 1 Melbury Road in Holland Park in west London, whither headquarters moved on 23 December 1919. This was some distance from Whitehall, but evidently security considerations were uppermost. ‘No one to know of address,’ wrote Cumming in his diary and he even considered (perhaps a bit maliciously) not revealing it to the Director of Military Intelligence. A letter to an individual summoned to Melbury Road shows that the information was too secret to be put on paper. The individual concerned was to report to 1 Adam Street (off the Strand) where he would be given the Head Office address. ‘It is about half an hours underground ride . . . [on] the other side of London,’ he was told, ‘but as we do not make the address public I am afraid this is the only way I can tell it to you.’ In another move to enhance secrecy, Cumming asked that his staff ‘whose salaries were paid out of S.S. funds could have them paid free of Income Tax . . . It was’, he wrote, ‘undesirable that their names & connection with S.S. should be known to anyone.’ This privilege, agreed to by the Foreign Office, was jealously guarded by the Service for decades to come.
The pressure for economy was relentless. At the beginning of 1920 Nevile Bland told Cumming that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had asked for his estimate to ‘be reduced to half!’. In February Bland revealed that the Secret Service’s income ‘should be cut down to £65,000’. On 2 March Cumming learned that Hardinge had confirmed the £65,000 figure, but had added that ‘the matter was to be put up to the Cabinet’. On the plus side, Hardinge was to raise Passport Control fees by 50 per cent, ‘thus providing a good income’. A fortnight later Bland confirmed to Cumming ‘categorically’ that ‘Passport Control with its cover & funds were an integral part of our financial scheme’, which was just as well as Robert Nathan calculated that, without it, the Service would ‘require an additional £100,000’.
The proposed budget cut to £65,000 greatly alarmed Winston Churchill, the Secretary of State for War, who protested about it to his senior Cabinet colleagues. ‘With the world in its present condition of extreme unrest and changing friendships and antagonisms, and with our greatly reduced and weak military forces,’ he argued, ‘it is more than ever vital for us to have good and timely information.’ Setting up a Secret Service organisation was a slow business; ‘five or ten years’ were ‘required to create a good system’, which could be ‘swept away by a stroke of the pen’. It would, he wrote, ‘be an act of the utmost imprudence to cripple our arrangements at the present most critical time’. Churchill circulated a table prepared by Cumming showing proposed expenditure both under the original 1920-1 estimate of £125,000 and under the new estimate of £65,000. In each case allocations of £15,000 for ‘Headquarters’, £1,000 for ‘Technical’ and £10,000 for ‘Contingent’ remained the same, but in the reduced scheme there were deep cuts abroad. The stations in Vladivostok, Prague, Warsaw, Italy, Spain and Portugal were abolished (saving £7,000), and £4,000 earmarked ‘for the inauguration of a service of information from Berlin, Munich and Hamburg’ was cut. Spending reductions elsewhere, however, suggested a slightly greater emphasis on work against Germany than Russia. ‘Helsingfors (for North Russia)’ was cut from £20,000 to £8,000, and ‘Holland (for Germany