Remember the code name of James Bond's boss? It's M , a letter that Ian Fleming, the author of the 007 novels, did not use at random.
It was the initial of the name of a real character, Captain Sir Mansfield George Smith Cumming , whom he honored as the first director of the British secret services.
In fact, the prestige achieved by Cumming led him to appear in other works of fiction, such as the television series Reilly, ace of spies (which TVE broadcast in 1983) or the books by John Le Carré (where he is identified by the nickname Control).
Cumming's life was really interesting, typical of his profession. Born in 1859, he was the son of a soldier, but since his grandfather ran the famous East India Company, he probably bequeathed him a love of the sea, so young Mansfield joined the Royal Navy , training as a midshipman at the Britannia Royal Naval College , the same prestigious Dartmouth academy where Kings George V and George VI would also study, among other illustrious personalities.
Mansfield graduated in 1878 with the rank of second lieutenant and was posted to HMS Bellerophon , an ironclad (a type of armored steamer) in which he served seven years, first in Malaysia fighting piracy and then in Egypt. But, despite all that time, the young officer could never escape the strong dizziness of life on board and ended up being retired from active service in 1885 .
Still in the Navy, he began working on land, building coastal and river defense systems, while also founding a family through his marriage in 1889 to the wealthy Leslie Marian Valiant-Cumming , who was the one who gave this last surname to what until then was only the simple Mansfield George Smith.
He also performed several missions as a naval intelligence agent around Germany and the Balkans, posing as a German businessman. But the truly interesting part of his story came in the 20th century, in 1911, when the tension with Germany was increasing and a kind of paranoia began to be created with the idea that all the Germans who lived on British soil were spies in the service of the Kaiser.
That year, Cumming joined the SIB (Secret Intelligence Bureau), an organization created two years earlier by merging other security services; Vernon Kell was in charge of the Home Section , national security office, while he remained as head of the Foreign Section , that is, the agency that acted abroad .
As such, he used to abbreviate the signing of reports and orders with the letter C of his last name (of his new last name, taking into account that it was actually his wife's) and that custom was imitated by his successors, making it a tradition, as we mentioned at the beginning regarding M and Control, along with using green ink.
In any case, Cumming was forging a legend at the head of that service from the moment when, visiting France in 1914 before the imminence of the outbreak of war, he suffered a very serious automobile accident in which his own son Alastair died and he was trapped in the mass of iron:he broke his legs and they had to amputate one, but the hoax spread that the operation was done himself with the pen of him before the delay of help.
Since then he has fueled the rumors, partly out of strategy and partly because it seems that he was quite sly.
Finally came the First World War. In its course, Cumming discovered and arrestedtwenty-two German spies on English soil, of which half were executed.
During the conflict, the secret services were once again reorganized so that the Home Section led by Kell became MI5 while the Foreign Section became MI6 , devoting the first to security issues and the second to intelligence.
Although the budget was limited, Cumming enlisted the collaboration of some particularly famous agents:except for William Sommerset Maugham , who did not really achieve fame as a spy but as a writer (he is the author of Al filo de la navaja ), the most important man of his was Sidney George Reilly , the same one played by actor Sam Neill in the aforementioned television series, probably one of the sources of inspiration for Fleming's Bond.
There is little certainty about Reilly's biography and it would require an exclusive article, but we can note that, although many dubious adventures are told about him, at the beginning of the war he was in North America as the owner of a business selling arms to Germany and Russia.; when the ban forced him to close it, Cumming signed him to his team.
Or rather, he re-signed him, since he had already worked before for the British Empire, ending his days disappeared in the middle of the Russian Revolution after trying to support Kerensky alongside Maugham himself, who spoke Russian (when the Provisional Government fell, the spy-writer said that "perhaps if they had sent me to Russia six months earlier I might have been able to do something" ).
The other great front attended by the Foreign Section it was Ireland , who took advantage of the context to take up arms. Cumming was responsible for uncovering the dealings with the Teutons made by a diplomat and gentleman, Sir Roger Casement , since he was horrified by the barbarities committed by the British army in the Boer War. A Dubliner by birth, Casement entered into negotiations with the enemy to send aid for the Irish Easter Rising of 1916, but was ultimately arrested and also ended up on the scaffold , without any possibility of clemency because his epistolary also revealed that he was homosexual.
He was buried in a grave without a headstone or cross, although his remains would be repatriated in 1965. Incidentally, it is believed that Joseph Conrad, whom he knew, was inspired by his stories for The Heart of the darkness , since Casement had been in the Congo and had told him about it; Vargas Llosa quotes him in The Celt's Dream .
With the Treaty of Versailles finally signed, London still had some thorny fringes to finish off. One was the Russian Civil War , in which his agent, as we saw, ended up missing. The other was the Anglo-Irish War , declared in January 1919 by the aireacht (Irish Prime Minister) Cathal Brugha representing the self-appointed Dáil Éireann (Parliament or Assembly of Ireland).
Parliamentarians, with a majority from Sinn Féin, authorized the IRA (Irish Republican Army) to initiate actions against the enemy, resulting in the murder of two policemen. The English government disavowed the Irish government and an escalation of violence began based on ambushes and reprisals that would cause more than two thousand deaths between both sides until the truce of 1921 and the subsequent negotiations that at the end of that same year resulted in the Anglo-Irish Treaty by which the country was divided into two states, North and South.
Well, Cumming set up a espionage network which was called DDSB (Dublin District Special Branch) with which the lack of results obtained by the security forces should be complemented.
He had a twenty agents recruited into the army and trained specifically for that mission, later joined by sixty other MI5 native Irishmen. There was some confusion because after the First World War they had begun to reorganize MI5 , considerably reducing the entity's budget and dismantling "bases" in several countries, Cumming refusing the project to merge MI5 and MI6 into a single entity; he was of the opinion that they should act separately so as not to compromise each other.
The fact is that then the episode in Ireland surprised everyone and it was necessary to rectify it on the fly, making a fix. That's probably why mistakes were made and an organization called The Squad , originally known as the Twelve Apostles and led by Michael Collins as an IRA counterintelligence service, identified and killed fourteen of Cumming's agents in November 1920. Others made it to safety but thereafter the DDSB was withdrawn from Ireland.
Despite everything, Cumming enjoyed unquestionable prestige , as evidenced by the fact that the previous year he had been granted the orders of San Miguel and San Jorge, normally reserved for the diplomatic corps and colonial governors. And it is that this man with an affable appearance and usually cheerful attitude -when not directly joking -as when he suddenly played penknives stuck in his prosthesis to impress his interlocutors-, who nevertheless had terrible fits of anger, had literally revolutionized the services of intelligence with its organizational capacity and, above all, conceiving those typical gadgets of spy that we usually see Q invent in the Bond movies:cameras the size of a coin, microfilms hidden in hollow cigarettes, viewers for the dark...
From all this he had, apparently, a predilection for invisible inks and he hired a physicist to develop them, obtaining one based on potassium permanganate, antipyrine and sodium nitrate, although the most famous was the one that recommended improvising his agents with semen (which in the end were banned due to the strong smell they left on the paper).
His fascinating life ended on June 14, 1923 , dying suddenly at her home in Kensington just as he was preparing for his retirement. He was succeeded by Admiral Hugh Sinclair.