The Rest Is Classified - 8. The Man Who Made MI6

Episode Date: December 25, 2024

The daring, gadget-loving, mischievous founder of MI6. Mansfield Cumming, the first C, was a former navy man brought out of retirement to keep tabs on German spies around the outbreak of the First World War. Over the following decade he established MI6 and set it on course to be a central part of the British security apparatus. Known to test the mettle of potential employees by taking a knife out and stabbing his own wooden leg; Mansfield was an eccentric man who's personality has come to shape the institution which he founded. In this Christmas special, listen as David and Gordon discuss the founding of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service. Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ www.nordvpn.com/restisclassified It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Email: [e-mail] Twitter: @triclassified Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Seated at a large desk with his back to the window and apparently absorbed in reading a document was the most remarkable man I have ever met in my life. The thing that struck me most about him was the shape of his large intelligent head, which I saw in profile against the light. Without paying the slightest attention to me as I stood by the door, he went on reading, occasionally making a note on the papers before him. Then, with startling suddenness, he put his papers aside and, banging the desk hard with his hand, said, Sit down, my boy. I think you will do. I knew then that something really eventful had come into my life. This was my first introduction to C, the name by which this man was known to all who came in official contact with him. He had, of course, other names and one

quite well known in London society, but to us, or rather to those who served under him, he was always known and referred to by this single letter of the alphabet. C was the head of the British Secret Service. Well, welcome to The Rest is Classified. I'm David McCloskey, and that was Augustus Agar, a naval officer who carried out all kinds of wonderful undercover missions. And he's talking about his first meeting with a man known by the single letter of C. That's right. In the James Bond films, it's M, but in real life, it's C. And C is the chief of MI6. I'm Gordon Carrere, and we're going to be talking about the first chief, a man called Mansfield Cumming, and who gives the letter C to all the future chiefs of MI6 who are still using that

designation. David, have you ever been to the director of the CIA's office? Well, I have, and we should talk about it. We should also just note that up until we started researching this episode, Gordon, I really did think the C stood for chief, which I'm embarrassed to say. No, and a lot of people do. No, it's coming. It's coming. The first chief. So when you went to a director of the CIA's office, you probably can't tell me much about what it looks like, big office, I'm guessing. I can tell you lots.

I can tell you, I'll tell you everything I know, Gordon. Okay. Big office, nice view. Medium size office, decent view of the Potomac and sort of the woods along the Potomac. Very wood paneled. Ah, okay. Middling coffee, I would say. Like definitely could use some improvement on the caffeine side, but it's normal.

It's kind of a normal office. But my question is, when you went to sit with the director of the CIA, did he look you in the eye, pull out a knife, and stab himself in the leg? It's highly classified, but I can't share. No, that particular experience did not happen to me ever working inside CIA, unfortunately. Unfortunately, but that is the kind of thing that Mansfield Cumming used to do to people who came into this office. And we'll get to why he did that and the kind of story behind it later on. But he was an eccentric character, a kind of monocle, Victorian eccentric sailor with a big chin, which was often compared to a battleship.

But what I think is so interesting about him is that his eccentricities, his character, moulded the early MI6. And I still think you can see some of the legacy of the way he operated and the kind of person he was going through the service right through, even to some extent today, there were some of his traditions still there today, but also just, I think, a touch of that eccentricity and some of the kind of slightly odd and slightly kind of buccaneering characteristics that came from Cumming at the start. So I think maybe it's good we start with him and learn a little about him because I guess we have a case here, Gordon, where the corporation sort of resembles to some degree the founder, right? And who he was and is. So he's not your upper crust sort of guy,

is he? He's not an Oxbridge character. Is that right, Gordon? No, no, no. He's not your stereotype, I guess, of either an aristocratic spy or a kind of Oxbridge, very posh type. Born in 1859, most of what we know about him comes from a fantastic book called The Quest for Sea by Alan Judd. The key thing about the early coming is he goes to Dartmouth Naval College. So he's a naval man. He goes age 12 as a cadet. Now, the college in those days was comprised of two ships moored on a river. And the key thing about it is he got into trouble, right? He was the kind of person who within months of joining, he's getting punished. And we know from his record, he gets punished.

And I love the things he gets punished for. He gets punished for reading a novel, which is clearly something you should not be doing at Naval College. Later, for stuffing ink pots with blotting paper, throwing work overboard. I guess that makes more sense. Throwing a glass bottle at a train. Laughing, clearly not something you do at Naval College. Talking, again. Punch for the lash.

The lash, yes. Punch for the lash for talking. Loitering and disorderly behavior, talking during morning prayers, and encouraging two younger cadets to sing on a Sunday. I guess not sing hymns. That's probably the point. Probably sing some riotous naval tune, which is probably a bit out of character. I guess the picture you get is he's a rule breaker. He's a rule breaker. He's naughty. Yeah. Which I guess is the sort of person you do. I mean, you want that, I guess the picture you get is he's a rule breaker. He's a rule breaker. He's naughty. Yeah. Which I guess is the sort of person you do. I mean, you want that, I guess, built a little bit into the character of the guy who you're

going to send out to break foreign laws, right? I mean, at the end of the day, you want a little bit of that adrenaline junkie rule breaker kind of mentality. It seems like it works. And that's him. And you get that picture from the early age. So then he's off to the Navy. He graduates. He travels around the world with the Navy. By 1874, he's going to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Nagasaki, Manila. And when you hear the list,

you suddenly realize this was an era when the British Navy spanned the world, enforced the kind of British empire at this point at its majestic peak all over Asia and elsewhere. And he was traveling as part of that. But then slightly oddly, in 1885, he retires. And the only reference we have as to why he retires is that he had seasickness, which if you're a sailor seems somewhat of a problem. He discovered this after a couple of decades in the Navy that he just couldn't quite not throw up all over the world. I mean, is it wrong that I picture him as sort of like a Captain Ahab character? Is that the right- Yeah, no, I think that's pretty good.

I've got a bit of a salty- A salty sea dog kind of. Yeah, sea dog vibe. Yeah, I think that's pretty good. So he's retired, 1885, he gets married to Dora, but just two years later, she dies. 16 months later, he marries again. And his wife gives birth to a son, Alistair. Now he's going to come back to our story and play an important role later. But he's back in the UK. He's on the reserve list. And he is kind of drifting around doing different things at this point. He's working on naval defences. But the other thing that I think also gives a bit of a kind of sense of the character of the man and of what becomes MI6 is that he's into tech and gadgets. So he's

big into motor cars at this point. He becomes quite an influential member of the Royal Automobile Club. He kind of goes on Paris-Madrid races. He's a leading figure in what's called at the time motorism, which I think is people are really kind of excited by cars. He also learns to fly. So he gets a pilot's license, even when he's in his fifties. And he's a member of the Royal Aero Club. He loves photography and cameras, and he's a kind of tinkerer. One interesting thing is he actually builds a grandfather clock. So a very tall clock. And a few years ago, I went into MI6 and into the then chief's office to do an interview. It was with then John Scarlet,

and he had Cumming's clock actually up in the chief of MI6 office. I think it's now in an antechamber, someone told me. But this was a clock that Cumming himself had actually built. So he's a kind of tinkerer, someone who loves his gadgets. And I guess we think now we sort of look back on people who might have been flying in the early 20th century or really into cars. And because those are so common today, it almost seems, I guess, a little bit quaint. But if we put ourselves back in his shoes, he's actually sort of on the cutting edge of a lot of frontier technology in many respects, right? I mean, he's out in front of where the society is from the standpoint of technology. He's advanced, right? I mean, it's pretty interesting and he's really into it.

Yeah. It's like it's be someone today who's really into AI or really into kind of some other form of tech and really focused on it. So here he is, he's just a retired naval officer working on defences. It's a good point to stand back and look at what leads to the creation of MI6 and why he gets the call and what's going on in Britain at this point. Because his whole career in the Navy, there's no standing intelligence service. Exactly. Full stop in the UK, right? Exactly. There's not what we think of today as MI6. And it's going to get created in 1909 in an interesting way.

And one of the reasons it gets created is actually fiction, novelists. One of Cummings' friends was a man called Erskine Childers, who was sailing around the coast and he'd go on to, you know, they probably knew each other from the kind of sailing community down on the south coast. He writes a novel called The Riddle of the Sands. This is a very famous novel, because it's all about someone who's on a sailing trip, and then suddenly realize there's something amiss about their sailing trip, that the Germans might actually be using this sailing trip to do some intelligence gathering for a possible invasion of the east of England. And this comes out in 1903. And the novel is a sensation, which is all

about this point in history as well, where there's starting to be this fear about Germany and the rise of Germany. Britain's been at its imperial height, but it's also had this period where it's not felt it needed a secret service because it's been in what it called splendid isolation, sitting off the continent, using its navy to enforce power. But then suddenly Germany is rising, and Germany is a rising naval power particularly, and that's starting to worry Britain. Even when you look at the way spies are portrayed in sort of popular fiction, you could go back even to James Fenimore Cooper, almost 100 years before this, and main characters are spies. And there's a lot of care taken by the writers to make sure that the readers understand that these people are actually noble and good people. I think there's kind of this almost up to this point, a sense that the spy is sort of morally nasty and we don't want to get, we wouldn't, why would we have an intelligence service and sort of get our hands in the muck? You know, we're not in the era of James Bond yet, are we? Where was the spy sort of flashy

heroes, right? They're sort of dirty in many respects. But you see the kind of fictional world of spies really pick up at this point, because others follow Childers, like John Buchan, who's kind of one of the more famous ones, and a guy called William LeCue. And it starts a kind of spy fever in Britain at this point, because they're giving this sense that there are lots of German spies operating in Britain, that every possible German immigrant who might be cutting your hair is actually a secret German agent, kind of gathering intelligence. There's a Daily Mail headline from this era, which I think is wonderful. It's actually a piece of advice. It says, you should refuse to be served

by German waiters. Don't let the German waiter take your order. I mean, it's almost impossible to fathom now. But are there real cases of German espionage in this period or sort of sabotage? Or is this literally fiction imagines it and then popular culture takes it and it's not really based on anything true? There's almost none. So there are a few cases, but almost none. So it's whipped up, you realise, by the press who are running these headlines and they're running headlines about with maps of where the German invasion might come in Britain and warning about it. And the newspapers for the first time, one of them employs a spy editor who's going to kind of look for these

people. But what's amazing is, so this is all happening in this period before the First World War. And yet, actually, Britain doesn't have an intelligence service, and it doesn't have a counter espionage service to catch German spies. And so you kind of sense that the politicians and the people in government are like, everyone thinks we've got one. And everyone thinks, maybe we should have one. Maybe we need a spy service. And so in 1909, that's why there's a kind of committee set up by the prime minister to look at this subject. And it basically goes, we need our own spy service to spy abroad. And we need a counter espionage service to catch all those largely mythical German spies operating in Britain. And so that is what leads to the

creation of what becomes MI5, which is the Domestic Security Service, and what becomes known as, and we'll come back to names later, but MI6, the Secret Service, which is there to do this abroad and to kind of go gather those secrets about Germany. It does remind me to some degree of the influence that a writer like Le Carre had on Cold War espionage because he created words and sort of a terminology around the world of spies that was fictional that then was imported into real spy services. So you think about like the use of the word mole to describe a double agent hadn't really been used before him. Now it's literally the way anyone describes counter espionage, or even little things like, you know, the CIA's Russia house is not actually called Russia house on the org chart. And it wasn't Russia House in the 80s or 90s until the Le Carre novel came out

in like 89, I think. And then the CIA, like CIA officers inside Langley were like, oh, let's call ourselves that. And so they literally imported it. So in this case, we literally have a spy service created in the UK because of your love for spy fiction, which really gives this spy novelist a tremendous amount of hope, I think, about the possibilities. Yeah. Someone might set up a spy service based on one of yours. Well, I guess they already have. A guy can dream, Gordon. A guy can dream. But Cumming, he doesn't seem like the obvious choice. Let's just put it that way. Why him? Yeah. Why him? So he gets this letter in the summer of 1909, basically going,

we'd like to call you back for one last mission. We know you're 50 and you're retired and you're doing naval defences, but would you like to do this? It's not entirely clear why, because for instance, he doesn't really speak foreign languages. He hasn't served abroad for a while. There's one little hint, which is his kind of interest in fast boats, as well as fast cars, had maybe meant he'd gone on a kind of trip around Europe a few years earlier and might have been kind of gathering some intelligence on what Europeans were doing at that point. And that's one of the guesses, or it's just one of those things where it's just someone in the Navy knew him and thought, well, you know, he'd be the right kind of person. I mean,

maybe as well, it's that sense that they just knew he had the right character. And I think that the character thing maybe comes to it. So he gets asked to create this thing called the Secret Intelligence Service. That's what it becomes known as. But at this time, it's really called the Secret Service is the main title for it. What he's asked to do is get intelligence on Germany, particularly the German Navy, because the British Navy has been the kind of world power, and now suddenly the Germans are rapidly building up their battleships. And the fear is they are going to be building newer, faster, better battleships, better guns. And so there's a key intelligence priority there, which Cumming is given to do. I think the other bit that's interesting is why you need a Secret

Service Bureau to do this. And the answer is intelligence before seems to be pretty ad hoc. So the military would have had a little bit of intelligence on its specific requirements. Out in the colonies, the empire would have had intelligence locally, but now you've got this very specific requirement. At the same time, there's this strange world in which in Europe, there are lots of people selling secrets. On the continent, there's this world of people who go around saying, I can get you some plans, I can get you some details. These are all upstanding citizens on the continent. And here's the problem is that the foreign office, so the diplomats, don't want to meet them.

The knife and fork set aren't interested in dealing with this sort of lowbrow, you know, ruffian type crew, right? But I guess Cumming actually probably is to some degree. I also do love that he's basically not staffed or resourced to start. I mean, there's this great line from his diary on his first full day as the chief. He says, went to the office and remained all day, but saw no one, nor was there anything to do there. So he literally is alone. His first day was alone in a room, probably pondering how he was going to do this. Yeah, exactly. And the idea is he and his people, and he's got to find people, are effectively going to be a screen between the foreign office or the military and these

agents out in the field. And so the idea is that they can be deniable. So there's no link. They're not an official government department. They don't exist. They're not avowed or acknowledged by the government. So they can go out and meet these people who Cumming himself describes as scallywags. Scallywags, which is such a great phrase. And I guess that helps to clarify a bit of the bureaucratic give and take here, because the foreign office probably thinks there are some secrets we'd like to have, but we'd really prefer to not deal with the scallywags. And so if we have a guy like Cumming who can interact with them, great. We can sort of benefit from this without our people

needing to sort of be sullied by it. Be sullied by it. And I think there's still a little bit of that, isn't there, in the diplomatic world where the diplomats, you know, look down on the spies as having to get involved in a slightly grubbier business. Yeah, it's the diplomats are, you know, I mean, this is a broad brush term, but, you know, I'm all for that. It is the knife and fork set.

It's sort of the, you know, we're at dinners and diplomatic receptions and we don't want to deal with the coke fiend who's got secrets. We don't want to plumb those depths. You know, we want to have shrimp scampi and talk with the ambassador about, you know, whatever diplomatic talking points. And you get a feeling from the early coming days that it was a bit like that, that he would actually go out into the field himself in some cases to meet the people he called rascals as well as scallywags. I guess he had no staff to begin with.

Yeah, he didn't. He's just got one or two people. He's still hiring up. He gets a disguise, which is a kind of fake mustache and a toupee, which he gets from a theatrical costume shop in somewhere. No one's ever going to recognize him in that. There's one story. In 1910, I think he goes to Brussels to meet an agent who says they've got some information from inside Germany. They meet in a cafe, then they have a four-hour lunch. Cumming finds the man very slippery. I think it's four-hour lunch. And I love it. The man demands £100 in cash and Cumming gives him a tenner, £10, which is probably about the right way to go. They're sure he's withholding information. And then the agent shows Cumming

pictures of himself in various different uniforms to show that he can operate undercover. And then he describes himself as the slyest man in Europe, except for his brother, which is just, you know, it's like something out of the British comedy, Blackadder. This whole cafe scene, Gordon, reminds me a little bit of a letter actually that we received at the CIA when I was, I think a couple of years in as an analyst and I got passed around because it was so legendary, but it was essentially, it was from a felon who was in prison in a federal penitentiary in California. And he was offering his services to CIA when he was released. I think he was on the cusp of like a work release program

or something like that. And he basically spent 10 pages riffing on how he had sort of survived and thrived inside the prison and how he'd gotten to know members of sort of different gangs. And you could see some real psychological insight in there on his fellow man, but also he's a felon and he's in prison. And so I think small example, but sorting through the messiness of humanity, I think is really a key piece of the espionage game that we're seeing come in play here. Yeah, that's right. I mean, you get other people who seem to want allowances for champagne at their demands. And then there's one who's the agreed divorce wife of a German officer who says she can get more intelligence from other German officers. So you get a sense of the kind of

richness of humanity, I think, on offer here. All these scallywags. Yeah, exactly. Which Cumming has to sift through, basically, and kind of get his head around. Generally, I think in the profession, you'd say it's sort of stock and trade to think that there is some screw loose with most of the people who are coming forward with secrets. You know, if you are betraying people close to you, your country, there's just something off, you know? And I think the work here and probably why Cumming is quite adept at this is because he's got some sense of, yeah, I mean, you can see that with the giving the guy a tenor afterward. He's got some sense of how to work people, how to keep people in the flow and producing, but also vet what's, you know, frankly made up, right? I mean, that is the game. And coming is, of course, on the cusp of the First World War here, when the mission of the Secret Service is going to

grow significantly. We're also on the cusp of a very real personal tragedy for Mansfield coming, which is going to start to create this kind of mythology around him and his service, I think, that continues today. So maybe there, Gordon, we'll take a quick break and we come back, we'll dive into the First World War and the creation of MI6. Sounds good. Well, welcome back to The Rest Is Classified. We are on the cusp of the First World War, and Mansfield Cumming, who is now leading this very sort of motley crew of the British Secret Intelligence Service, is about to go to Europe with his son, Alistair. That's right. It's the start of the war. MI6 is suddenly incredibly busy building up networks to try and understand what Germany is doing, where the troops are going, what's

happening. And we mentioned Cumming's son, Alistair. Now he's now 24 as the war started. He's joined the army and then the intelligence corps. And he's in Europe, and then Cumming goes on one of his trips to Europe. So October 1914, the two of them are together, and it's 5am when they set out from army headquarters, and Cumming picks up Alistair, and it looks like they're heading to Paris together, just the two of them in a car. Not quite clear if they're on a mission together or quite what it is, but they're on a very long drive through the day. And then at nine in the evening, disaster strikes. Alistair seems to be driving. It's a Rolls Royce Cummings car and it's going at full speed. Now, either he fails to take a turn or there's a puncture at a bend and the car goes off the road and slams into a tree and overturns. And it's a terrible accident. There's actually a picture of the car, which is a mangled mess.

And Alistair is thrown out of the car while Cumming is trapped in the car, in the wreckage, pinned by the leg. And it's a terrible scene because it's described later by people that Cumming can actually hear while he's trapped his son saying he's cold and calling for help. But Cumming couldn't move to get to him. And it's just the two of them there. He hears Alistair's voice getting weaker and fainter. Now the legend is that Cumming then takes out a penknife and hacks away at his own smashed leg to free himself, goes to his son, lays a coat over his son who's now unconscious and then Cumming himself passes out and is out cold until the next morning when at about 6am the two of them are found. Now,

you know, the mythology is that Cumming amputated his own leg to get himself out of that car crash. The reality is he probably kind of cut himself free somehow, but then the next day his leg is amputated below the knee at hospital. But the tragedy is his son Alistair dies and Cumming kept a diary, which is a professional diary rather than a personal dies. And Cumming kept a diary, which is a professional diary rather than a personal diary. And he just writes in it, poor old Ali died. Now, I know-

It's a bit of a British stiff upper lip mentality there if I've ever heard one. I know, and it does sound a little bit strange to us. But I think, and a bit stiff upper lip and Victorian, which, you know, Cumming was, but it is a kind of work diary rather than a personal diary. And I think his biographer, Alan Judd, gets it right when he says, actually, the fact that he wrote that in his work diary, just those few words actually suggest quite a lot of emotion for him and for someone like him to

have done that. So it's a personal disaster. It's also quite a professional disaster because Cumming is now out of action for a few weeks at a time when the war has just started, when the military is also trying to move in on his game. So the military and the army particularly is trying to run its own intelligence networks and effectively trying to swallow up what he's doing. I suppose he's got a bit of an untested product too, right? If we take that founder sort of analogy and play it out here, he is all of a sudden now in the middle of a European land war. This is the test, right? Of whether or not his organization will fail or succeed, right?

He's got to figure out how to make it work. And so what he does is he just goes back to work. I mean, after a few weeks, it seems he's back at work trying to kind of keep that intelligence network going and to try and build it work. What he does is he just goes back to work. After a few weeks, it seems, he's back at work trying to keep that intelligence network going and to try and build it up. I think the amputation also means that the mythology then around Cummings starts to grow. Does he spread it himself or is it just- Good question. Because it seems now we know that he didn't actually hack his own leg off to get out, right?

But he was obviously horribly injured and the leg was amputated. Does he kind of work on this? I don't think he does. I think maybe he allows the mythology, though, to grow. I think he plays to it a bit. I mean, his office during the war is at the top of a turret and steep stairs at a place called Two Whitehall Court. It's now a hotel and there's not much left of the kind of atmosphere of the time. But he's got to navigate this. And one person finds him going down the flight of stairs on his backside, you know, because he can't walk. But then he gets

a scooter to go around the office and to go around London. And at first, it's one of those kind of kids scooters, you know, which you use, you know, you pedal with your foot. And then supposedly, one of his colleagues in New York sends him a motorized one from the AutoPed company of Long Island, I think. And so you just have this vision of this guy who by now also often wears a monocle, you know, scooting around London offices. To be fair though, I picture all of my London gentlemen of this era monocled. Monocle, okay. Maybe that's true. Maybe that's true. That's not fair, apparently.

He also gets this sense of just slight eccentricity around him. And he's trying to recruit people. And his early recruits are kind of, again, it's that motley crew of, one worked in the Colombian emerald mines, another one's an actor. But he's trying to find people who are kind of quirky, who are different, who've got that sense of adventure, who've maybe got a bit of human understanding. They come up to see him at the top of Whitehall Court. And this is where we get into the penknife in the leg story, because what he'll do is someone will come up to see him, a new recruit, and he'll welcome them into his office. That description we heard at the start of the episode. And the way he'll test them is he will get out a penknife.

And of course, they won't know at this point that he's got a wooden leg. So they'll think he's just got two normal legs. And he will get the penknife out and he will look them in the eye and then just thrust the penknife into his leg and not flinch at all. And he would just look to see whether they flinch or how they react. And if they wince, then he says, I'm afraid you won't do. Now, I mean, that is one way to do a job interview for people. I'm not sure it's the done way these days, even at the CIA. No, no. It's testing for a very specific personality trait, I suppose. And it also, I should say, as I've been picturing him, maybe I've gone too far with my Captain sort of Ahab vibe, because I was definitely

picturing an exposed wooden leg, like a peg leg. But you're right, it is underneath a pant, right? So, he's not- Yeah, underneath some trousers, as we say. There's some trousers. And I think it is also the case that he's dealing with a lot of ruffians, but these people that he's hiring to be intelligence officers and he's sort of stabbing the leg in front of, he also... And I think this is critical because this is embedded into the sort of DNA of the British Secret Service and frankly, CIA, is that you want really honest people to come on and work for you to sort out the scallywags. And he actually, Cumming has this great line saying, he's looking for honest people. It says, in the long run, it's only the honest

man who can defeat the ruffian. So I think we should draw this contrast of he's dealing, he's in the muck, but he's also looking for people who are credible and honest and of sound character to sort of sort through this. And I guess one way you test for sort of the bravery or the metal is by plunging a knife into your wooden leg to see what the response is, which never happened to me when I was briefing David Petraeus or Leon Panetta, appropriately. No CIA director's ever done that. I'm glad to hear it. So the other bit, though, I love about this early Secret Service is you also got, again, from him, I think, you get this love of experimenting and gadgets. There's a favorite story I've got from one person who was there at the time, which is about secret inks. David, I'm going to get you to read this story,

if that's okay. There will be revenge in later episodes. I want our listeners to understand that I will have my vengeance on Gordon for forcing me to read this. I'll get you to read it, but I also would suggest that if there are any children listening, this does contain themes of an adult nature. I think it's fair to say, as they say on TV. We should say shame on the parents for thinking that the rest is classified as appropriate entertainment for you. You're young, impressionable children. Okay, so I'm going to read this, but I don't want to. Okay, so here we go. All right, here we go. Secret inks were our stock in trade, and all were anxious to obtain some which came from a natural source of supply.

I shall never forget C's delight when the chief censor, Worthington, came one day with the announcement that one of his staff had found out that semen would not respond to iodine vapor, which is a chemical used to discover secret writing, and told the old man that he had had to remove the discoverer from the office immediately, as his colleagues were making life intolerable by accusations of masturbation. The slogan went round, every man his own stilo. We thought we had solved a great problem. Then our man in Copenhagen, Major Holm, evidently stuck it in a bottle,

for his letters stank to high heaven, and we had to tell him that a fresh operation was necessary for each letter. Beautifully read, David. Thank you. What I love about that story is the schoolboyish sense that you get of these MI6 officers. That's coming through loud and clear. It's schoolboy humor, and the jokes they're making in the office, and the slight kind of the silliness of it as they're doing this quite important secret work. And I think, you know-

We were using, we used blood at the CIA. It was far more painful. I think this is- What, for secret ink? Yeah, secret ink. Yeah, blood. If you're listening, you can see me smiling now because I've just gotten Gordon. No, we were generally, for any secret egg, bodily fluids

of any sort were frowned upon. Okay. Just to clarify, you never had to undertake these kinds of operations. I think we should just make that clear. One of the things that Foranoff described MI6 as, is a piratical crew, a bunch of pirates. You get a sense of it from that story that they're naughty. And I mean, coming himself, he carries a sword stick, a walking stick with a sword hidden within it. And you just get this sense of people who are adventurers, buccaneering, and a little bit naughty. Like when these guys were in the Navy, they were looking at the pirates and thinking,

that seems like it's more fun, maybe. So this is then the MI6 of World War I, which is actually starting to become quite effective. And you get coming building up networks. There's a famous one called La Dame Blanche, which is mainly in Belgium, which is watching German trade movements and reporting back. They've got agents now. One particularly good German engineer, codenamed TR-16, who last actually as an agent for decades is reporting on the German Navy.

They're starting to run agents into Russia after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. We heard Augustus Eger at the start, and he was one of those kind of rescuing or trying to get agents out. So you get a sense now of it turning into something more institutionalized and kind of recognizably like a secret service, you know, with the inks, with the gadget, with the danger, with the disguises. And you start to get some of the names. I mean, you know, there's a whole thing about where the name MI6 come from. That seems to come later as a cover name. Here, there's lots of different names and it's cover names, MI1C, it's called the different names and its cover name's MI1C. It's called the Special Intelligence Service, but eventually it settles down as the Secret

Intelligence Service, which is its official name. What did Cumming know it as? What did he call it? Well, he would call it, I think the Secret Service would be his normal name. And he would call himself often Chief of the Secret Service as C. And he would use C particularly so he didn't have to use his full name when he was writing things. And they had the kind of a cover address in London, Messrs. Rasson, Falcon and Co, P.O. Box 400, which were shippers and exporters. So import, export cover for people to... Perfect. Perfect. The kind of classic secret service cover again, what you think of for Bond and people refer to it as the firm.

So you get a sense of the kind of the institution and the mythology, which we now recognize all emerging, you know, at this time, you know, around the First World War in the years afterwards. I'll say that on the subject of names, I mean, when I was inside the agency, I mean, I can't think of a time where we ever referred to it as MI6. It was always the British Secret Intelligence Service, and BESIS was how we abbreviated it in all of the documents, right? We never called it MI6. No. And I mean, that is really just the colloquial name, but it's so widely used that even they use it on their kind of website and elsewhere. But yeah, Secret Intelligence Service is the true name of it. But he had really done some pretty effective knife fighting inside the bureaucracy, right, to put the place on solid footing beforehand, which I think is probably a critical piece of his success or frankly, the success of any founder or, I mean, it's actually the

case inside the American Secret Services as well after the Second World War that we've kind of been talking about him as though, of course, we've told the story and we know how it's going to turn out, but it's probably not obvious at all after the First World War that MI6 continues, right? I mean, you've got military intelligence and you've got the foreign office, like it could have been subsumed by one of these bigger, more powerful bureaucracies. That's absolutely right. And I think when you look at his legacy, one of his legacies is just that MI6 or the Secret Intelligence Service survives because there were attempts to cut the budget at the end of the First World War to slim it down. There's the kind of constant battle

with the military and the war office who are trying to swallow it up because they want all the intelligence within their world. And he plays it very well. And he plays it so that he keeps the kind of patronage of the foreign office and remains useful to them as his kind of sponsor department, which means that he survives. And I think that is definitely one of the attributes you need as a spy chief, is you need to be able to play the bureaucratic knife fight as well as play the agents in the field, don't you? And I think Cumming, we actually can see, is very adept at that. And I think it's something which probably MI6 chiefs through the following decades have also learned to do, which is,

how do you protect the budget? How do you protect your independence and your service and keep it safe. So I think coming last as the chief until 1923, and the legend is that he dies in the office, like a true chief, although the office was also his home. He obviously kind of often lived next door and he's having a farewell drink with someone who's about to leave for a mission abroad and then has a heart attack and kind of done and he keels over so he wasn't a um public school boy although he of course enjoyed many of the same naughty things that those types do when did it become because i'll be honest with you you know as we were preparing for this i was kind of thinking of course the the guy who founded MI6 would have come from Oxford or Cambridge, but he's not. In many respects, it's actually similar to the American experience where the guy who founded the OSS is

a military man. Yeah. And it is largely military men. When did they pull that in? It's really much later because the interesting reference point there is when Kim Philby joins around the time of the Second World War. And he's obviously been to Cambridge, one of the Cambridge spies as he is. And he's seen as being unusual because before then they didn't really recruit university men. And he's part of this new generation of smart university people who joins. It takes quite a while for it to change from this kind of buccaneering early days. I think what's interesting on Cumming is the legacy that he has. The place survives because of him. The name Sea lasts because of him. I mean, one of the theories, going back to James Bond where we started,

and Ian Fleming, who wrote the James Bond books, worked in naval intelligence in World War II, and he uses M for his spy chief. One of the theories is because he knew that C was the real name for it, and he was worried that if he used C, that would actually breach the Official Secrets Act by revealing the true name. So he picks a different single letter to do it. But the chief of MI6 still goes down as C. Another tradition that's interesting is green ink. Using green ink is a naval tradition, but Cumming keeps it into MI6 when he starts. And the current chief of MI6 still uses green ink. I was at an event recently where he was speaking and he was taking notes and I wasn't sitting that far

away from him. And I noticed that he was taking notes in green ink, you know, and that is still, you know, a Cumming tradition. And, you know, MI6 officers say they still get kind of, if they get a letter from him, it's signed C in green ink from the current chief. And even MI6 reports, so the intelligence that are produced are called CX, which is Cummings Exclusive is the original name of it. So it's interesting, you see these threads which continue kind of, and also the love of the gadgets. Also, I think the interesting one, perhaps, is the sense of naughtiness, that kind of piratical instinct.

Because I guess the question is, is that still there? It's an interesting question, maybe, because you sometimes talk to people who are old MI6 hands, and they will be like, well, it's not like it used to be, you know, too much health and safety, too many, you know, kind of bureaucratic form fillings now, you know, I remember one once kind of saying to me slightly longingly, we were supposed to be pirates. That's someone who lives for the kind of coming tradition, you know, and I guess the question is, is it still there? You know, how much of that still, you know, how much do you want pirates to be your spies?

I don't know. And the answer is probably there's a lot less there now than there was. I mean, there's a very similar dynamic here with the CIA where some of the dinosaurs from the early Cold War would talk about how basically the suburban spies took over. It used to be sort of more of a field operation risk-taking, and now it's kind of run from Langley, from headquarters, from sort of the safety and security of this kind of bubble. It's also maybe a little bit the story of what happens to organizations over time as you get further and further away from the founder and the personality

of the founder. And in this case, it does seem like you had a Navy man who probably looked out across horribly seasick, of course, because he left because of it, was looking out at pirate ships and thinking that that seemed like it would be more fun and that he really brought that to the DNA of the place, it seems. And we're now generations removed. Can you really continue that in a world of lawyers, I guess, Gordon? Lawyers and bureaucracy in a much bigger world. I don't know. It seems hard to maintain that. Yeah. Yeah. I think the threads of Cummings' influence are still there, but perhaps only in those things like green ink and maybe the grandfather clock, but less so in the sword sticks and the knife into the leg.

That's right. For the new recruits. So I think with that image of a Navy man plunging a knife into his leg, we should call an end to our exploration of Mansfield Cumming and the birth of MI6. We will be back next week with an episode about North Korean bank robbers and their mafioso spy services. So do tune in for that. But until then, goodbye from me, David McCloskey.

And from me, Gordon Carrera. See you next time.