The Bethell Letter: The recruitment of mansfield Cumming, the first Chief of SIS
In 1909 the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) ordered the formation of a Secret Service Bureau. A War Office appointee was to head the Home Section of the Bureau while Rear-Admiral The Hon A.E. Bethell, the Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI), and a member of the CID was responsible for finding a suitable naval candidate to head the Foreign Section. On 10 August 1909, Bethell wrote the following letter to Commander Mansfield Cumming:
"My dear Mansfield Cumming, Boom defence must be getting a bit stale with you and the recent experiments with Ferret rather discounts yours at Southampton. You may therefore perhaps like a new billet. If so I have something good I can offer you and if you would like to come and see me on Thursday about noon I will tell you what it is.
Yours sincerely
A E Bethell"
The letter and a few surviving files provide only the most limited information on how and why Bethell identified Cumming as his choice to take a leading role in the formation of Britain's modern intelligence community. Bethell had only recently been apppointed DNI and it seems unlikely that he would have had contact with Cumming over intelligence issues. On the other hand, Bethell had been Assistant Director of Torpedoes between 1903 and 1907 and during that time he may have had connection with Cumming who was engaged in experiments with boom defence near Southampton. The available documents provide no clear indication of either a personal or a professional link between the two men and it is also possible that their first contact might have taken place during an earlier stage of their service careers. No evidence has been discovered to suggest that any alternative candidates to Cumming were considered.
Few indications of intimacy are provided by the correspondence between the two men. Cumming is addressed in Bethell's first letter as 'My dear Mansfield Cumming' but ten days later is accorded the more familiar 'My dear Cumming'. The relationship appears to have developed and subsequent exchanges include invitations from Bethell to Cumming to visit him at his home in Norfolk, 'I can put you up at any time if you send me a wire to say you are coming'.
There was nothing in Cumming's service record to mark him out as a man destined to become the first Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service. He was born Mansfield George Smith in 1859 (he changed his name in 1889 to Smith-Cumming to incorporate that of his wife and later dropped his original surname). After attendance at Royal Naval College Dartmouth he saw service in the Far East, Mediterranean and other postings. But in 1885, after only seven years in the Navy, he was declared medically unfit and retired on 'Active Half Pay'.
By August 1909 Cumming was 50 years old and, thanks to his wife's substantial income, financially independent. He had resumed service with the Royal Navy with an intellectually stimulating if somewhat peripheral posting carrying out his work on boom defence in Southampton Water and the Solent. Although physically a less than prepossessing figure - he was said to resemble 'Mr Punch' - Cumming possessed a keen intellect and was actively engaged in the very modern pursuits of flying aircraft and racing motorcars.
Cumming's diary relates that he visited Bethell as requested on 10 August 1909. He followed this up with a letter to the DNI on the 17th expressing a keen interest in the new post whilst proposing that he be allowed to combine it with his boom defence work. Bethell wrote back three days later telling Cumming that there was little room for negotiation over combining the posts and, in the light of the latter's disinclination to relinquish his old duties, questioned whether he was the man for the job, 'I had no idea your billet was such a good one or that you had so many interests in the place and I doubt that its being worth your while to take this appointment - but you must decide this for yourself.'
Cumming replied almost by return of post expressing his continuing desire to accept the new billet but also maintained his reluctance to sever his connections with boom defence, 'I am exceedingly keen on taking up the [new work] and am determined to make it a success if it is within my power. You must forgive me if I show some natural regret at giving up the work into which I have put all my interests for a long time. Cumming eventually secured a grudging permission to retain at least a vestige of his interest in boom defence and was appointed to head the Foreign Section of the Secret Service Bureau.
The faltering start to Cumming's secret career continued and although the Bureau should have opened for business on 1 October, account ledgers provide the information that payment for staff and premises only began on the 10th. Typically, Cumming, a workaholic, began work at his Victoria Street office a week earlier. It is hardly surprising given his premature action, that he was obliged to write in his diary that 'went to the office and remained all day but saw no one, nor was there anything to do there.' The start date was not the only source of confusion. Cumming seems to have been uncertain over the precise remit of his work and the chain of command. He wrote in his diary that the post he had been offered was 'Chief of the SS Service for the Navy'. He also laboured under the misapprehension that he was to head the whole of the Bureau and was discomforted to learn that he would be on an equal footing with his army opposite number, Captain Vernon Kell.
Worse was to follow and he confided in his diary that he even began to feel that he occupied a subsidiary role, 'There is no getting over the fact that up to the present I have been put on one side in favour of my colleague, and that if this attitude is maintained I shall have to take a very second place in a department and shall become in all practical respects subordinate to him as regards my relations with my superior officers. This is quite contrary to what I understood when the appointment was mentioned to me and I do not think it would prove a good plan, nor tend to the success of the work.'
Cumming was the victim of differences of opinion between several Whitehall departments over the emphasis and priority to be accorded to the Secret Service Bureau. It is difficult to apportion blame for this uncertainty. Bethell can not be entirely exonerated while Cumming seems likely to have put a complexion on discussions and papers that best coincided with his own aspirations. These wrangles over suzerainty and tasking were to resonate for years to come.
Cummings diaries reveal that he and Bethell remained in close professional and social contact in the early years of the Secret Service Bureau. They continued to dine together, stay at each other's houses and even visited the Motor Show together. Inevitably such contacts diminished when Bethell relinquished his position as DNI in 1912 and continued a distinguished career that embraced a range of important sea and staff postings until his retirement in 1918. In contrast, once Cumming had assumed his 'new billet' he took up occupancy for life. He saw the Foreign Section of the Secret Service Bureau through its difficult early years, endured the testing times of the First World War and laid the foundations for SIS's continued development.