Fanaticism, like other disorders, however, evolves over time. What makes the early twenty-first century a less dangerous place than the twentieth is that fanatics no longer control any of the world’s major powers. There is no realistic prospect of another Hitler in Berlin or another Stalin in Moscow. Unlike Hitler and Stalin, today’s most dangerous fanatics – terrorist groups (Al Qaida chief among them) and rogue regimes – are on the margins of the international system rather than at its centre. But if the political power of fanaticism has declined, its destructive capacity over the next generation is likely to be increased by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.45 Bin Laden declared in 1998 that acquiring these weapons is a ‘religious duty’. A year before 9/11, without realizing it at the time, Security Service counter-proliferation operations disrupted a first attempt by Al Qaida to obtain material in Britain to develop biological weapons. The ambition of Dhiren Barot, the chief Islamist plotter arrested as a result of Operation RHYME in 2004, was to explode a radioactive ‘dirty bomb’. Though, as Barot acknowledged, he failed to make the contacts necessary to achieve his ambition, other terrorists will try to succeed where Barot failed.
In the twenty-first century, as in the twentieth, some of the challenges faced by the Security Service will be difficult, if not impossible, to predict. One of the lessons of its first hundred years is that it will respond to these challenges best if it has a long-term perspective. In the words of Winston Churchill, for half a century a committed supporter and occasional critic of the Service, ‘The further backwards you look, the further forward you can see.’
Appendix 1
Directors and Director Generals, 1909–2009
1909–1940 Sir Vernon Kell
1940–1941 Brigadier Oswald Allen ‘Jasper’ Harker
1941–1946 Sir David Petrie
1946–1953 Sir Percy Sillitoe
1953–1956 Sir Dick White
1956–1965 Sir Roger Hollis
1965–1972 Sir Martin Furnival Jones
1972–1978 Sir Michael Hanley
1978–1981 Sir Howard Smith
1981–1985 Sir John Jones
1985–1988 Sir Antony Duff
1988–1992 Sir Patrick Walker
1992–1996 Dame Stella Rimington
1996–2002 Sir Stephen Lander
2002–2007 Baroness Manningham-Buller
2007 Jonathan Evans
Note: The title of director general was first used by Sir David Petrie. Kell and Harker were both designated director.
Appendix 2
Security Service Strength, 1909–2009
Appendix 3
Nomenclature and Responsibilities of Security Service Branches/Divisions, 1914–1994
1914
1916
1931
1941
1953
1968
1976
1988
1991
1994
Notes
ABBREVIATIONS
AVIA Ministry of Aviation
BUL Birmingham University Library
CAB Cabinet Office
CCAC Churchill College Archive Centre, Cambridge
CHAR Chartwell papers (CACC)
CO Colonial Office
CUL Cambridge University Library
CUSS Cambridge University Socialist Society
DEFE Ministry of Defence
DNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
DO Dominions Office
FCO Foreign and Commonwealth Office
FO Foreign Office
GEN Cabinet Sub-Committee
HLRO House of Lords Record Office
HO Home Office
HW Papers of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)
INF Papers of the Central Office of Information
IWM Imperial War Museum
KV Papers of the Security Service
LHC Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College London
MEPO Papers of the Metropolitan Police
MISC Cabinet temporary sub-committee
NAW National Archives, Washington, DC
NMM National Maritime Museum
PREM Prime Minister’s Office
RG Record Group (NAW)
SLYU Sterling Library, Yale University
T Treasury
TNA The National Archives
WC War Cabinet
WO War Office
SECTION A: THE GERMAN THREAT, 1909–1919
Introduction: The Origins of the Secret Service Bureau
1 Memorandum re Formation of a S.S. Bureau [minutes of meeting on 26 Aug. 1909, approved by Sir Charles Hardinge, PUS at the Foreign Office, on 14 Sept. 1909], TNA WO 106/6292. The date set for the Bureau to open business had been 1 October, but it was not until the 10th that both Cumming and Kell started work in the office and money from the Foreign Office Secret Vote came on stream. Cumming had paid his first visit to the office on the 7th ‘and remained all day but saw no-one, nor was there anything to do there.’ Judd, Quest for C, pp. 86, 100.
2 Mansfield Cumming diary, 4 Oct. 1909, SIS Archives. Kell later told Gilbert Wakefield, subsequently an in- house MI5 historian, that he ‘first met “C” in the office of a private detective’ (identified by Wakefield as Drew).
3 Evidence by Kell to Secret Service Committee, Secret Service Committee Minutes, 10 March 1925, TNA FO 1093/68. Cumming’s diary suggests, however, that Kell and Cumming rarely worked in the room at the same time.
4 ‘Report and Proceedings of a Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence Appointed by the Prime Minister to Consider the Question of Foreign Espionage in the United Kingdom’, Oct. 1909, TNA CAB 16/8.
5 Ibid.
6 Le Queux, England’s Peril, p. 42.
7 Le Queux’s name rhymed with Drew’s. Like Drew he had an English mother and a French father. On visits to France Drew used his real name, Dreux.
8 Le Queux, Secrets of the Foreign Office.
9 ‘William Tufnell Le Queux’, Oxford DNB.
10 Kim was first published as a magazine serial, beginning in December 1900. It appeared in book form in October 1901.
11 Hinsley et al., British Intelligence in the Second World War, vol. 1, p. 16n.
12 Andrew, Secret Service, ch. 1.
13 Warwick (ed.), South African War, p. 66.
14 Report of the Royal Commission on the War in South Africa, Cd 1789 (1903), p. 128. See also Andrew, Secret Service, pp. 28–9.
15 Cook, M: MI5’s First Spymaster, pp. 146–8, 253.
16 Ibid., pp. 248–9. Melville also received Austrian, Danish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish decorations in recognition of his services during the travels of British and foreign royals.
17 Both the alias and the address appeared on Melville’s business card, which survives both in his papers (ibid., p. 254) and in Security Service files.
18 On the Nachrichten-Abteilung and Steinhauer’s role in it, see Boghardt, Spies of the Kaiser, pp. 13–20.
19 Steinhauer, Steinhauer, pp. 310–19. Cook, M: MI5’s First Spymaster, pp. 134–7. Boghardt, Spies of the Kaiser, pp. 47–8. On Steinhauer’s place in the German naval intelligence hierarchy, see Boghardt, Spies of the Kaiser, appendix 1, p. 148. An interwar MI5 assessment of Steinhauer’s memoirs concluded: ‘Comparison with the records of the Security Service shows this book to be a very fair account of his organisation in this country.’ ‘Gustav Steinhauer’, ‘Game Book’, vol. 1: 1909–1915, TNA KV 4/112.
20 Report by Melville on Long’s mission, 8 April 1904; reproduced in Cook, M: MI5’s First Spymaster, appendix, p. 256. Long’s first name sometimes appears wrongly as ‘Henry’.
21 ‘Historical Papers’, TNA KV 6/47.
22 Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, pp. 76–86, 113.
23 Untitled memoir by Melville, 31 Dec. 1917, pp. 15–16, TNA KV 1/8.
24 Ibid., p. 2.
25 Ibid., pp. 21–2.
26 Edmonds, ‘Origins of MI5’, LHC Edmond
s MSS VIII/3; Edmonds, Unpublished Memoirs, ch. 20, LHC Edmonds MSS III/5.
27 Untitled memoir by Melville, 31 Dec. 1917, p. 3, TNA KV 1/8. Le Queux claimed inaccurately that the German translation ended with a German victory.
28 The new ‘voluntary Secret Service Department’, in so far as it existed outside Le Queux’s imagination, had its main home in the patriotic Legion of Frontiersmen founded by Roger Pocock at the end of 1904. Pocock inhabited a Walter Mitty world as extravagant as Le Queux’s, full of Boy’s Own Paper villains and heroes.
29 Le Queux, Invasion of 1910. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War, p. 145. Kennedy, Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, pp. 362, 371. Andrew, Secret Service, pp. 74–6. Patrick and Baister, William Le Queux, pp. 57–63.
30 Le Queux, Things I Know, p. 237.
31 Standish, Prince of Storytellers.
32 Morris, ‘And is the Kaiser Coming for Tea?’, pp. 58–61. Gooch, Plans of War, pp. 284–5.
33 Steiner, Britain and the Origins of the First World War, pp. 53, 287 n.23.
34 Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, vol. 1, ch. 7.
35 Thwaites to Gleichen, 7 May 1907, TNA WO 32/8873. Hiley, ‘Failure of British Espionage’, p. 874.
36 Edmonds, Unpublished Memoirs, ch. 20, LHC Edmonds MSS III/5.
37 ‘Report and Proceedings of a Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence Appointed by the Prime Minister to Consider the Question of Foreign Espionage in the United Kingdom’, Appendix 1: ‘Cases of Alleged German Espionage which have been reported to the Director of Military Operations’, Oct. 1909, TNA CAB 16/8.
38 Among them Christopher Andrew in Secret Service.
39 ‘Sir James Edward Edmonds’, Oxford DNB. Though the War Office Intelligence Division was formally renamed the Intelligence Department only in 1901, it was often called by the latter title in the 1890s.
40 ‘Report and Proceedings of a Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence Appointed by the Prime Minister to Consider the Question of Foreign Espionage in the United Kingdom: First Meeting, Tuesday, 30th March, 1909’, Oct. 1909, TNA CAB 16/8.
41 Security Service, p. 64; cf. Stieber, Chancellors’ Spy: a source to be treated with some caution.
42 Edmonds, ‘Espionage in the time of peace’, Jan. 1909, pp. 22–32, TNA KV 1/2.
43 CID, ‘The Question of Foreign Espionage in the United Kingdom’, 30 March 1909, p. 2, TNA CAB 16/18.
44 Edmonds, ‘Espionage in the time of peace’, Jan. 1909, p. 24, TNA KV 1/2. Stieber, Chancellors’ Spy.
45 ‘Report and Proceedings of a Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence Appointed by the Prime Minister to Consider the Question of Foreign Espionage in the United Kingdom: First Meeting, Tuesday, 30th March, 1909’, Oct. 1909, TNA CAB 16/8. In talks to new recruits early in the Cold War, the DDG, Guy Liddell, explained that ‘When visiting Berlin and Moscow and after his return, [Edmonds] gathered that the Germans had opened a section of their Intelligence Service to deal with England.’ Guy Liddell diary, 1 Nov. 1950. The Liddell diaries for the Second World War are in TNA KV 4/185–194; extensive extracts have been published in West (ed.), Guy Liddell Diaries, 2 vols. The post-war diaries are in Security Service Archives.
46 Boghardt, Spies of the Kaiser, pp. 13–20.
47 Andrew, Théophile Delcassé, pp. 284–5. Hiley, Introduction to Le Queux, Spies of the Kaiser, pp. xix–xx.
48 ‘Sir James Edward Edmonds’, Oxford DNB.
49 Kell wrote to Holt-Wilson soon after the war: ‘Old Edmonds wrote to me asking that we should take him on! I have not replied. I would not have minded, if I could be sure he was not more cranky than he was in the old days.’ Security Service Archives.
50 J. E. Edmonds, ‘Intelligence Systems: Germany’, 9 Feb. 1909, IWM Kell MSS.
51 Le Queux, Spies of the Kaiser. Le Queux identified closely with the narrator, Jacox, at one point taking over as the narrator himself; Patrick and Baister, William Le Queux, p. 66.
52 Edmonds, Unpublished Memoirs, ch. 20, LHC Edmonds MSS III/5.
53 Introduction by Sir Robert Gower MP to Sladen, The Real Le Queux, p. xv. Le Queux also persuaded Gower, though he can scarcely have persuaded Edmonds, that his own unpaid ‘Secret Service operations’ exceeded ‘in their daring the most colourful adventures of his bravest fictional heroes’.
54 Edmonds, Unpublished Memoirs, ch. 20, LHC Edmonds MSS III/5.
55 ‘Report and Proceedings of a Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence Appointed by the Prime Minister to Consider the Question of Foreign Espionage in the United Kingdom’, Oct. 1909, appendix no. 1, case no. 26, TNA CAB 16/8.
56 Edmonds, Unpublished Memoirs, ch. 20, LHC Edmonds MSS III/5.
57 Lady Kell, ‘Secret Well Kept: an account of the work of Sir Vernon Kell’, p. 113 (unpublished manuscript, IWM).
58 Its other members were the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Home Secretary, the Postmaster General, Lord Esher, the permanent under secretaries of the Treasury and the Foreign Office, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, the Director of Military Operations, the Director of Naval Intelligence, the Director of Military Training and Rear Admiral Sir C. L. Ottley.
59 ‘Report and Proceedings of a Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence Appointed by the Prime Minister to Consider the Question of Foreign Espionage in the United Kingdom’, Oct. 1909, TNA CAB 16/8. Edmonds, Unpublished Memoirs, ch. 20, LHC Edmonds MSS III/5.
60 Col. W. G. Simpson, ‘The Duties of Local Authorities in War Time’, Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, LVIII (Jan. 1914), pp. 5–30; Gilbert Mellor, ‘The Status under the Hague Conference of Civilians Who Take up Arms during the Time of War’, Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, LVIII (May 1914), pp. 559–78; Col. G. H. Ovens, ‘Fighting in Enclosed Country’, Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, XLIX (1905), pp. 524–46.
61 ‘Report and Proceedings of a Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence Appointed by the Prime Minister to Consider the Question of Foreign Espionage in the United Kingdom: First Meeting, Tuesday, 30th March, 1909’, Oct. 1909, TNA CAB 16/8.
62 ‘Report and Proceedings of a Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence Appointed by the Prime Minister to Consider the Question of Foreign Espionage in the United Kingdom’, Oct. 1909, Appendix 1, case no. 10, TNA CAB 16/8. Untitled memoir by Melville, 31 Dec. 1917, pp. 24–5, TNA KV 1/8.
63 Dr Nicholas Hiley was the first to discover the meaning of ‘TR ’, ‘Tariff Reformer’and ‘Tiaria’.
64 Mansfield Cumming diary, SIS Archives.
65 Herbert Dale Long to Melville, 23 March 1909, TNA KV 6/47. The ‘party’ refers to ‘Tariff Reform Party’ (German intelligence). Only fragmentary records survive of the secret investigations of Herbert Dale Long at home and abroad, often on half-pay. On his early work for Melville, see Cook, M: MI5’s First Spymaster, pp. 148–9. Dr Nicholas Hiley’s research has shown that in 1911 Long was sent to Brussels to run an operation for Cumming (SS Bureau: General Organisation, TNA KV 1/53).
66 ‘Report and Proceedings of a Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence Appointed by the Prime Minister to Consider the Question of Foreign Espionage in the United Kingdom. Appendix 1: Cases of Alleged German Espionage which have been reported to the Director of Military Operations’, Oct. 1909, TNA CAB 16/8.
67 Ibid. Boghardt, Spies of the Kaiser, p. 32.
68 ‘Report and Proceedings of a Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence Appointed by the Prime Minister to Consider the Question of Foreign Espionage in the United Kingdom. Appendix 1: Cases of Alleged German Espionage which have been reported to the Director of Military Operations’, Oct. 1909, TNA CAB 16/8.
69 ‘Report and Proceedings of a Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence Appointed by the Prime Minister to Consider the Question of Foreign Espionage in the United Kingdom: First Meeting, Tuesday, 30th March, 1909’, Oct. 1909, TNA CAB 16/8.
70 Brett (ed.), Jour
nals and Letters of Reginald Viscount Esher, vol. 2, p. 379.
71 ‘Report and Proceedings of a Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence Appointed by the Prime Minister to Consider the Question of Foreign Espionage in the United Kingdom: First Meeting, Tuesday, 30th March, 1909’, Oct. 1909, TNA CAB 16/8.
72 Koss, Lord Haldane, pp. 15–16, 65, 69.
73 ‘Report and Proceedings of a Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence Appointed by the Prime Minister to Consider the Question of Foreign Espionage in the United Kingdom: First Meeting, Tuesday, 30th March, 1909’, Oct. 1909, TNA CAB 16/8.
74 ‘Report and Proceedings of a Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence Appointed by the Prime Minister to Consider the Question of Foreign Espionage in the United Kingdom: Second Meeting, Tuesday, 20th April, 1909’, Oct. 1909, TNA CAB 16/8.
75 Haldane also reported a meeting with ‘a member of the Russian government’, who argued that, given the reinforcement of French and German defences, Germany must be tempted ‘by the possibility of successfully invading England’. ‘Report and Proceedings of a Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence Appointed by the Prime Minister to Consider the Question of Foreign Espionage in the United Kingdom: Third Meeting, Monday, 12th July, 1909’, Oct. 1909, TNA CAB 16/8.
76 Edmonds, Unpublished Memoirs, ch. 20, LHC Edmonds MSS III/5.
77 ‘Report and Proceedings of a Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence Appointed by the Prime Minister to Consider the Question of Foreign Espionage in the United Kingdom’, Oct. 1909, TNA CAB 16/8.
78 Judd, Quest for C, p. 72.
79 Le Queux to the Editor, Manchester Guardian, 4 Jan. 1910 (I am grateful to Dr Nicholas Hiley for this reference). For further evidence that Le Queux was aware of the founding of the Secret Service Bureau, see Hiley, Introduction to Le Queux, Spies of the Kaiser, p. xviii.
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