Informant, while motoring last summer in an unfrequented lane between Portsmouth and Chichester, nearly ran over a cyclist who was looking at a map and making notes. The man swore in German, and on informant getting out of his car to apologize, explained in fair English, in the course of conversation, that he was studying at Oxford for the Church, and swore in German to ease his conscience. He was obviously a foreigner.66
Edmonds’s second category of evidence consisted of twelve cases of ‘Germans whose conduct has been reported as giving rise to suspicion’. There was at least one real German spy on the list. German archives confirm that Paul Brodtmann, managing director of the Continental Tyre Company in London, had been recruited by the Nachrichten-Abteilung in 1903 to report on British battleships at Southampton and had also sent several reports to the German military attaché in London.67 Another possibly authentic spy on Edmonds’s list was Herr Sandmann, who had taken photographs inside the Portland defences which were published in the German periodical Die Woche. If Sandmann was a spy, however, his liking for publicity raises some doubt about his competence. Edmonds’s third and final category of evidence consisted of six ‘houses reported to be occupied by a succession of Germans which it is desirable to watch’. Once again Le Queux (‘a well-known author’) seems to have supplied one of the examples: ‘A series of Germans come and go at 173, Powerscourt Road, North End, Portsmouth. They receive many registered letters from Germany.’68 From such mostly insubstantial evidence Edmonds deduced the existence of an ‘extensive’ German espionage network in Britain directed, he believed, from a special office in Brussels. ‘The use of motors’, he believed, ‘has facilitated espionage, as it enables agents to live at a distance from the scene of their operations, where their presence excites no suspicion.’69
At least one member of the sub-committee, Lord Esher, was less than impressed with Edmonds and described him in his journal as ‘a silly witness from the WO’: ‘Spy catchers get espionage on the brain. Rats are everywhere – behind every arras.’70 Probably to test the limits of Edmonds’s credulity, Esher asked him whether he ‘felt any apprehensions regarding the large number of German waiters in this country’. Edmonds remained calm. He ‘did not think that we need have any apprehensions regarding the majority of these waiters’.71 Esher’s initial scepticism gradually waned as the War Office revealed the extent of its concern. Whatever doubts remained on the sub-committee were successfully dispelled by the chairman. Haldane had a reputation for having not espionage but German culture on the brain. John Morley, the Secretary of State for India, complained that he ‘wearies his Cabinet colleagues by long harangues on the contribution of Germany to culture’.72 Thus when Haldane told the sub-committee that it was ‘quite clear that a great deal of reconnaissance work is being conducted by Germans in this country’, some of it probably to ‘enable important demolitions and destruction to be carried out in this country on or before the outbreak of war’, his views conveyed unusual conviction.73
Haldane told the second meeting of the sub-committee on 20 April that he had just returned from a visit to Germany. Though he did not think the German government had a definite invasion plan, there was little doubt that ‘the German General Staff is collecting information systematically in Great Britain’. Ways must therefore be found ‘to prevent them in time of war or strained relations from availing themselves of the information they had collected, by injuring our defences, stores, or internal communications’. On Haldane’s proposal, it was agreed that five members of the sub-committee – Sir Charles Hardinge, PUS (permanent under secretary) at the Foreign Office, Sir George Murray, PUS at the Treasury, Sir Edward Henry, Commissioner of the Met, Major General Ewart and Rear Admiral A. E. Bethell, Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI) – should meet to consider ‘how a secret service bureau could be established’.74
Haldane brought before the third and final meeting of the sub-committee on 12 July the most remarkable piece of bogus intelligence it had yet considered. Within the last week, said Haldane, the War Office had received a document from abroad ‘which threw some light on what was going on’:
This document had been obtained from a French commercial traveller, who was proceeding from Hamburg to Spa. He travelled in the same compartment as a German whose travelling-bag was similar to his own. The German, on leaving the train, took the wrong bag, and on finding out this the commercial traveller opened the bag left behind, and found that it contained detailed plans connected with a scheme for the invasion of England. He copied out as much of these plans as he was able during the short time that elapsed before he was asked to give up the bag, concerning the loss of which the real owner had telegraphed to the railway authorities where the train next halted.
Haldane had at first rightly regarded the plans as forged, possibly planted by the French to provide a stimulus for Anglo-French staff talks to prepare for war with Germany. Generals Ewart and Murray (Directors, respectively, of Military Operations and Military Training) persuaded him otherwise. The plans, in their view:
showed great knowledge of the vulnerable points in this country, and revealed the fact that, as we had already suspected, there were certain places in this country where German agents are stationed, whose duty it would be to take certain action on the outbreak of war, or during the time of strained relations preceding that outbreak.75
Some years later Edmonds acknowledged that the plans were, in retrospect, an obvious forgery, though he concluded somewhat bizarrely that they were probably planted by the Germans rather than the French.76 At the time, however, no doubts were expressed by the sub-committee, which agreed unanimously that ‘an extensive system of German espionage exists in this country’. The sub-committee also approved a report on the establishment and funding of a Secret Service Bureau prepared for the meeting by five of its members. The Bureau was ‘to deal both with espionage in this country and with our own foreign agents abroad, and to serve as a screen between the Admiralty and the War Office on the one hand and those employed on secret service, or who have information they wish to sell to the British Government, on the other’.77
The report approved by the sub-committee on the establishment of the Secret Service Bureau was considered ‘of so secret a nature’ that only a single copy was made and handed over for safekeeping to the Director of Military Operations.78 Once established, the Bureau remained so secret that its existence was known only to a small group of senior Whitehall officials and ministers, who never mentioned it to the uninitiated. More than half a century later, the main biographers of Asquith and his ministers seem still to have been unaware of its existence and make no mention of it. Even the nine-volume official biography of Winston Churchill, who was the main supporter of the Secret Service Bureau in the Asquith cabinet, contains no reference to it. One of the few outside the small circle of ministers and mandarins who knew of the founding of the Bureau was Le Queux, who had probably been told by Edmonds. When the Manchester Guardian accused him of propagating the ‘German spy myth’, Le Queux replied indignantly on the letters page on 4 January 1910:
The authorities in London must have been considerably amused by your assurances that German spies do not exist among us, for it may be news to you to know that so intolerable and marked has the presence of [these] gentry become that a special Government Department has recently been formed for the purpose of watching their movements.79
Most of the evidence of ‘an extensive system of German espionage’ which led to the foundation of the Secret Service Bureau was flimsy and some of it (such as the bogus German invasion plan considered at the final meeting of the sub-committee) rather absurd. Since there was no German military intelligence network in Britain at the time, the evidence of its operations considered by the sub-committee was necessarily mistaken (with the possible exception of a few private intelligence-gathering initiatives by German citizens and occasional cases of reports to the German military attaché in London by informants not working for military intelligence).80 The case
for establishing the Bureau was none the less a strong one. A German naval espionage network concentrating on naval targets was operating in Britain and, until the establishment of the Bureau, there was, to quote the sub-committee report, ‘no organisation for keeping in touch with that espionage and for accurately determining its extent or objectives’. The continuing naval arms race between Britain and Germany, a persistent cause of tension between the two countries until the First World War, made such an organization an obvious priority. The successes achieved by the Nachrichten-Abteilung before the outbreak of war, even after the founding of the Secret Service Bureau, were sufficient to indicate that, if naval espionage in Britain had been allowed a free rein, it might well have provided the German Admiralty with a major flow of classified information on its leading rival. A well-developed German naval intelligence network would also have been able to report on the despatch of the British Expeditionary Force to the continent in August 1914.
The Secret Service Bureau got off to a confused start. The sub-committee decided that ‘two ex-naval and military officers should be appointed [to the Bureau] having special qualifications’, but did not seek to apportion work between the two. Nor did it say whether the army or the naval officer should head the Bureau, though whoever became head would have to be ‘free from other work and able to devote his whole attention to Secret Service problems’.81 The officers selected by the War Office and the Admiralty were Captain Vernon Kell and Commander Mansfield Cumming RN.82
The thirty-six-year-old Kell had been born while his mother was on a seaside holiday at Yarmouth and liked to describe himself in family circles as a ‘Yarmouth Bloater’ (kipper). His oddly chosen nickname was misleading. Kell’s father was an army officer who had distinguished himself in the Zulu Wars and other conflicts at the outposts of Empire, while his mother (later divorced) was the daughter of a Polish count with a string of exiled relatives scattered across Western Europe. Kell had a private education and a cosmopolitan upbringing, travelled widely on the continent to visit friends and relatives, and – according to an unpublished biography by his widow – learned five foreign languages in the process. After Sandhurst, he joined his father’s regiment, the South Staffordshire, ‘determined to strike out on his own and make use of his languages’. Having qualified with ease as an army interpreter in French and German, Kell left in 1898 for Moscow to learn Russian. Two years later he set out for Shanghai with his new wife Constance to learn Chinese and witnessed the anti-Western Boxer Rebellion at first hand. As Kell’s widow later recalled, ‘We were constantly hearing of how the Boxers were succeeding with alarming swiftness to poison the minds of the villagers and townsmen.’83 Kell was the most accomplished linguist ever to head a British intelligence agency.
Extracts of the record of a meeting at Scotland Yard to implement the recommendation of the sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence to nominate Kell and Cumming to the Secret Service Bureau, which was intended to start work in early October 1909.
On his return to London from China in 1902, Kell was employed as a German intelligence analyst at the War Office. Probably because of the paucity of intelligence, he found the work ‘not particularly interesting’.84 His opportunity to make his mark came soon after the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 when the officer in charge of the Far Eastern section was found to have confused Kowloon (the city) with Kaoling (Indian corn), and to have made other embarrassing errors. Edmonds was chosen to replace him and selected Kell as his deputy and ‘right-hand man’. In 1909 it was Edmonds as head of MO5 who proposed Kell (then assistant secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence) for the Secret Service Bureau.85 The recent claim that, by the time Kell joined the Bureau, he was ‘a dyed-in-the-wool Germanophobe’86 is clearly contradicted by the Kells’ decision in 1907 to employ a Germangoverness for their children.87 Though, like many in the War Office, Kell wrongly believed that Britain was being targeted by German military, as well as naval, intelligence, no evidence has come to light to indicate that, like the more excitable Edmonds, he was in contact with William Le Queux.88 In the interests of secrecy, Kell had to be removed from the active list before joining the Secret Service Bureau. He was thus taking a significant gamble in accepting the new job. As his wife wrote later: ‘There was the risk that should he fail to carry it through it would leave him with his career wrecked and bring about the dismal prospect of having to provide for his family with no adequate means of doing it. But he was young and an optimist – why should he fail?’89
Letter from Kell to the Director of Military Operations, Major General (later Lieutenant General Sir) John Spencer Ewart, accepting the ‘billet’ offered him in the Secret Service Bureau.
As well as being fourteen years older than Kell, Cumming was also more extrovert. Major (later Major General Sir) Walter Kirke of MO5, who saw Cumming almost daily during the two years before the war, found him ‘the cheeriest fellow I’ve ever met, full of the most amusing yarns’. But, on first acquaintance, Cumming could also be intimidating. The writer Compton Mackenzie, who worked for him during the First World War, recalled how he would stare at newcomers through a gold-rimmed monocle. Peacetime secret service work, Cumming told him, was ‘capital sport’.90 There was one major similarity between the careers of Kell and Cumming. Kell had moved into desk jobs because of sometimes severe asthma. Cumming was forced to retire from active service in the navy because of illness. In 1898 he returned to the active retired list and was put in charge of the Southampton boom defences. In August 1909 he received an unexpected letter from the Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral Bethell: ‘Boom defence must be getting a bit stale with you . . . You may therefore perhaps like a new billet. If so I have something good I can offer you . . .’ The ‘new billet’ was with the Secret Service Bureau.91
The Admiralty and the War Office had failed to agree on what Cumming’s and Kell’s roles would be. Bethell initially told Cumming that he would ‘have charge of all the Agents employed by him and by the W[ar] D[epartment]’ and would have a junior colleague. By the time the Secret Service Bureau began work, however, the junior colleague, Kell, thanks to the support of the War Office, looked as if he might have the upper hand. Cumming, as he admitted in his diary after another meeting with Bethell, was ‘disappointed to find that I was not to be Chief of the whole Bureau’. He was even more disappointed when Colonel George Macdonogh, who had succeeded Edmonds as head of MO5, wrote to tell him on 10 October that he proposed to hand all War Office matters over to Kell and that he should work directly to Kell. ‘The letter’, wrote Cumming, ‘made me very uncomfortable as I could not help feeling that under the circumstances, it was a distinct rebuff.’92 As Cumming’s biographer, Alan Judd, puts it, ‘The War Office thought it controlled the Bureau, the Admiralty thought it controlled Cumming, while the Foreign Office, which paid for it, did not at this stage want too much to do with it.’93 On 21 October Kell and Cumming agreed on a division of responsibilities which presaged their future roles as the first heads of MI5 and SIS. Cumming wrote in his diary: ‘[At a] meeting with K[ell] and Macdonogh, duties assigned; K[ell] gets Home work, both naval and military (espionage and counter-espionage) and I get Foreign, naval and military, K[ell] gets M[elville] and D[ale Long] and their office, and I was to have nothing to do with them.’ Kell and Cumming, however, remained in the same office only until the end of the year, with Macdonogh forwarding Cumming his monthly salary of £41 13s 8d via Kell.94
During these early months, Kell, as he later reported, spent most of his time ‘going through the previous history of counter-espionage as shown in the War Office files, and in getting acquainted with the various aspects of the work’.95 Melville (‘M’), assisted by Dale Long (‘L’), investigated a number of localities where reports of alleged German espionage had reached the War Office.96 Despite the agreement by Cumming and Kell on dividing the Bureau’s work, the relationship between them remained tense. By 1 November Cumming was close to despair:
C
annot do any work in office. Been here five weeks, not yet signed my name. Absolutely cut off from everyone while there, as cannot give my address or [be] telephoned to under my own name. Have been consistently left out of it since I started. K[ell] has done more in one day than I have in the whole time . . .
The system has been organised by the Military, who have just had control of our destinies long enough to take away all the work I could do, hand over by far the most difficult part of the work (for which their own man is obviously better suited) and take away all the facilities for doing it.
I am firmly convinced that K[ell] will oust me altogether before long. He will have quantities of work to show, while I shall have nothing. It will transpire that I am not a linguist, and he will then be given the whole job with a subordinate, while I am retired – more or less discredited.97
Cumming’s morale improved somewhat after the DNI, Rear Admiral Bethell, assured him ‘That I need not do anything to justify my appointment. I must wait patiently for work to come. That I need not sit idle in the Office but could go about and learn.’98
Though Cumming was somewhat reassured and intelligence leads began to reach him in early November,99 he remained suspicious of Kell’s intentions. On 26 November Cumming went to complain to Bethell that Kell was trying to interfere in his arrangements for meeting an agent, and was adamant that he, not Cumming, should pay him. Bethell sided with Cumming, insisting that he was in sole charge of all foreign work and that he – not Kell – was to pay agents. At another meeting on 30 November, Bethell also claimed that the War Office now realized they had made a mistake in dividing the Bureau’s work in two and allowing Cumming to take charge of the more important part.100
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