In August 1909, a semi retired, Naval Commander aged fifty, and living on a houseboat near Southampton devising boom defences for rivers and harbours, received an odd written request. The letter was from Rear Admiral Bethell, Director of Naval Intelligence. It advised Mansfield Cumming’s that he might ‘….like a new billet. If so I have something good I can offer you….’
The new job Bethell offered Cumming’s was to set up and run a new organisation called the Secret Service, which have become the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Major Vernon Kell became director of the newly-formed Secret Intelligence Bureau (MI5) created in response to growing public concern over German Spies in Britain, while Cumming’s had responsibility for foreign affairs (MI6).
Both sections of the SS Bureau took up office space at 64 Victoria Street, Westminster opposite the Army and Navy Stores, Cummings was less than happy with the arrangement but nevertheless opened ‘for business’as he put it by November 1909. Within a matter of weeks he had moved his operation to Ashley Mansions in Vauxhall Bridge Road and again in 1916 to Whitehall Court, Westminster which remained the service HQ until the end of the First World War.
Of course Britain had had intelligence organisations for hundreds of years before this. Henry VIII’s, private secretary, Thomas Cromwell, maintained agents in many foreign countries who reported to the Kings Ambassadors. Sir Francis Walsingham, secretary to Elizabeth I, maintained fifty agents. John Thurloe, Oliver Cromwell’s Secretary of State, maintained a cipher expert, and an ‘allowance for intelligence’ payment was made.
The Napoleonic Wars heralded an explosion of spying, by 1805 Britain was spending £172,000 on its secret service. During the Edwardian era, spying was seen as not being quite cricket. Although an ad-hock service was run by the Foreign Office with a budget of £65,000 in 1907.
Lord Fisher, the First Sea Lord, was one of the driving forces behind setting up a new secret service, to help the Ballard Committee in 1906, which met in secret to draft war plans in the event of hostilities with Germany. Fisher was also obsessed with maintaining oil supplies from the Persian Gulf for his new oil-fired battleships and denying supplies to other powers for which he needed reliable agents in the field.
At the time fiction had also stirred up public opinion. Perhaps the most famous work was Erskine Childers novel, The Riddle of the Sands published in 1903, regarded by many as the first modern spy yarn. Childer wrote it as a wake-up-call and was stunned by the public reaction and its success which did not entirely please him, for he had written it as an alert to the British Government to the German threat. Childers a House of Commons clerk was known to Cummings. In many ways Cumming’s life reads like fiction.
He was born in 1859 Mansfield George Smith; he took the name Cumming after marriage to his second Wife in 1889. His wife’s family were a relatively famous Scottish dynasty. So Mansfield took the name becoming Smith-Cumming not all that an uncommon action at the time.
In 1872 he had joined the Navy aged twelve and joined his first ship the screw corvette Modeste in 1874. Two years later he saw action against Malay Pirates on the Parak River.
Cummings joined the Raleigh in 1884 where he became Flag Lieutenant to Admiral Walter Hunt-Grubbe, the captain of the ship was Arthur Wilson VC, and they sailed to South Africa. However Cummings returned home in December 1885 to become a retired officer on active half pay. His Naval record gives the reason for his retirement as ‘unfit for service.’ It is believed he was suffering from chronic-sea-sickness, although, given he was and remained a keen small boat owner, seems unlikely.
It was certainly the patronage of other officers that kept Cummings in mind Wilson would later become Admiral of the Fleet and it was he in 1898 who invited Cummings to take charge of boom defence. He was also well known to future First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher who had been his captain on the battleship HMS Bellerephon in 1878.
By 1898 he had already worked for Naval Intelligence, including occasional work abroad. He even travelled through eastern Germany and the Balkans pretending to be a German business man while not speaking German.
Cumming’s was a keen pilot qualifying for his licence in 1913, and took part in several road races, being an early member of the RAC, famously crashing his Wolseley car in the Paris-Madrid race of 1902 whilst well placed.
As head of the new Foreign Section of the secret service he soon became known as ‘C’ after his habit of initialling papers when read with a C in green ink. This has continued on with later directors, although ‘C’ now stands for ‘Chief.’ Ian Fleming used this for ‘M’ in his Bond books.
Although his ‘M’ may have been loosely based on William Melville the Irish-born Policeman who ran the Secret Service at the end of the 19th century and adopted the codename ‘M’.
Prior to World War I budgets in the secret service were tiny; Cummings came to rely on basically enthusiastic amateurs, or service officers at a loose end. Royal Marine officers often came into this category because the Corps offered a limited career to commissioned ranks, few officers being required at sea and there was no permanent ground force for operations ashore. Some of these found their way into the SSB.
Captain Bernard Trench, just such an officer, fluent in German, undertook a mission with Lieutenant Vivien Brandon RN in 1908 to observe German Naval facilities in Kiel. Brandon was caught in a restricted zone and Trench was soon arrested as well. Both were put on trial at Leipzig which was felt to have been fair and also lenient, they were sentenced to four years. The German Court had been sympathetic for they felt it was an officer’s duty to obtain information in such a manner. However things would soon change.
Sidney Reilly, who worked for Cummings, was an altogether different customer, regarded by many as ‘The greatest spy in history’, he was said to possess eleven passports and as many wives and was not adverse to making money out of his trade. A man of mystery who spoke seven languages, and apparently disappeared from the world as mysteriously as he entered it, for his death at the hands of the Russian Secret Police in 1925 was doubted for years and still is by some. Even in the realms of spy-fiction there are few more dramatic stories than his. When Ian Fleming wrote Casino Royale, the first Bond book he was surprised by its sales and commented ‘James Bond is just a piece of nonsense I dreamed up. He’s not a Sidney Reilly, you know.’
Sidney Reilly, born Georgi Rosenblum a Russian Jew in 1873, was commissioned into the Royal Flying Corps in 1917 and awarded the Military Cross on January 22 1919 ‘for distinguished services rendered in connection with military operations in the field.’
Reilly was brought to the screen in the successful 1983 TV series Reilly Ace of Spies starring Sam Neill as Reilly. Norman Rodway played Mansfield Cummings in the series Reilly’s irascible boss, complete with limp. The only trouble being he has the limp before 1914.
In October 1914, Cummings was driving his Rolls-Royce with his son Alastair on the Paris-Rouen road. The car overturned, believed to be the result of a puncture or blow-out, and struck a tree, trapping Cummings and killing Alastair who was thrown clear. Compton Mackenzie who worked for Cummings in Greece tells the story of how ‘C’ hearing the cries of his fatally injured son ‘….struggled as he might he could not free his smashed leg. Thereupon he had taken out his penknife and hacked away at the smashed leg…’ until he could get clear and crawl out to his dying son. Cumming’s was awarded a pension of £300 a year for the ‘loss or right foot and impaired use of left leg…’ while on active duty, after this he walked with a cane and had a false foot.
Agents who worked for MI6 during the war included Augustus Agar and Paul Dukes mainly in Russia, and John Buchan and W.Somerset Maugham, the latter would write about his experiences in Switzerland in his stories The Ashenden Papers.
Cummings last great battle came after World War I to maintain the integrity of MI6 against cost cutters who wished to amalgamate the two services; he was also instrumental in setting up Special Branch for the police. Over the years the War Office (Army) lost control of MI5 the service becoming closer to the police, however MI6 dealing with espionage has always been something apart.
Mansfield Smith-Cummings died at home in June 1923 after suffering heart problems for over a year; shortly before he was due to retire, he was knighted in 1919. It is interesting to note MI6 had become such a plum job that Admiral Sinclair took over Cummings role from his position as director of NI maintaining the link between the two services.
Ian Fleming came into Naval Intelligence in similar circumstances to Cummings on personal recommendation in this case by Admiral Aubrey Hugh-Smith. Just before the out-break of World War II Admiral John Godfrey, head of NI was looking for a personal assistant. Thus Fleming, a stockbroker and reserve subaltern in the Black Watch, went to work as a Lieutenant (special branch) in the RNVR at the admiralty, working in rooms 38 & 39 of NI.
He was responsible for collecting and analysing and distributing intelligence, liaising with MI6 and SOE, and shielding Godfrey. He was also allowed to develop his own plans or ‘plots’ as he called them.
Fleming did come up with some remarkable schemes from, scuttling cement barges on the Danube, to Operation Ruthless to obtain a code book of the German Navy Engima Machine. By trying to capture a German aircrew rescue boat in the English Channel, a German Heinkel bomber was obtained which the crew would crash into the sea, when the rescue boat arrived they would overwhelm the crew and take boat and code books back to Britain. However this plan came to nothing as crashing a large bomber into the sea was fraught with danger.
However NI did come up with the most successful deception plan in World War II, Operation Mincemeat carried out in 1942-43, which drew German forces away from Sicily prior to Allied landings there. Ian Fleming according to Admiral Godfrey came up with the idea but Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu executed it. To land a body on the Spanish shore, which seemingly had come from a lost British Aircraft, knowing the Spanish Authorities would inform the Germans. The body given the name William Martin and the rank of a Major in the Royal Marines would be carrying documents indicating Allied plans for landings in the eastern Mediterranean.
Mincemeat was swallowed whole by the Germans. In reply to a letter from Admiral Doenitz Hitler indicated.
‘The Fuehrer does not agree with the Duce (Mussolini) that the most likely invasion point is Sicily. Furthermore, he believes that the discovered Anglo-Saxon order confirms the assumption that the planned attack will be directed mainly against Sardinia and the Peloponnesus.’
Of Operation Mincemeat we might hear Cummings applauding ‘capitalsport’for to the end of his life he retained a great interest in the eccentricity and mystery of espionage, experimenting personally with disguises, mechanical gadgets, and secret inks.
The Bethel Letter dated 10 August 1909 from Rear-Admiral A.E Bethell Director of Naval Intelligence Reads.
‘My dear Mansfield Cumming, Boom defence must be getting a bite stale with you and the recent experiments with Ferret rather discounts yours at Southampton. You may therefore perhaps like a new billet. If so I have something good I can offer you and if you would like to come and see me on Thursday about noon I will tell you what it is.
Yours sincerely
A E Bethell’