M

by Andrew Cook

  This early information gave Kaulitz a good start and pretty soon he was able to take a whole Pimlico house at 31 St George’s Square and install an expensive Exchange Telegraph Column Printing Instrument. This meant simultaneous transmission direct from a big agency and Kaulitz had prospered ever since; so much so that by the end of 1901 he had moved into 44 Temple Chambers, Temple Avenue, on the City borders. The building backs onto King’s Bench Walk, within the enclave of Temple, a foundation of ancient origin where barristers from two Inns of Court (the Inner Temple and the Middle Temple) have their chambers.

  It was Special Branch practice to intercept mail or telegrams which might be of interest, and since the German Embassy wanted to know about Kaulitz, Melville instructed his officers to get hold of any messages to or from South Africa. He was interested to discover that normal GPO deliveries excluded Temple Chambers. Messages in the immediate vicinity were instead received and distributed by the Eastern Telegraph Company of Electra House, Finsbury Pavement. Inspectors Quinn and Walsh called at the company’s offices only to be firmly informed by the Assistant Secretary that ‘no information could be given respecting telegrams or those who send or receive them’.2 Since Special Branch was in no position legally to demand access to another person’s mail, that was that. The War Office, to which Quinn next had recourse, informed him that it was improbable that Kaulitz could be getting cables direct without attracting the attention of the military authorities. There the trail ended, and whether or not the Government passed on all the information to the German Embassy is unknown. Melville noticed the security of Temple, however, and retained it for future reference.

  In 1906 his son James set out upon the path which would lead him to political prominence. After an unpromising start (he had left school to join the Eagle Insurance Company like his siblings) he had worked for several years for the rising barrister Douglas Hogg. Now, still only twenty-one, he was called to the Bar of the Middle Temple. The buildings of this Inn are slightly west of the grassy square, shaded by majestic trees, that is at the heart of the Inner Temple.

  In October of 1909 Cumming noted at a meeting that Edmonds and MacDonogh ‘said they were going to keep M (the best man we have at present) in an office of his own, to which letters could be addressed’. Melville’s friend at the Royal Mail, Henry Freeman Pannett, whose two future sons-in-law had been witnesses at Sidney Reilly’s wedding, retired in 1908. From now on, how sure could Melville be that his own correspondence would not be tampered with?

  After five years at 25 Victoria Street, the office of W.G. Morgan moved to the more discreet environment of Temple Avenue in December 1908. Temple Avenue was not isolated by its postal service alone. Only yards from the bustle of Fleet Street, it was close enough to the gates of Temple itself to be frequented mainly by lawyers who kept regular hours. Unfamiliar faces were remarked by beadles.

  In October also, Melville’s old acquaintance Sidney Reilly paid the first of several visits to London from St Petersburg where he was now based. ‘Based’ is the word to use. Reilly was one of those rare people for whom everywhere is a jumping-off point to the next opportunity. Reilly was staying in Rachkovskii’s favourite London haunt – the extremely grand Hotel Cecil next to the Savoy, a few hundred metres along the river from the Temple. He took advantage of his temporary residence to regularise the change of name by deed poll which he had begun before his precipitate departure from England in 1899. He also re-formed the Ozone Preparations Company, which would be run from an office above Saqui and Lawrence, the jewellers, at 97 Fleet Street.

  Two days after he filed the deed poll application from his temporary address at the Cecil, it seems that there arose, unbidden and unwelcome, a face from the past. A young woman called Louisa Lewis had been working at the Hotel Cecil for four years. On the evening of 25 October 1908 she was seen, dressed in outdoor clothes and hat, at the bottom of the hotel’s imposing marble staircase speaking to a man.

  Later, when a search was mounted and the authorities notified, it would have gone unnoticed that Louisa Lewis was the daughter of Alfred Lewis, manager at the London and Paris Hotel, Newhaven; or that she had been working there when the Reverend Thomas was found dead, and had met ‘Dr T.W. Andrew’ who signed his death certificate. Neither the death nor the young doctor would easily have been forgotten by a young woman.

  The man at the foot of the stairs answered Sidney Reilly’s description perfectly. Louisa Lewis was never seen again.3

  The Ozone Preparations Company, managed in Rosenblum’s (Sidney Reilly’s) absence by his partner William Calder, ran for three years and was wound up in 1911. The choice of Fleet Street for its office may be significant; like Farlow Kaulitz earlier in the decade, Sidney Reilly understood that early knowledge can be converted into hard cash. He was at this time working for the St Petersburg agent for Blohm and Voss of Hamburg; in the course of chasing contracts he would place information, and mis-information, in a St Petersburg newspaper. The English wire services at the time physically received news at Fleet Street offices and hardly anywhere else.4

  The British Secret Service was also aware how much the slant of international news could influence diplomatic, as well as commercial, events. A 1909 letter to the Ambassador in Peking proves that the Foreign Office subsidised Reuters’ office there in order to offer an alternative source of information to the German news going in and out of China.

  Technically the Secret Service also had to keep up with the quickening pace of change. In 1906 Colonel Davies had been a delegate at an early international conference on wireless telegraphy. MacDonogh, besides being a former barrister, was a qualified engineer, and in the years leading up to the war would make it his business to understand advances in the field. Fortunately for Melville, the spy network he would eventually discover made little use of the new technology. Before the First World War, agents put it all down on paper.

  Melville was unchallenged as Chief Detective of the new SSB. At one of Cumming’s first meetings with Edmonds and Kell in November of 1909 he noted that D – Drew – was already out of favour, to be used as little as possible as a matter of policy. Edward ‘Tricky’ Drew (‘time was when Edward Drew was the handsomest man in the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard’, sighed a biographer5) had probably found it hard to adjust. A lifetime in the Metropolitan Police did not necessarily make a man suitable for secret work. For one thing, he might keep on gossiping to his old cronies down the road. Melville never had that problem because he had made professional discretion a habit throughout his life; it had helped him maintain his authority. Nor could an ex-policeman necessarily understand the political and diplomatic niceties of counter-espionage work – unless, like Melville, he had already become familiar with highly placed civil servants and the everyday international intrigue of people at the top. And then, an SSB detective needed to be something of a self-starter; he needed to know when to show initiative, and when to hold fire and consult a senior officer. A lifetime in a hierarchy can undermine independence of thought.

  Cumming noted two other policy decisions made at the same meeting. No other detectives were to be employed just yet. And M was to be present at all meetings with ‘rascals’ (suspects), presumably because his years of experience in dealing with criminals gave him a nose for them. Cumming had not yet met M. He would not meet him for some time. When an appointment was arranged (at Edmonds’s house) Melville failed to turn up – ‘disappointed to find on my arrival that a note had been left for me saying that the authorities had decided that the meeting had better be postponed’ wrote Cumming.6 MacDonogh was determined that Melville should not tell Cumming who the existing foreign agents were.

  This unwillingness to share information was indicative of a deeper awkwardness afflicting the infant SSB. The Navy was sidelined, and Cumming with it. Although Kell and MacDonogh appeared friendly enough they were united in treating Cumming (who had been quietly working for naval intelligence for some years) as a junior partner. Worse: Cumm
ing was older than Kell, and stouter, and up from the country (he had spent the past decade working on boom defences in the Solent). Where Kell was multilingual and thirty-six, Cumming was fifty and – although he spoke French – was only now beginning to learn German. Where Kell was urbane, impatient, and his talents obvious, Cumming was original, modest, patient and a clever engineer whose overriding enthusiasm was for new boats, planes and dirigibles. They were the hare and the tortoise.

  The military men held onto their contacts. Bearing in mind point 4 of Kell’s report,

  It is probably best to employ a first class detective under direction of an officer to collect and work agents abroad.

  Kell’s chief operative, Melville, should have been working equally for both of them. His experience in many respects was unmatched by any senior officer and this is acknowledged by his gradual re-invention not as mere M, but ‘Mr M’, as Long and others came to call him. There is affectionate respect in their attitude to him.

  Melville had personally sanctioned most of the MO5 agents overseas who were now supposed to be handed over to Cumming, but Cumming waited in vain; MacDonogh was playing power games. And naval intelligence had no counterpart network of civilian spies to offer him, because the Admiralty had been employing consular staff. But that policy had decisively changed following a rap over the knuckles from the Foreign Office.7

  In the first months MacDonogh was inappropriately controlling, expecting Cumming to be ever-present at Drew’s empty Victoria Street office where nothing happened and there were no records or facilities. Unsurprisingly, Cumming was soon agitating to be permitted to move from Victoria Street to a headquarters of his own (six months later, in March 1910, he briefly relocated to Ashley Mansions in Vauxhall Bridge Road prior to a more permanent move to Whitehall Court). In November of 1909 he was allowed to meet his first foreign agent, B – Byzewski, who was already working in Berlin – but was only reluctantly permitted to pay him.8

  Long, who had been valuable abroad, was back in England working for Melville. Again, this was all about the War Office maintaining control. In the August of 1910 the Admiralty showed that it was just as capable of petty behaviour when it prohibited coastguards from communicating with Kell.9 Yet over the years the SSB did become a more collaborative service, albeit one that eventually evolved into two separate services, headed respectively by Kell and Cumming, dealing with home and foreign intelligence. That it did so owed more to Cumming’s patience, sharpness and determination than to any unprompted generosity on the part of Kell or MacDonogh.10

  With no espionage network so far uncovered, yet a certainty that systematic spying was going on, Melville’s investigations had to start from a wide base and narrow their focus to likely individuals. Kell had no problem with this; he was an orderly fellow who dealt well with card indexes and lists and his report had recommended

  11. The registration of aliens which was enforced by Act of Parliament in 1798 and 1804 must be revived.

  Conveniently, spies in Britain before the First War seem almost without exception to have been foreigners. If they sounded British and looked it, they usually turned out to have (exactly like Kell himself, as it happened) foreign parents. Inconveniently, the information-gathering must be unofficial because Parliament had not given the go-ahead for a register of aliens. So when Kell set out to compile his register of immigrants, rather than visitors, to Britain, he cast his net extremely wide. Nearly all of them would be safe. But among them would be people with something to hide – people subject to blackmail by the authorities in their own country; or people who would do anything for money; or (rarely) genuine patriots of another country. Most often, the tasks demanded of them seemed so harmless that the people themselves cannot have realised what terrifyingly deep water they might be stepping into.

  It would be Melville’s task to investigate individual foreigners who, in his judgement and Kell’s, were up to no good. This represented a new departure because most of his work to date had been about investigating suspicious visitors and scaring them off. If he did uncover a network, in his view he should do exactly what he had done with the anarchists of the Tottenham Court Road: make them nervous without letting them know what he knew, then leave them alone so that he could learn more about them if he wanted to and pick them off if need be. This approach made efficient use of scant resources. It had worked for the Deuxième Bureau and Special Branch twenty years ago, and it would work again.

  Kell kept memoranda of his activities in the first summer of SSB’s existence. M, L, and K (as Kell was known) met quite regularly at the Temple Avenue office. Melville’s plan for a round-robin was bettered, for in June 1910, Kell himself made a tour of chief constables to impress on them the need for vigilance. Henry Dale Long was encouraged to join the Legion of Frontiersmen to find men who would supplement the post-office and police authorities as the ‘few paid agents’ of Kell’s report, which at this stage remained the blueprint for activity. M hopped across to Ireland to investigate the sister of a deceased soldier called O’Brien (she was trying to sell plans of Portsmouth), and reported on a German who seemed to frighten all the foreign waiters around Folkestone. At Harrow School a drill instructor called Greening was under surveillance.

  On the evening of 10 July 1910, a Sunday, M was to meet naval Captain Roy Regnart in Brussels. Regnart had been set to work with Cumming on the orders of Admiral Bethell, head of the Department of Naval Intelligence. There was evidently a ‘traitor’ in that city. The word is in inverted commas in Kell’s memorandum. The information had come to Kell via Cumming, whom Kell did not yet take entirely seriously, only slowly perceiving that Cumming’s preoccupation with dirigibles and other transport wizardry might be more to the point than it appeared. (The first plane had flown the Channel exactly a year earlier.)

  If the Brussels lead proved genuine and Melville required an arrest to be made while they were in Belgium, Superintendent Quinn was on standby to provide a detective at short notice. On Wednesday 13 July everyone was back in England and Kell noted:

  Meeting with C and Regnart in C’s room at 11am. Regnart gave a full account of the Brussels affair, which ended in a fiasco.

  The following day:

  Met M in his offices at 10am and he gave me an account of the Brussels affair. He seems to think they were taken in by Rouveroy and that no more confidence should be reposed in him. I told M to send in a written report.11

  They would discover that in Brussels

  …there were two very dubious agencies… which make a business of prying into the military secrets of all the big powers and selling information to the highest bidder.12

  They would use them, too; but they needed their own man on the spot. Henry Dale Long, now working to Melville, would be relocated to Brussels for a second time in 1911. A continental posting was what Regnart wanted for himself. He was a troublesome colleague although he held Melville in high regard. In the course of his absence for the ‘fiasco’,

  Cumming discovered yet more examples of his having given to agents addresses of his own for communications that should have been sent to Cumming. The trip, meanwhile, was disappointingly inconclusive but in one respect surprising: Regnart formed a high opinion of Melville and his methods, the tactical subtlety and penetration of which may be gauged by the following: ‘He [Regnart] says M is much bolder than he when dealing with strangers. He goes right up to them and peers in their faces.’13

  It would become apparent that for Cumming’s purposes, spies in the inland capitals of Europe were less important than people who could survey the north German coast with an expert eye. This coastline of shifting sands was almost impenetrable of access from the sea without recent intelligence of sandbanks, mines, harbour works and submarines. The Admiralty were particularly interested in Borkum as a possible landing place because it was sufficiently distant from the Hochseeflotte’s base at Wilhelmshavn. Unfortunately, in August of 1910 the Germans would scent British interest in Borkum when a couple of amateur s
pies, Brandon and Trench, were caught snooping and taking pictures in the area. They were naval officers doing some inept detective work for the Admiralty (not SSB; Regnart acting on his own initiative) while on leave, and they were jailed in Germany.14

  As this embarrassment must be followed by a tit-for-tat arrest, the first alleged spy to make headlines was a cheerful German soldier cadet who probably meant no harm. His capture had nothing to do with Melville at all.

  In the summer of 1910 Lt Siegfried Helm, at twenty-one a very junior engineer officer of the 21st Nassau Regiment, visited England for a month. One of his friends had already been to London and had enjoyed a brief flirtation with a Miss Wodehouse. Helm wrote to her at her London address; he would appreciate her company on his visit to the capital. The reply that reached him in his Tooting boarding-house (the only people there were old ladies, he had complained, ‘from 45 to 70 years old’) came from Fratton. Miss Wodehouse had moved there with a family she was working for.15 Helm had told her he wanted to see Chatham and Aldershot and Portsmouth while he was in England. She told him Fratton was very close to Portsmouth, so he came to stay at the house next door for a few days.

  Miss Wodehouse, probably missing her former beau, was impatient with Helm from the start. He sketched everything – forts, ships, anything he could see around Portsmouth – showed her the pictures and then said winningly ‘You won’t tell, will you?’ Miss Wodehouse did not find this romantic, or even interesting. He was an overgrown schoolboy. However, she probably wanted to enlarge her circle of male acquaintances locally and Helm unknowingly represented an opportunity. Following a tedious afternoon in his company she walked, emboldened by self-righteousness, right into the local barracks and spoke to a senior officer. He and a colleague watched Lt Helm in the days that followed and saw more sketching and some behaviour they interpreted as furtive. They stopped him and asked questions, and Lt Helm was detained for a couple of days in the Officers’ Mess at Fort Purbrook, where everyone was very hospitable, according to an anxious note he wrote to his betrayer. His capture seems to have been made with embarrassed good humour; the officers did it because they had been told to be vigilant rather than because they saw much harm in the young man.