The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War (17 page)

However, this sudden deployment sparked a major panic in Britain and caused the most serious invasion scare of the war. Hall remembered how ‘our trenches along the East Coast were hurriedly manned; local commandants worked 24 hours a day; orders for the evacuation of residents in all towns and villages near the sea were on the point of being issued’. Perhaps wisely, he never perpetrated such a big deception again. Nonetheless, he was not deterred from making use of the press whenever it suited him.

The other activity that Lord Fisher had accused Hall of wasting time on was ‘hunting spies’. Hall’s investigative co-pilot on these missions was Basil Thomson, head of both Special Branch and the Criminal Investigations Department (CID). The origins of Britain’s secret police lay in the 1880s, when the Special Irish Branch was formed to combat republican terrorists, while CID concentrated on the threat of anarchist subversion. Though MI5 was charged with uncovering spies operating in the UK, it had no powers of arrest; that honour belonged to Special Branch, and Thomson exploited it to the full.

Thomson was born in 1861. His father was the Archbishop of York, and he grew up in a restored fourteenth-century mansion. A sensitive youth, he suffered two breakdowns, the second forcing him to leave Oxford after only one term. Declaring a desire to travel, he was sent to an agricultural college in Iowa that turned out to be nothing but a farm set in the vast, unforgiving wilderness of the American Midwest, populated by wolves and rattlesnakes. Not surprisingly, he succumbed to nervous exhaustion.

For a man of his class and background, there was always the Colonial Office: Thomson was dispatched to the South Sea Islands in the Pacific. Despite enduring volcanic eruptions, cannibals, a war with a pirate tribe, and malaria, he enjoyed it immensely. In 1890, he became Commissioner of Native Islands and adviser to the King of Tonga. The first white man to learn Tongan, he was invited to join the King’s family; as he put it, ‘at the age of twenty-nine to be elder brother to a monarch of ninety-two is an unusual experience’. He was also elected prime minister, and administered Tonga’s legal system, civic codes and tax affairs. Some years after leaving the island, with Germany casting a covetous eye on the region, he returned to negotiate its formal entry into the British Empire.

Back in the UK, he was a changed man; gone was the scared, overwrought schoolboy. For a while he looked after the interests of the crown prince of Siam and his brother; then, in 1896, after passing the bar exams, he was appointed deputy governor of Liverpool Prison. Thomson hoped he’d ‘find criminals of our own race even more interesting than alien islanders on the threshold of civilisation’. In 1900 he transferred to Dartmoor Prison, where, in the wake of a riot and several escape attempts, he introduced a farm and a factory to give inmates something useful to do. His reputation as a troubleshooter followed him to Wormwood Scrubs, which had recently suffered a mutiny. Then, in June 1913, the position at Scotland Yard became vacant and he was asked to fill it.

Together, Hall and Thomson were a formidable team; during interrogations they adopted classic good cop/bad cop tactics. Hall’s ‘shrewd penetrating glance’ and ‘quick mode of speech’ created ‘an almost terrorising effect’. Thomson, on the other hand, was ‘charming, quiet and sympathetic’.

One of their main tools for tracking and dealing with suspect individuals was set up in August 1915. The Port Control Section inspected the documents of everybody arriving in the UK by boat and liaised with the Military Permit Office, which had bases in London, Paris, Rome and New York and was responsible for issuing entry and exit visas. Information gathered by both agencies was sent directly to Hall and Thomson, who could then check the names against their own databases and act accordingly.

Aside from the titled German agents fleeing American justice, many of those stopped this way proved to be harmless amateurs who posed no real danger. This was not true of Alfred Hagn, a Norwegian traveller posing as a businessman. Even before he arrived, Hagn was on Hall’s radar: ‘the decoding of wireless messages revealed that a man of this name had left Holland for England … the man’s name already figured in our card index’. Hall wanted him arrested immediately he stepped off the boat; Thomson preferred to let him land and then have him followed. Hall reluctantly agreed, stressing that ‘he must not be lost sight of for a moment’.

As Hagn made his way to London, he was shadowed by an undercover Special Branch operative who observed how protective he was ‘of one suitcase in particular’. Hagn booked into the Savoy, and the Special Branch man set about befriending him. After a few days he concocted a way to get Hagn out of the hotel for long enough to search his room. In the suitcase, the agent discovered ‘the materials of a fiendish plot’, including phials, packages and documents. On Hagn’s return to the Savoy, he was arrested.

When the contents of the suitcase were examined, it was found that one of the phials contained ‘enough germs … to kill thousands of people’; there were also ‘enough explosives to reduce a large part of London to ruins’. Interrogated by Hall and Thomson, Hagn confessed that he intended to poison reservoirs and ‘blow up vital centres in the London area’. Hagn escaped the hangman’s noose: his death sentence was commuted to penal servitude and he was repatriated to Norway in 1919.

Of equal significance to his alliance with Thomson was Hall’s relationship with Mansfield Smith-Cumming, head of MI6. The Secret Service Bureau was formed during 1909 to counter the perceived threat of German espionage, whipped up by the press and flamboyant, bombastic authors like William Le Queux, who penned lurid tales of spy rings and invasion plans. The bureau was split between MI5, whose remit was domestic counter-espionage, and SIS, later MI6, which was responsible for foreign affairs. As MI6 was under the nominal control of the Admiralty, a naval man was chosen to lead it.

Mansfield Smith-Cumming, dubbed ‘C’ by his colleagues, was born in 1859. He was educated at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, and at the age of 19 went to sea, spending six years patrolling the East Indies, where he saw action in operations against Malay pirates. He was decorated for his role in the Egyptian campaign 1882, but retired three years later due to ill health. In November 1898 he was put in charge of the construction of harbour defences at Southampton, and bought a country house not far away where he kept his collection of sailing vessels.

Cumming loved speed and enthusiastically embraced the new, revolutionary modes of transport that appeared with stunning regularity at the turn of the century. He joined the Motor Yacht Club, which held international races, and in 1906 was a founder member of the Royal Aero Club, established just three years after the Wright brothers made their historic flight, earning his pilot’s licence in 1913. After the war he kept a biplane and a functioning tank on his lawn.

Like Malcolm Hay, he had a passion for fast cars; a friend remembered how he drove ‘at breakneck speed about the streets of London to the terror of police and pedestrians alike’. He joined the RAC in 1902, and a year later drove a 50 h.p. vehicle in the Paris—Madrid race, during which eight people died. He gave a vivid account of the thrills and inherent danger of the early days of motor sport: ‘the dust when passing other cars was awful. The mere physical pain of the stones hitting me in the face was considerable – my goggles were smashed … the dust was so thick that one could not see the road at all.’

His love affair with the motor car ended in tragedy. In October 1914, while driving from Paris to Rouen with his 24-year-old son Alistair, the car skidded and smashed into a tree, crumpling on impact. Alistair was killed outright and Cumming’s right leg became trapped in the wreckage. A grisly version of what happened next gained credence thanks to the well-known author Compton Mackenzie, who worked for MI6 during the war. He wrote that Cumming, penknife in hand, ‘hacked away at his smashed leg until he had cut it off’. In reality, the leg was amputated in a French hospital soon afterwards. Cumming did little to deny the rumour that he had performed the surgery himself, it only added to his mystique. Once fitted with an artificial limb, he would, for his own amusement, stab it with a compass to alarm unsuspecting and unwanted visitors.

Though MI6 was technically under the control of the Foreign Office, it found itself under constant pressure from the War Office and Military Intelligence, who were running their own agents in parallel to Cumming. Matters were further complicated by the fact that FO officials in target countries often resented the presence of spies, and the fledging MI5 under Vernon Kell was also trying to get in on the act.

These internal power struggles frequently led to confusion and messy compromises that threatened the very existence of the networks that had been painstakingly set up by MI6. As a result, intelligence-gathering in Switzerland was almost entirely abandoned; in Holland and Belgium, two critical territories, it led to the collapse of espionage operations; while in Russia, personality clashes were made worse by the fact that the Russians’ own agencies were more interested in spying on each other than on the enemy.

Cumming’s one powerful friend in all this was Hall. At various points throughout the war, the WO made determined efforts to bring MI6 under their control. Each time, Hall stood by Cumming and insisted on his independence. Cooperation between the two even extended to codebreaking. Cumming had a very small unit, mainly creating codes for his own agents to use. Room 40 staff often dropped by to swap ideas and give advice.

In return, Cumming was expected to serve Hall and support his intelligence operations. Over the course of the war, he ran agents for Hall in Spain, Greece, Romania and South America. Hall also insisted that Cumming’s agents in Germany, who were few and far between, report back on naval matters such as construction and repair work going on in the dockyards there. In addition, he had Cumming employ watchers on the Danish coastline to spy on the movements of the German fleet and monitor neutral ships that might be carrying contraband in defiance of the blockade; the same arrangements applied to Norway and Sweden.

Though Cumming had little choice but to bow to Hall’s demands, he could be fiercely protective of his favourite agents. One of them was the prolific young writer Compton Mackenzie, best known today for his Scottish novels,
The Monarch of the Glen
(1941) and
Whisky Galore
(1947). Mackenzie had been working for MI6 in Greece and the Aegean, but, increasingly frustrated at the incompetence and lethargy he encountered, he wrote a critical report about the situation and forwarded it directly to Hall rather than sending it to Cumming, after a colleague advised him that ‘Blinker … holds senior rank to him in the service’. When Cumming heard about it, he was livid with Mackenzie: ‘I regard your behaviour in sending a report … over my head to my superior officer as a gross breach of discipline.’

Back in London, Mackenzie was hauled before Cumming. He feared the worst, but Cumming’s bark turned out to be worse than his bite. After ignoring Mackenzie for a few moments, he ‘took off his glasses and stared hard at me for a long minute without speaking’, then demanded he account for himself. Mackenzie spun a yarn, ‘in such a way as to win his attention’, and they embarked on a two-hour conversation that ended in an invitation to dinner. Cumming paid for the taxi that Mackenzie had left waiting outside throughout the meeting, having anticipated that it would last only a few minutes, and they went to eat. During the meal, he introduced Mackenzie to his wife as ‘the man who had given him more trouble than anybody in the service’. He confessed that he had intended to make life extremely unpleasant for Compton, but instead found him to be ‘a man after my own heart’ and suggested he visit every day he was in London.

In autumn 1917, Mackenzie returned to the Mediterranean, spending some time in Italy, and passed through Paris, where he managed to ruffle the feathers of an FO official, resulting in a mild and wryly amused telling-off from Cumming. Despite the trouble Mackenzie caused him, Cumming wanted him to become his number two. Mackenzie declined the offer and headed to the island of Capri, where he started on a new book.

The writer Compton Mackenzie in uniform

Rumours that Mackenzie was writing about his espionage work soon reached Hall. ‘Boiling’ mad, he summoned the young man to the Admiralty. Mackenzie recalled the meeting in some detail: ‘I had heard a great deal about Blinker Hall … what I had not heard was that facially he was so like my own chief. His nose was beakier; his chin had a more pronounced cutwater. Nevertheless, when I looked at the two men I could have fancied that each was a caricature of the other.’

Hall got right to the point and asked him about the book, reminding him that he’d be liable for a court martial, and to forget about getting it published in America as a way round censorship. Mackenzie denied he had any such intention and assured Hall that he would only pen an account after the war was over. Hall was not convinced. ‘I’m talking about while the war lasts. I hear you’ve already written at least half a dozen chapters.’ He paused to fix Mackenzie with a ‘horn-rimmed horny eye. I felt like a nut about to be cracked by a toucan.’