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. Born into a middle-class family, Smith attended the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth and, upon graduation, was commissioned to the Navy as a sub-lieutenant. He was posted to the HMS Bellerophon in 1878, and for the next seven years saw sea duty in the East Indies. 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 many missions. He would travel 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. During this period he married the extremely rich May Cumming, and as part of the marriage changed his name to Smith-Cumming. 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-organized under the SIS, Kell's division becoming the Home Section, and Cumming's becoming the new Foreign Section, responsible for all operations outside Britain. 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[1]. This habit became a custom for later directors, although the C now stands for "Chief". 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[1]. 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 based in Saint 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, John Buchan, Compton Mackenzie and W. Somerset Maugham. When SSB discovered that semen made a good invisible ink he noted of his agents that "Every man carries his own stylo".[2] Secret Service budgets were once again severely cut after the end of WWI, and MI6 stations in Madrid, Lisbon, Zürich and Luxembourg were closed. 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
See also
| Military offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by William Melville |
Head of SIS 1909–1923 |
Succeeded by Hugh Sinclair |
Further reading:
Judd, Alan: "The Quest For C - Mansfield Cumming And The Founding Of The Secret Service"; HarperCollinsPublishers, 1999, ISBN 0002559013
