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

Number Two, Whitehall Court. This was a labyrinthine collection of offices close to the centre of government. Potential agents were led up six flights of stairs before entering a warren of corridors, passageways and mezzanines.
    Nothing was quite as it appeared. There were mirrors and blind corners and doors that seemed to lead to nowhere. Many recruits felt as if they were wandering through an optical illusion. One of them noted that by the time he reached C’s door, he had the distinct impression that he was back in the same place as when he had first arrived on the sixth floor.
    Cumming referred to his Whitehall Court staff as his ‘top mates’ while the spies themselves were ‘rascals’ and ‘scallywags’. He had no qualms about hiring men of dubious repute, so long as they were up to the job. One potential spy recalled the Chief swivelling around in his chair and saying: ‘I know all about your past history. You are just the man we want.’
    Yet Cumming’s attitude was the exception to the norm. Many in the government and army viewed espionage as both immoral and disreputable. Britain’s pre-war military attaché in Berlin had baulked at the idea of sending intelligence back to London. ‘You will not have forgotten when we talked this matter over some months ago, that I mentioned how distasteful this sort of work was to me.’
    Cumming viewed things rather differently. ‘After the War is over, we’ll do some amusing secret service work together,’ he told Compton Mackenzie. ‘It’s capital sport.’
    The author-turned-spy, Valentine Williams, described Cumming as ‘cunning as an old dog fox, as rusé and as full of guile as a veteran sergeant major.’ He would sit behind his vast desk and await the delivery of some secret report from the hands of his secretary.
    ‘Were it favourable, he would chuckle, “Ha!” while a grimly roguish smile, boding no good to someone, would slowly spread over the broad face.’

    Mansfield Cumming was soon engaged in work of vital importance to national security. The naval arms race with Germany and the First World War dominated the early years of his tenure. He despatched agents to France, Belgium and Germany, from where they sent back information on troop movements and naval manoeuvres.
    He spent long hours at the office, working through weekends and public holidays. He only occasionally saw his wife, May, who lived for much of the time at their country house at Bursledon in Hampshire. A prim and rather demure Scottish lady, May had grown used to her husband’s long absences.
    During the early years of his tenure as the Chief, Cumming undertook espionage missions in person, disguising himself with toupee, fake moustache and an outfit that even he described as ‘rather peculiar’. In preparation for one important assignment, he hired clothes from William Berry Clarkson’s theatrical costume shop in Soho. The disguise, he declared, was ‘perfect . . . its existence not being noticeable even in a good light.’
    He delighted in showing visitors a photograph of himself pretending to be a heavily built German. ‘[He] was entranced when I failed to recognise the party in question,’ wrote Valentine Williams. ‘It was himself, disguised for the purposes of a certain delicate mission he once undertook on the Continent before the war.’
    One of these foreign missions came very close to killing him. It also revealed a dogged, obsessive determination that was to become the hallmark of his working life.
    In the summer of 1914, he had headed to France in the company of his only son, Alistair. They were driving at high speed through woodland in Northern France when Alistair lost control of the wheel. The car spun into a roadside tree and flipped upside down. Alistair was flung from the vehicle and landed on his head. Cumming was trapped by his leg in a tangle of smouldering metal.
    ‘The boy was fatally injured,’ wrote Compton Mackenzie in his account of the incident,