Meanwhile, the ‘foreign’ branch of the Secret Service Bureau, first known as MI1C, was renamed Military Intelligence 6, or ‘MI6’, during the First World War. Thereafter it became known as MI6 or the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) – again, twin designations that it retains to the present day. Its first head was Sir Mansfield Cumming, a Royal Navy officer who had taken early retirement due to ill-health. By all accounts he was a remarkable character. In the early stages of the First World War he lost a leg in a road traffic accident in France – as the story goes, he hacked his own leg off with a pocket penknife in order to drag himself to safety from the wreckage of his car. This accident caused him to use a wheelchair, and colleagues later recalled that he would terrorise the corridors of power in Whitehall, spinning at high speeds around corners.8
In taking the decision to establish a professional intelligence department in 1909, the British government actually came late to the ‘intelligence game’ when compared to other European powers, most of which had already set up such bodies by the turn of the twentieth century. France had established code-breaking ‘black chambers’ (cabinets noirs) in the middle of the nineteenth century, while tsarist Russia had an infamous intelligence service (the Okhrana), and Germany had a specialised intelligence service (Nachrichtendienst) operating at least since the time of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870. The reason for Britain’s late arrival into the world of espionage was due to strong opposition from some Victorian and Edwardian politicians, who decried ‘intelligence’ as an inherently un-English pursuit: gentlemen ‘did not read each other’s mail’, went the phrase, and ‘espionage’ was not even an English word, as some liked to point out. It was better to leave such sordid exploits to the Continental powers, where they belonged.9
The formation of the two services that would later become known as MI5 and SIS represented a fundamental break with all British intelligence-gathering efforts up to that point. For the first time, the government had professional, dedicated peacetime intelligence services at its disposal. Operational distinctions between MI5 and SIS, particularly jurisdictional disputes over what constituted ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’ territory, proved a thorny subject that would only be resolved over subsequent decades. Nevertheless, the crucial point is that, unlike all British intelligence-gathering efforts up to that point, after 1909 the government was equipped with independent intelligence bureaucracies, furnished with card-catalogue index registries, which brought together information from all available sources. Whereas previously the British military and various government departments, such as the India Office, had gathered intelligence and conducted espionage for their own purposes, often on an ad hoc basis, the services established in 1909 had two specific combined purposes: to gather and assess intelligence. They were also inter-departmental, that is to say they were meant to ‘service’ all British government departments with the intelligence they needed. Although MI5 and SIS grew out of Britain’s military intelligence department (MO5), they were different from the intelligence departments of the armed forces, which were not inter-departmental. All three of the armed services, the army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force, would go on to maintain their own intelligence departments, but it is MI5 and SIS (and later GC&CS) that are usually understood to be Britain’s intelligence services, or, more amorphously, ‘British intelligence’. The establishment of MI5 and SIS also witnessed for the first time a distinction between various grades of classified information (or ‘intelligence’), such as ‘secret’ and ‘top secret’. Thus, while British government departments before 1909 had gathered intelligence, and would continue to do so thereafter, the breakthrough for the government was that after 1909 it had for the first time its own intelligence services.
To this day, MI5 and SIS retain many of the practices established in their earliest days. The Chiefs of SIS retain the designation ‘C’, a title that was first used by Sir Mansfield Cumming, which is variously understood to stand either for ‘Cumming’ or for ‘Chief’. Other SIS rituals established in its earliest times which continue to the present include a green light outside C’s room (indicating that C is busy), special green ink that is reserved for him alone to use, and the ubiquitous and sometimes pointless use of codenames. SIS reports are still referred to as ‘CX reports’, apparently meaning ‘C Exclusively’. Similar continuities also exist in MI5. The terms ‘Put Away’ (‘P/A’) and ‘Look Up’ (‘L/U’), for example, can be seen on the front of countless declassified MI5 records, indicating when a file has been looked up and then put away in a secure cabinet – both of which were terms used by Kell soon after his ‘Bureau’ was established. The same is true of ‘Nothing Recorded Against’ (‘NRA’), which refers to one of the most important, but least glamorous, activities that MI5 officers have undertaken since Kell’s time: when an MI5 officer has looked up an individual in the service’s central archive, but has found nothing incriminating.
Eccentric rituals and designations apart, MI5 and SIS also retain much more important legacies from their early history. From the outset of their operations it was established that neither would have any executive powers. In contrast to law-enforcement agencies such as London’s Special Branch at Scotland Yard, or the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), neither MI5 nor SIS has ever had any powers of arrest. Readers may be disappointed to learn that SIS officers have never had ‘licences to kill’. Instead, MI5 and SIS have always relied on police authorities in Britain, particularly Special Branch, to carry out arrests for them. This was a calculated strategy on the part of the Chiefs of Staff and the British government. By decoupling intelligence-gathering from law enforcement, policing, and executive action more generally, they hoped to avoid the establishment of a ‘police state’, which they feared would be created by providing the secret services with powers of arrest. They also seem to have concluded that policing is a very different activity from intelligence work, which is not necessarily concerned with either arrests or law enforcement. Intelligence-gathering involves acquiring information in an anticipatory, prophylactic manner – fragments of information from here or there which may or may not become important one day. This distinction between intelligence and policing continues to the present day, and in fact is one of the reasons why the FBI at the start of the twenty-first century is considered to be ill-equipped to deal with the threat of terrorism, which requires anticipatory intelligence, not policing.10
Despite the notable continuities in MI5 and SIS’s history from 1909 onwards, it would be erroneous to suppose that in the years immediately after their foundation they were anything like the services they would later become. It is a myth that ever since the sixteenth century ‘British intelligence’, like the British empire itself, grew steadily in size and influence, spreading its tentacles across the world. This myth was mostly derived from Edwardian spy novelists like Erskine Childers, whose writings, such as Riddle of the Sands, depicted a powerful British intelligence service actively thwarting its enemies both at home and abroad. The reality could not have been further from such fictions. For years after their establishment, both MI5 and SIS remained desperately short of resources. The diary of MI5’s first and longest-serving head, Sir Vernon Kell, reveals how perilous the organisation’s existence was in its early days. In the years before the First World War, MI5 and SIS were both run on shoestring budgets. At the outbreak of war in 1914, MI5 had an entire staff of just fifteen – including the office’s caretaker. Staff numbers in SIS were similarly meagre. During his first week on the job in 1909, the first Chief of SIS, Sir Mansfield Cumming, noted rather miserably in his diary that he sat alone in his new office, without the telephone ringing, and with no one visiting him because the Bureau was too secret to be listed in a Whitehall telephone directory. This was very much a one-man-and-a-dog operation.11
The First World War led to the massive expansion of the machinery of Britain’s secret state – just as it did in all other major belligerent European powers. In fact, it is fair to say that the war