The Appointment of Britain's First Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service - 'C'

On 7 October 1909, Commander Mansfield Smith-Cumming was invited to become joint head of the newly created Secret Service Bureau (SSB).  The SSB was established in response to the Anglo-German naval arms race and several scare stories that a nest of German spies was operating in Britain.  The Daily Mail ran an article suggesting that Swiss waiters might actually be German spies and the same newspaper, in 1906, commissioned William Le Queux to write an alarming serial on what might happen were Germany to invade England.  The later book, The Invasion of London 1910, caused widespread Germanophobia.

The SSB comprised initially just two officers, Captain Vernon Kell of the South Staffordshire regiment and Commander Smith-Cumming.  At the time, the War Office (ie the army) had its own intelligence service and saw little value in the new SSB carrying out any overseas intelligence tasking.  Instead, Kell focused on what was then called contre espionage, ie the unmasking of German spies.  The Admiralty, also, had its own intelligence department, but saw value in an organisation that could recruit agents in Germany to report on the country’s naval armaments programme.  As a result, Kell and Cumming agreed between them that Kell would focus on “home” matters, ie counter espionage, and Cumming would set up a foreign section of the SSB.  Kell’s service eventually became known as the Security Service (MI5) and Cumming’s the Secret Service.

Mansfield Smith joined the Royal Navy in 1871.  In 1889, he married an heiress and changed his surname to include her name and was then known as Smith-Cumming.  Unfortunately, he suffered badly from seasickness and was retired early as a commander, specialising in boom defence, until being invited back to run the SSB.

Kell was fortunate to be given active support by the Home Secretary of the day, one Winston Churchill.  He had close links with the chief constables and Special Branch.  Until the formation of the SSB, counter intelligence had been the responsibility of Special Branch and one of its former heads, Superintendent William Melville.  Melville then began to work under Kell.  Although the spy scare stories turned out to be based on fiction, Kell’s department did, indeed, unearth a Germany spy ring tasked to spy on the Royal Navy, working for Gustav Steinhauer, the head of the British section of the German Naval Intelligence Service.  The spy ring was allowed to stay at large and its communications intercepted until the outbreak of WW1 when it was rolled up.  I have fictionalised these early days of the SSB in my second WW1 novel, Now the Darkness Gathers.

Unlike Kell, Cumming had no infrastructure to work off and had to set up his organisation from scratch.  He was frequently dismayed to discover that the Admiralty’s Naval Intelligence Division duplicated his efforts.  However, the organisation came into its own during WW1 and several famous writers worked for it, including John Buchan, Somerset Maughan and Compton Mackenzie.  Sidney Reilly, the subject of the TV series, Ace of Spies, was also one of his key agents.  Some of Cumming’s agents were seconded to SIS from the RN or army and returned to their parent service afterwards.  An example was Augustus Agar VC, whose exploits will be the subject of the final novel in my WW1 For Those in Peril series.  Cumming used to sign papers in green ink as ‘C’, a tradition that has been adopted by his successors as head of the SIS ever since. 

The activities of SIS and the Naval Intelligence Directorate during WW1 are running themes in my series, For Those in Peril.  In Book #2, I not only describe the formation of the SSB, but how a German attempt to declare a jihad to foment trouble in India was foiled.  Other books describe the formation by the Royal Navy of a signals interception and decryption department that became the forerunner of today’s GCHQ.  In Book #5, I explain how the Royal Navy’s interception of the Zimmerman telegram was deftly used to bring the US into the war against Germany.