M (29 page)

Technically the Secret Service also had to keep up with the quickening pace of change. In 1906 Colonel Davies had been a delegate at an early international conference on wireless telegraphy. MacDonogh, besides being a former barrister, was a qualified engineer, and in the years leading up to the war would make it his business to understand advances in the field. Fortunately for Melville, the spy network he would eventually discover made little use of the new technology. Before the First World War, agents put it all down on paper.

Melville was unchallenged as Chief Detective of the new SSB. At one of Cumming's first meetings with Edmonds and Kell in November of 1909 he noted that D – Drew – was already out of favour, to be used as little as possible as a matter of policy. Edward ‘Tricky' Drew (‘time was when Edward Drew was the handsomest man in the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard', sighed a biographer
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) had probably found it hard to adjust. A lifetime in the Metropolitan Police did not necessarily make a man suitable for secret work. For one thing, he might keep on gossiping to his old cronies down the road. Melville never had that problem because he had made professional discretion a habit throughout his life; it had helped him maintain his authority. Nor could an ex-policeman necessarily understand the political and diplomatic niceties of counter-espionage work – unless, like Melville, he had already become familiar with highly placed civil servants and the everyday international intrigue of people at the top. And then, an SSB detective needed to be something of a self-starter; he needed to know when to show initiative, and when to hold fire and consult a senior officer. A lifetime in a hierarchy can undermine independence of thought.

Cumming noted two other policy decisions made at the same meeting. No other detectives were to be employed just yet. And M was to be present at all meetings with ‘rascals' (suspects), presumably because his years of experience in dealing with criminals gave him a nose for them. Cumming had not yet met M. He would not meet him for some time. When an appointment was arranged (at Edmonds's house) Melville failed to turn up – ‘disappointed to find on my arrival that a note had been left for me saying that the authorities had decided that the meeting had better be postponed' wrote Cumming.
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MacDonogh was determined that Melville should not tell Cumming who the existing foreign agents were.

This unwillingness to share information was indicative of a deeper awkwardness afflicting the infant SSB. The Navy was sidelined, and Cumming with it. Although Kell and MacDonogh appeared friendly enough they were united in treating Cumming (who had been quietly working for naval intelligence for some years) as a junior partner. Worse: Cumming was older than Kell, and stouter, and up from the country (he had spent the past decade working on boom defences in the Solent). Where Kell was multilingual and thirty-six, Cumming was fifty and – although he spoke French – was only now beginning to learn German. Where Kell was urbane, impatient, and his talents obvious, Cumming was original, modest, patient and a clever engineer whose overriding enthusiasm was for new boats, planes and dirigibles. They were the hare and the tortoise.

The military men held onto their contacts. Bearing in mind point 4 of Kell's report,

It is probably best to employ a first class detective under direction of an officer to collect and work agents abroad.

Kell's chief operative, Melville, should have been working equally for both of them. His experience in many respects was unmatched by any senior officer and this is acknowledged by his gradual re-invention not as mere M, but ‘Mr M', as Long and others came to call him. There is affectionate respect in their attitude to him.

Melville had personally sanctioned most of the MO
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agents overseas who were now supposed to be handed over to Cumming, but Cumming waited in vain; MacDonogh was playing power games. And naval intelligence had no counterpart network of civilian spies to offer him, because the Admiralty had been employing consular staff. But that policy had decisively changed following a rap over the knuckles from the Foreign Office.
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In the first months MacDonogh was inappropriately controlling, expecting Cumming to be ever-present at Drew's empty Victoria Street office where nothing happened and there were no records or facilities. Unsurprisingly, Cumming was soon agitating to be permitted to move from Victoria Street to a headquarters of his own (six months later, in March 1910, he briefly relocated to Ashley Mansions in Vauxhall Bridge Road prior to a more permanent move to Whitehall Court). In November of 1909 he was allowed to meet his first foreign agent, B – Byzewski, who was already working in Berlin – but was only reluctantly permitted to pay him.
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Long, who had been valuable abroad, was back in England working for Melville. Again, this was all about the War Office maintaining control. In the August of 1910 the Admiralty showed that it was just as capable of petty behaviour when it prohibited coastguards from communicating with Kell.
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Yet over the years the SSB did become a more collaborative service, albeit one that eventually evolved into two separate services, headed respectively by Kell and Cumming, dealing with home and foreign intelligence. That it did so owed more to Cumming's patience, sharpness and determination than to any unprompted generosity on the part of Kell or MacDonogh.
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With no espionage network so far uncovered, yet a certainty that systematic spying was going on, Melville's investigations had to start from a wide base and narrow their focus to likely individuals. Kell had no problem with this; he was an orderly fellow who dealt well with card indexes and lists and his report had recommended

11. The registration of aliens which was enforced by Act of Parliament in 1798 and 1804 must be revived.

Conveniently, spies in Britain before the First War seem almost without exception to have been foreigners. If they sounded British and looked it, they usually turned out to have (exactly like Kell himself, as it happened) foreign parents. Inconveniently, the information-gathering must be unofficial because Parliament had not given the go-ahead for a register of aliens. So when Kell set out to compile his register of immigrants, rather than visitors, to Britain, he cast his net extremely wide. Nearly all of them would be safe. But among them would be people with something to hide – people subject to blackmail by the authorities in their own country; or people who would do anything for money; or (rarely) genuine patriots of another country. Most often, the tasks demanded of them seemed so harmless that the people themselves cannot have realised what terrifyingly deep water they might be stepping into.

It would be Melville's task to investigate individual foreigners who, in his judgement and Kell's, were up to no good. This represented a new departure because most of his work to date had been about investigating suspicious visitors and scaring them off. If he did uncover a network, in his view he should do exactly what he had done with the anarchists of the Tottenham Court Road: make them nervous without letting them know what he knew, then leave them alone so that he could learn more about them if he wanted to and pick them off if need be. This approach made efficient use of scant resources. It had worked for the Deuxième Bureau and Special Branch twenty years ago, and it would work again.

Kell kept memoranda of his activities in the first summer of SSB's existence. M, L, and K (as Kell was known) met quite regularly at the Temple Avenue office. Melville's plan for a round-robin was bettered, for in June 1910, Kell himself made a tour of chief constables to impress on them the need for vigilance. Henry Dale Long was encouraged to join the Legion of Frontiersmen to find men who would supplement the post-office and police authorities as the ‘few paid agents' of Kell's report, which at this stage remained the blueprint for activity. M hopped across to Ireland to investigate the sister of a deceased soldier called O'Brien (she was trying to sell plans of Portsmouth), and reported on a German who seemed to frighten all the foreign waiters around Folkestone. At Harrow School a drill instructor called Greening was under surveillance.

On the evening of 10 July 1910, a Sunday, M was to meet naval Captain Roy Regnart in Brussels. Regnart had been set to work with Cumming on the orders of Admiral Bethell, head of the Department of Naval Intelligence. There was evidently a ‘traitor' in that city. The word is in inverted commas in Kell's memorandum. The information had come to Kell via Cumming, whom Kell did not yet take entirely seriously, only slowly perceiving that Cumming's preoccupation with dirigibles and other transport wizardry might be more to the point than it appeared. (The first plane had flown the Channel exactly a year earlier.)

If the Brussels lead proved genuine and Melville required an arrest to be made while they were in Belgium, Superintendent Quinn was on standby to provide a detective at short notice. On Wednesday 13 July everyone was back in England and Kell noted:

Meeting with C and Regnart in C's room at 11am. Regnart gave a full account of the Brussels affair, which ended in a fiasco.

The following day:

Met M in his offices at 10am and he gave me an account of the Brussels affair. He seems to think they were taken in by Rouveroy and that no more confidence should be reposed in him. I told M to send in a written report.
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They would discover that in Brussels

…there were two very dubious agencies… which make a business of prying into the military secrets of all the big powers and selling information to the highest bidder.
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They would use them, too; but they needed their own man on the spot. Henry Dale Long, now working to Melville, would be relocated to Brussels for a second time in 1911. A continental posting was what Regnart wanted for himself. He was a troublesome colleague although he held Melville in high regard. In the course of his absence for the ‘fiasco',

Cumming discovered yet more examples of his having given to agents addresses of his own for communications that should have been sent to Cumming. The trip, meanwhile, was disappointingly inconclusive but in one respect surprising: Regnart formed a high opinion of Melville and his methods, the tactical subtlety and penetration of which may be gauged by the following: ‘He [Regnart] says M is much bolder than he when dealing with strangers. He goes right up to them and peers in their faces.'
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It would become apparent that for Cumming's purposes, spies in the inland capitals of Europe were less important than people who could survey the north German coast with an expert eye. This coastline of shifting sands was almost impenetrable of access from the sea without recent intelligence of sandbanks, mines, harbour works and submarines. The Admiralty were particularly interested in Borkum as a possible landing place because it was sufficiently distant from the
Hochseeflotte's
base at Wilhelmshavn. Unfortunately, in August of 1910 the Germans would scent British interest in Borkum when a couple of amateur spies, Brandon and Trench, were caught snooping and taking pictures in the area. They were naval officers doing some inept detective work for the Admiralty (not SSB; Regnart acting on his own initiative) while on leave, and they were jailed in Germany.
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As this embarrassment must be followed by a tit-for-tat arrest, the first alleged spy to make headlines was a cheerful German soldier cadet who probably meant no harm. His capture had nothing to do with Melville at all.

In the summer of 1910 Lt Siegfried Helm, at twenty-one a very junior engineer officer of the 21st Nassau Regiment, visited England for a month. One of his friends had already been to London and had enjoyed a brief flirtation with a Miss Wodehouse. Helm wrote to her at her London address; he would appreciate her company on his visit to the capital. The reply that reached him in his Tooting boarding-house (the only people there were old ladies, he had complained, ‘from 45 to 70 years old') came from Fratton. Miss Wodehouse had moved there with a family she was working for.
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Helm had told her he wanted to see Chatham and Aldershot and Portsmouth while he was in England. She told him Fratton was very close to Portsmouth, so he came to stay at the house next door for a few days.

Miss Wodehouse, probably missing her former beau, was impatient with Helm from the start. He sketched everything – forts, ships, anything he could see around Portsmouth – showed her the pictures and then said winningly ‘You won't tell, will you?' Miss Wodehouse did not find this romantic, or even interesting. He was an overgrown schoolboy. However, she probably wanted to enlarge her circle of male acquaintances locally and Helm unknowingly represented an opportunity. Following a tedious afternoon in his company she walked, emboldened by self-righteousness, right into the local barracks and spoke to a senior officer. He and a colleague watched Lt Helm in the days that followed and saw more sketching and some behaviour they interpreted as furtive. They stopped him and asked questions, and Lt Helm was detained for a couple of days in the Officers' Mess at Fort Purbrook, where everyone was very hospitable, according to an anxious note he wrote to his betrayer. His capture seems to have been made with embarrassed good humour; the officers did it because they had been told to be vigilant rather than because they saw much harm in the young man.

Meanwhile, they applied for permission to charge him. (‘Captain Bonham Carter came up from Portsmouth with all necessary evidence and documents about Lt Helm's espionage', wrote Kell sternly in his diary.)
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The War Office permission, granted with alacrity in view of the Brandon and Trench fiasco, was implemented by Inspector Abel of the Hampshire police. Lt Helm was driven to Fareham Police Station by Lt Salmond, ‘the police following close behind in a trap'. He was charged with attempting to take a plan of Fort Widley for communication to a foreign power, a felony under the 1889 Official Secrets Act, and appeared in court in the second week of September 1910.
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News of his arrest was leaked to the
Daily Express
before the court appearance; the Admiralty were highly displeased and summoned Kell to explain himself. He told them airily that ‘…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'.
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After the first court hearing, the conservative German
Kreuz Zeitung
said indulgently that ‘the temptation was great, during his free time which was not devoted to the study of the English language, to practise technical drawing from nature' and fancied the young man reclining idly in the grass drawing, quite by chance, picturesque naval installations. The writer then pulled himself together to face facts: ‘two real British spies' were in German custody, so Helm would probably be in for the high jump. The
National Zeitung
pronounced the arrest ‘less of a mistake than a somewhat malicious revenge'.
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