| Sir George Mansfield Smith-Cumming |
| C |
 |
| Allegiance |
United Kingdom  |
| Service |
Royal Navy,
SIS (MI6) |
| Active |
1878 - 1909 Royal Navy
1909 - 1923 SIS (MI6) |
| Rank |
Captain,
Head of the SIS |
| Operation(s) |
World War I |
| Award(s) |
Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George
Companion of the Order of the Bath |
| Codename(s) |
C |
|
| Born |
1 April 1859
British India |
| Died |
14 June 1923
London, United Kingdom |
| Nationality |
British |
Captain Sir George Mansfield Smith-Cumming KCMG, CB (1 April 1859 – 14 June 1923) was the first director of what would become the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI6. In this role he was particularly successful in building a post-imperial intelligence service.
Contents
- 1 Early military career
- 2 Head of the SIS
- 3 Portrayal in popular culture
- 4 References
- 5 Further reading
- 6 See also
|
Early military career
Born Mansfield George Smith on April 1, 1859 in British India, the youngest in the family of five sons and eight daughters of Colonel John Thomas Smith (1805–1882) of the Royal Engineers, of Föellalt House, Kent, and his wife, Maria Sarah Tyser. Smith attended the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth from the age of thirteen and, upon graduation, was commissioned to the Navy as a sub-lieutenant. He was posted to HMS Bellerophon in 1878, and for the next seven years served in operations against Malay pirates (during 1875–6) and in Egypt in 1883. However he increasingly suffered from severe seasickness, and in 1885 was placed on the retired list as “unfit for service”.
He was recalled to duty into the foreign section of Naval Intelligence in 1898, and undertook ‘special service’, including occasional intelligence work abroad, but his main work for the next decade was the construction and command of the Southampton boom defences. He also travelled through eastern Germany and the Balkans pretending to be a highly successful German businessman, despite not speaking a single word of German. His work was so successful that he was recruited to the Secret Service Bureau (SSB) as the director of the foreign section.
In 1885 Cumming married Dora, daughter of Henry Cloete of Great Constantia, Cape Colony. After her death he married, on 13 March 1889, a Scottish heiress, Leslie Marian (May), daughter of Captain Lockhart Muir Valiant (afterwards Cumming), of the 1st Bombay lancers and Logie, Moray. As part of the marriage settlement he changed his surname to Smith-Cumming, later becoming known as Cumming. Their only son, Alastair, a dangerous driver like his father, was killed in October 1914, driving Cumming’s Rolls in France. Cumming himself lost the lower part of his right leg in the same accident.
Head of the SIS
In 1909, Major (later Colonel Sir) Vernon Kell became director of the newly-formed Secret Intelligence Bureau (SIB), created as a response to growing public opinion that all Germans living in England were spies. In 1911, the various security organizations were re-organised under the SIB, Kell’s division becoming the Home Section, and Cumming’s becoming the new Foreign Section, responsible for all operations outside Britain. His remit did not cover the gathering of information on foreign navies or military for which the Naval Intelligence Division and Military Intelligence Branch arms of the Royal Navy and British Army were responsible. Over the next few years he became known as ‘C’, after his habit of initialing papers he had read with a C written in green ink. This habit became a custom for later directors, although the C now stands for “Chief”. Ian Fleming took these aspects for his “M”, Sir Miles Messervy - using Cumming’s other initial for the name and having M always write in green ink.
In 1914, he was involved in a serious road accident in France, in which his son was killed. Legend has it that in order to escape the car wreck he was forced to amputate his leg using a pen knife. Hospital records, have shown however that while both his legs were broken, his left foot was only amputated the day after the accident. Later he often told all sorts of fantastic stories as to how he lost his leg, and would shock people by interrupting meetings in his office by suddenly stabbing his artificial leg with a knife, letter opener or fountain pen.
Budgets were severely limited prior to World War I, and Smith-Cumming came to rely heavily on Sidney Reilly (aka the Ace of Spies), a secret agent of dubious veracity based in Saint Petersburg. He described pre-1914 espionage as ‘capital sport’, but was given few resources with which to pursue it. His early operations were directed almost entirely against Germany. Between 1909 and 1914 he recruited part-time ‘casual agents’ in the shipping and arms business to keep track of naval construction in German shipyards and acquire other technical intelligence. He also had agents collecting German intelligence in Brussels, Rotterdam, and St Petersburg.
At the outbreak of war he was able to work with Vernon Kell and Sir Basil Thomson of the Special Branch to arrest twenty-two German spies in England. Eleven were executed, as was Sir Roger Casement, found guilty of treason in 1916. During the war, the offices were renamed: the Home Section became MI5 or Security Service, while Smith-Cumming’s Foreign Section became MI6 or the Secret Intelligence Service. Agents who worked for MI6 during the war included Augustus Agar, Paul Dukes, John Buchan, Compton Mackenzie and W. Somerset Maugham.
When SSB discovered that semen made a good invisible ink his agents adopted the motto “Every man his own stylo”.
With the outbreak of the First World War, Cumming’s control of strategic intelligence gathering as head of the wartime MI1c was challenged by two rival networks run by general headquarters. Cumming eventually out-performed his rivals. His most important wartime network, ‘La Dame Blanche’, had by January 1918 over 400 agents reporting on German troop movements from occupied Belgium and northern France. Cumming was less successful in post-revolutionary Russia. Despite a series of colourful exploits, his agents obtained little Russian intelligence of value.
Secret Service budgets were once again severely cut after the end of WWI, and MI6 stations in Madrid, Lisbon, Zürich and Luxembourg were closed. Cumming succeeded, however, in gaining a monopoly of espionage and counter-intelligence outside Britain and the empire. He also established a network of SIS station commanders operating overseas under diplomatic cover.
When Britain’s Government Committee on Intelligence decided to slash Kell’s budget and staff and subordinate MI5 under a new Home Office Civil Intelligence Directorate led by Special Branch’s Sir Basil Thomson in January 1919, the powerful MI5/Special Branch partnership that admirably managed counterintelligence and subversives during the war was suddenly thrown into disarray. These bureaucratic intrigues happened at the very moment that the Irish abstentionist party, Sinn Fein, and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) were launching their own independence campaign. With MI5 reduced to a skeleton staff of just 28 officers and relegated to the sidelines, and with Thomson unable to contain or penetrate the revitalized IRA with a series of clumsy and hastily organized police intelligence operations, it fell to Smith-Cumming and SIS (then MI1(c)) to organize a new espionage unit in Ireland, based on continental lines and called the Dublin District Special Branch, in mid-1920. The DDSB consisted of some 20 line officers drawn from the regular army and trained by Smith-Cumming’s department in London. Beyond that, however, Smith-Cumming began importing some of his own veteran case officers into Ireland from Egypt, Palestine and India, while Basil Thomson organized a special unit consisting of 60 hastily vetted ethnically Irish street agents managed via impersonal communications from Scotland Yard in London. On Sunday, 21 November 1920, the Headquarters Intelligence Staff of the IRA, and its special Counterintelligence Branch (known as “The Squad”) under the leadership of IRA Intelligence Chief and IRA Adjutant General Michael Collins, mounted a successful operation to seize and execute 14 of Smith-Cumming’s case officers. While many more appear to have escaped the IRA execution squads that morning, Whitehall feared that more of its professional agents would be identified and suffer the same fate and this prompted the hasty withdrawal of most of the remaining SIS agents from Ireland in the days that followed. This was the single greatest catastrophe in the history of the British Secret Service, and according to author Nigel West, Smith-Cumming was forever after reluctant to involve the SIS in Irish operations.
To the end of his life Cumming retained an infectious, if sometimes eccentric, enthusiasm for the tradecraft and mystification of espionage, experimenting personally with disguises, mechanical gadgets, and secret inks in his own laboratory.
He also had a fascination with most forms of transport, driving his Rolls at high speed around the streets of London. In his early fifties he took up flying, gaining both French aviators’ and Royal Aero Club certificates. But his main passion was boating in Southampton Water and other waters calmer than those which had ended his active service career. In addition to owning ‘any number’ of yachts, Cumming acquired six motor boats. In 1905 he became one of the founders and first rear-commodore of the Royal Motor Yacht Club.
He was appointed CB in 1914 and KCMG in 1919. He died suddenly at his home, 1 Melbury Road, Kensington, London, on 14 June 1923, shortly before he was due to retire.
Portrayal in popular culture
In the television series Reilly, Ace of Spies, he was portrayed by Norman Rodway.
References
- ^ a b Quite Interesting, BBC One, Season 3, episode 10
- ^ The Independent review of The Quest for C: Mansfield Cumming and the founding of the British Secret Service by Alan Judd
Nigel West, MI5. London: Prendeville Publishers, 1972.
Further reading
- Judd, Alan: The Quest For C - Mansfield Cumming And The Founding Of The Secret Service; HarperCollinsPublishers, 1999, ISBN 0002559013
- Andrew, C: Secret service: the making of the British intelligence community; 1985
- Hiley, N: The failure of British espionage against Germany, 1907–1914, HJ, 26 (1983), 867–89
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