The Defence of the Realm Page 6
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 Bureau1 or Special Intelligence Bureau2 (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 staff3 consisted only of six officers,4 Melville and two assistant detectives,5 six clerical staff6 and a caretaker.7 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.8 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.’9 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.’10 In June Kell obtained a similar introduction from the Scottish Office to chief constables in Scotland.11 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’.12 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,14 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 in
volved ‘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.17
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
Some of the mistaken reports of German military espionage in Britain sent to Kell came from apparently very well-informed sources. Among them was Colonel Frederic Trench, a well-known military writer whose appointment as British military attaché in Berlin in 1906 had been enthusiastically received by the Kaiser, who was a personal friend. With the Kaiser’s approval, Trench had served in South-West Africa alongside German forces and had numerous friends and contacts in the German army. While in Berlin, Trench became convinced that Germany was planning a surprise attack on Britain: ‘When Germany comes to the conclusion that her navy is strong enough, or the British fleet sufficiently scattered or otherwise occupied, for there to be a reasonable prospect of success . . . the first move will be made without any warning whatever . . .’ Trench also believed that preparation of the invasion plans was being assisted by German spies in Britain, and some of his reports were passed to Kell.21
There was, in reality, clearer evidence of British espionage in Germany than of German espionage in Britain. In August 1910 Lieutenant Vivien Brandon of the Admiralty Hydrographic Department and Captain R. M. Trench of the Royal Marines (not to be confused with Colonel Trench) were arrested while on a mission assigned them by British naval intelligence to reconnoitre German North Sea coastal defences at Borkum and elsewhere. Both men showed their inexperience not merely by keeping large amounts of incriminating documents in their possession but also by their behaviour during cross-examination. Counsel for the prosecution acknowledged that it was only as a result of Trench’s evidence at the trial that they knew he had entered the Borkum fortifications at all.22 On 30 August Kell was summoned to the Admiralty for a meeting with Bethell, the DNI, Sir Graham Greene, Secretary of the Admiralty (its senior civilian official), Cumming and other senior naval officers, and asked if he ‘could get up a “counter-blast” to the Borkum affair’ – in other words, expose some German spies at work in Britain. Kell ‘feared not’.23
On 5 September, however, Kell received a telegram from Portsmouth, informing him that Lieutenant Siegfried Helm of the 21st Nassau Pioneer Battalion had been arrested for suspected espionage.24 Helm had travelled to Britain ostensibly to learn English, and had written beforehand to a Miss Wodehouse, the friend of a fellow officer, who helped find him lodgings near her home in the Portsmouth area. Wodehouse discovered that, as well as enjoying the company of a ‘lovely lady friend’, Helm was also making sketches of forts and military installations, and reported him to the local barracks.25 Though the First Lord of the Admiralty, Reginald McKenna, wanted to avoid pre-trial publicity, Kell thought ‘it was an excellent thing that the arrest should become known as soon as possible as it might have a soothing effect across the water’ – that is, help to deter other German spies. News of Helm’s arrest was published by the Daily Express. No mention of Kell’s role in this or any subsequent counterespionage case appeared in the press. On 6 September, having received ‘all necessary evidence and documents’, including Helm’s pocket book, Kell caught the train to Portsmouth to take charge of the investigation. Miss Wodehouse persuaded Kell that ‘she had deliberately egged Lieut. Helm on to make love to her to gain his confidence as she suspected from the outset that he was spying.’26
Though described by The Times as ‘a soldierly figure’ when he appeared in court at the committal hearing on 20 September, Helm seems to have stepped straight from the pages of Punch. He had what his defence counsel called ‘a mania for writing things in his pocket book’ and a stereotypical Teutonic thoroughness in doing so, noting down exact details of his bedroom furniture and the precise distance between the chest of drawers and his bed. His drawings of forts and military installations were less impressive. Kell’s later deputy, Eric Holt-Wilson, dismissed them as ‘rather futile sketches of the obsolete Portsmouth land defences’. Helm said he had made the drawings of the forts not by covert reconnaissance but by looking through a large public telescope on Portsmouth’s South Parade. After his arrest he wrote Wodehouse a pained but determinedly cheerful letter: ‘It is a dreadful thing, but they have taken me as a spy! It was all for my own study. The officers here are very kind to me. So comfortable a time I never had!’ When Helm discovered that Wodehouse had given evidence against him, he changed his tune: ‘I came as a true friend and you were my enemy. The Holy Bible said right, that a wife is as false as a serpent!!’ Though pleading guilty at his trial, Helm was merely bound over and discharged, with a cordial if condescending farewell from Mr Justice Bankes:
I trust that when you leave this country you will leave it with a feeling that, although we may be vigilant, and perhaps, from your point of view, too vigilant, yet . . . we are just and merciful, not only to those who are subjects of this realm, but also to those who, like yourself, seek the hospitality of our shores.27
In Germany as well as Britain, espionage by serving officers was still regarded as indicating their patriotism and treated with some leniency. The evidence of systematic espionage was much stronger in the case of Brandon’s and Trench’s reconnaissance of German North Sea coastal defences than in the case of Helm, and both were sentenced to four years’
imprisonment. Their trial ended, however, in a remarkably amicable, almost surreal, atmosphere. According to The Times correspondent:
When it was all over, they remained for some minutes chatting with counsel and others and shaking hands with acquaintances such as the Juge d’Instruction who conducted the preliminary hearing . . . They were very gay and perfectly satisfied with the result of the trial.
Brandon and Trench were to serve their sentence in a fortress where they would be ‘allowed to provide their own comforts and to enjoy the society of the officers, students and others, all men of education and good social position, who share the Governor’s hospitality in the fortress’. ‘There are no irksome regulations,’ concluded The Times report, ‘and it will not be difficult for them to obtain leave to make excursions in the town.’28
Since Helm was a serving army officer, his trial appeared to provide confirmation that Germany was engaged in military as well as naval espionage in Britain. German archives, however, now reveal what Kell could not have known at the time, though he might perhaps have suspected it, that Helm had been acting on his own initiative rather than on instructions.29 After the trial was over Kell had hoped to discover more about what lay behind Helm’s bungling espionage. In the train back to London he sat, unrecognized, in the same compartment as Helm and his father. To Kell’s disappointment, they ‘did not speak very much’.30
Only four days later an apparently promising lead to a more serious espionage case came from Major (later Major General Sir) William Thwaites, head of the German section at the War Office (and later Director of Military Intelligence) and a strong supporter of Kell’s Bureau.31 Thwaites reported that for the past month six Germans had been dining regularly at Terriani’s restaurant, opposite Harrods: ‘They appeared to be very secretive and it was suggested that they were engaged in S[ecret] S[ervice].’ Kell dined in the restaurant with Melville. Also present was Captain Stanley Clarke, an army officer who had returned to Britain after eleven years’ service in India and was shortly to become Kell’s assistant. ‘But’, noted Kell in his diary, ‘no Germans turned up.’32 As with most warnings of suspicious Germans over the previous few years, the report was almost certainly a false alarm.33