The Defence of the Realm (8 page)

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.
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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:

Cannot 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.'
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Though Cumming was somewhat reassured and intelligence leads began to reach him in early November,
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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

The early Secret Service Bureau was also plagued by lack of money, as is shown by a letter from Macdonogh on 28 February 1910:

My Dear Kell,

We are and shall be very hard up until the end of this month. Will you therefore please cut down your expenses to a minimum and not incur any travelling expenses without previous reference and then only in cases that will not wait till April.

Yours sincerely

M[acdonogh]
¹⁰¹

At the end of 1909 Cumming had set up a separate HQ in a flat in Ashley Gardens, near Vauxhall Bridge Road, for which, because of the exiguous Bureau budget, he had to pay himself (along with the telephone). There, he later reported to Bethell, he was able to ‘interview anyone . . . without the risk of my conversation being overheard'. He now also had as much work as he could handle.
¹⁰²

Kell too was looking for new premises. Cumming noted in his diary on 17 March 1910:

Called on K[ell] at his request handed over my small safe and the keys to my desk to his Clerk . . . He asked me if I should object to his coming next door, but I told him that I thought it would interfere with my privacy in my own flat and I begged he would not go forward with any such scheme. I would rather he were not in this immediate neighbourhood at all.
¹⁰³

Friction with Kell continued. Cumming listed a number of grievances in his diary on 23 March 1910. Kell had recently interviewed a Miss Yonger, who had offered to provide information, and attempted to conceal her name from Cumming ‘although her information is entirely in my department'.

Secondly, K[ell] told me that he had made the acquaintance of the editor of the Standard and through him, that of a man named ‘Half Term', who had supplied him with some information, and for whom he had got a retainer of £50 per year. I was expressly forbidden to approach the Editors of any paper.

Cumming also complained that Kell's department was both larger and better funded than his own – doubtless due in large measure to Kell's long association with the War Office.
¹⁰⁴
A diary entry for 5 April records further irritation. Cumming had been telephoned by Kell ‘who wanted me to come round for something “urgent”. When I got there, it was only to ask me about some particular paper that had been ordered under rather curious circumstances, which I undertook to do.' Kell also produced a letter he had received from a woman in Germany offering information but refused
to supply her address on the grounds that she would communicate only with him. Cumming discovered next day that the information concerned an alleged (but no doubt non-existent) German arms cache in Britain.
¹⁰⁵

Relations improved once the complete separation of what had now become the home and foreign departments of the Secret Service Bureau was fully recognized. On 28 April 1910 Cumming recorded in his diary: ‘Kell agreed that our work was totally different and that our connection was only one of name, and that it would be better for both of us if we should work separately.'
¹⁰⁶
At a meeting in Bethell's room at the Admiralty also attended by top brass from the War Office on 9 May, three days after the death of King Edward VII, with Whitehall in deep mourning, Macdonogh began by acknowledging that the two departments had little in common and that the respective duties of Kell and Cumming needed to be properly defined. The meeting confirmed Kell's responsibility for all work in the United Kingdom and Cumming's for all work abroad. The meeting also agreed that, though the work of Kell's department was sufficiently ‘above board' for its existence to be acknowledged, Cumming's department could not be officially avowed.
¹⁰⁷

That distinction between an avowable (if unpublicized) MI5 and an unavowable SIS was to be maintained until 1992 when the existence of SIS was officially acknowledged for the first time. Following the separation of the two services in 1910, proposals for their reunion, or at least for their being housed once again in the same building, continued to resurface intermittently in Whitehall for more than eighty years. None succeeded.

1

‘Spies of the Kaiser': Counter-Espionage before the First World War

Kell's section of the Secret Service Bureau, usually known to those aware of its existence as the Counter-Espionage Bureau
¹
or Special Intelligence Bureau
²
(and also, within the War Office, as MO5(g)), was run on a shoestring. Its resources before the First World War were well below the minimum which any modern security service would think necessary in order to function at all. Kell did not acquire a clerk until March 1910, and the first officer recruit did not join the Bureau until January 1911. Even at the outbreak of war in August 1914, Kell's staff
³
consisted only of six officers,
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Melville and two assistant detectives,
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six clerical staff
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and a caretaker.
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Kell had by then taken the title of director.

With such minimal resources, the key to Kell's initial counter-espionage strategy was to gain the assistance of chief constables around the country. That, in turn, required the support of the Home Secretary. It was Kell's good fortune that the Home Secretary for most of 1910 and 1911 was Winston Churchill, who in the course of a long career showed greater enthusiasm for, and understanding of, intelligence than any other British politician of his generation. His adventures during the Boer War had included cycling in disguise through Johannesburg to carry out reconnaissance work behind enemy lines. Churchill later acknowledged that, had he been caught, ‘No court martial that ever sat in Europe would have had much difficulty in disposing of such a case.' He would have been shot as a spy.
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As home secretary Churchill also played an important part in the development of Kell's Bureau. General Ewart, the Director of Military Operations, wrote to him in April 1910, commending Kell as ‘in every way most discreet and reliable':

This officer, who is attached to my Intelligence Department, is employed by me in making enquiries regarding the many alleged instances of Foreign Espionage and other suspicious incidents which are frequently brought to our notice. The nature of his work makes it desirable that, with your permission, he should be brought
into private communication with the Chief Constables of counties, and, if you could see your way to give him some general letter of introduction, which he could produce when necessary it would help us very materially.

Churchill minuted: ‘Let all facilities be accorded to Captain Kell.'
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Next day his private secretary provided Kell with a letter of introduction to the chief constables of England and Wales which concluded: ‘Mr Churchill desires me to say that he will be obliged if you will give Captain Kell the necessary facilities for his work.'
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In June Kell obtained a similar introduction from the Scottish Office to chief constables in Scotland.
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During the summer of 1910 he made personal contact with thirty-three English and seven Scottish chief constables, all of whom ‘expressed themselves most willing to assist me in every way'.
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The Aliens Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence (founded in March 1910), chaired by Churchill, approved the preparation by Kell of a secret register of aliens from probable enemy powers (chiefly Germany) based on information supplied by local police forces.
¹³

Kell was well aware that the German
Meldewesen
system, which made registration of all foreigners compulsory and placed restrictions on their movements and activities,
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would be unacceptable in Britain and therefore fell back on secret registration. On the ‘Return of Aliens' form devised by Kell in October 1910, chief constables were also asked to report ‘Any specific acts of espionage on the part of the persons reported on; or other circumstances of an unusual nature'.
¹⁵
Even with the assistance of chief constables around the country, Kell's inadequate resources initially allowed him and Melville to do little more than investigate reports of alleged German espionage which had already reached the War Office. Kell's first progress report, submitted in March 1910, shows that he had been influenced by Melville's belief, based on earlier investigations for MO5,
¹⁶
that German espionage in Britain was linked to plans for a German invasion. Kell concluded that the ‘Rusper case' and the ‘Frant case' provided ‘strong supplementary and confirmatory evidence to the existence in this country of an organised system of a German espionage'. The first case involved ‘suspicious' German activities in the Sussex village of Rusper:

It is hardly necessary to draw attention to the fact that the knowledge of the country lying on and between the North and South Downs, including as it does the important heights of Hindhead, Box Hill, and the Towers of Holmbush, Rusper Church and Lyne House, would be of greatest value to an invading force advancing from the direction of the coast-line lying between Dover and Portsmouth, as also an intimate
acquaintance with the Railway Lines leading to the Guildford, Dorking and Tunbridge junctions from the Coast.

The ‘Frant case' concerned a Sussex poultry farm which was suspected by locals of being a rendezvous for German agents. Kell cited the report of ‘our investigator' (probably Melville's assistant, Herbert Dale Long), who claimed ‘considerable experience of all classes of Germans' and concluded that two newcomers at the poultry farm were German officers travelling incognito.

Kell arrived at two main conclusions based on the first six months of his Bureau's work:

(a)  The Bureau has justified its institution

(b)  The experience gained has proved that it is essential to the effective working of the Counter-espionage Section of the Bureau that all information coming within its province should be sent to and exclusively dealt with by the Bureau.

Kell also praised the co-operation of chief constables as essential to the work of the Bureau and called for strengthening of the ineffective 1889 Official Secrets Act which made it difficult to prosecute espionage cases.
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With the gift of hindsight, it may seem surprising that Kell's first progress report did not inspire greater scepticism. The Rusper and Frant cases did not in reality provide the strong evidence of ‘an organised system of a German espionage' which Kell claimed they did. Kell, however, was preaching to the converted. Like the sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence, whose recommendations had led to the founding of the Secret Service Bureau six months earlier, the readers of Kell's report in the War Office and Admiralty had ‘no doubt . . . that an extensive system of German espionage exists in this country'.
¹⁸
Though significant German naval intelligence operations were being targeted against Britain, Kell's woefully underresourced Bureau as yet lacked the means to discover them. The Bureau's investigations in the summer of 1910 produced no evidence of espionage more significant than those in his first progress report. Melville reported in June that he was on the track of ‘a suspicious German', claiming to be a commercial traveller, ‘who periodically visits all the German waiters round Dover and Folkestone, and also, it is believed, all along the coast'.
¹⁹
In July a Colonel R. G. Williams informed Kell that two Germans had been discovered ‘signalling to each other by lamps by night' near the Sevenoaks Tunnel. Kell immediately contacted the Chief Constable of Kent, who reported that the lamps appeared to have been used by campers rather than German spies.
²⁰