Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution Read Online Free PDF

asked, putting in an eyeglass and staring at me harder than ever.’
    The ice was soon broken and the ensuing meeting went well: C even suggested that they dine together at the Savoy. ‘I intended to make myself extremely unpleasant to you,’ he later admitted, ‘but I said that when I saw you I should probably find a man after my own heart and fall on your neck.’
    C often whisked newly appointed agents to lunch at one of his London clubs. He would drive them there at breakneck speed in his magnificent Rolls-Royce, as if he wished to initiate them into a new and more reckless world.

    Those in C’s inner circle would eventually get to know his real name: it was Mansfield George Smith Cumming (the Cumming was adopted from his wife). He was a naval commander by profession, but suffered from such acute seasickness that he was retired from active service and posted to Southampton where he worked on the harbour’s boom defences.
    Cumming was fifty and in semi-retirement when he received an unexpected letter from the Admiralty. ‘Boom defence must be getting a bit stale . . .’ it read. ‘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.’
    The letter was signed by Rear Admiral Alexander Bethell, director of Naval Intelligence, and dated 10 August 1909. It was to mark the beginning of an illustrious new career for Mansfield Cumming.
    The offer was a startling one. The government had decided to establish a wholly new organisation called the Secret Service Bureau, with two separate but connected divisions. One was to deal with domestic intelligence, the other exclusively with foreign.
    Cumming was to head the latter division, charged with gathering military, political and technical intelligence from overseas. His task was to recruit agents, train them and then send them into foreign countries in order to report on the threat they posed to Britain.
    The establishment of the Secret Service Bureau was not the first government foray into foreign espionage. The navy had set up an intelligence department in the 1880s and the War Office also had an Intelligence Branch. These were preoccupied with military espionage. Now, the increasingly tense international situation called for the creation of a new, more professional organisation, with a far wider reach.
    Cumming accepted the job offer with alacrity, reasoning that it would be a wonderful opportunity to do good work ‘before I am finally shelved.’
    His organisation would eventually expand until it operated across the globe, but it had very modest beginnings. Cumming’s first day at work, on 7 October 1909, did not begin well. ‘Went to the office,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘and remained all day but saw no one, nor was there anything to do.’
    He was denied access to War Office files, an essential starting point for his new bureau, and had virtually no equipment.
    A week later, he was still complaining of having nothing to do. ‘Office all day,’ he wrote. ‘No one appeared.’
    In a letter to Rear Admiral Bethell, who had offered him the job, he vented his frustration. ‘Surely we cannot be expected to sit in the office month by month doing absolutely nothing?’ He soon realised that the success of his new bureau would be entirely dependent upon his own initiative.
    Cumming’s first office was established in London’s Victoria Street, opposite the Army and Navy Stores, where it was to operate under the guise of a detective agency. The location was not ideal, largely because C kept bumping into friends who wanted to know what he was doing there.
    To preserve his anonymity, he rented a private flat in Ashley Mansions on Vauxhall Bridge Road and moved most of his operations to this unassuming new headquarters. An office, he would say, arouses interest and curiosity, ‘but a private dwelling calls for no comment.’
    He would later move again, to the eaves of an Edwardian mansion at