How Britain's first spy chief ordered Rasputin's murder (in a way that would make every man wince)



The Rolls-Royce sped along the road through the woods outside Meaux, northern France. It was October 1914, two months after the start of World War I.



Driving the car was Alastair Cumming, a 24-year-old intelligence officer.



Beside him sat his father, Mansfield Cumming, head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, who had come out to France to visit him. As well as their intelligence work, they shared a love of fast cars.



Then, in an instant, the Rolls suffered a puncture. The car veered off the road, smashed into a tree and overturned, pinning Mansfield by the leg and flinging his son out onto his head.

Destruction: Influential Russian monk Rasputin (left) was killed by agents working under Spymaster Mansfield Cumming



Hearing his son moaning, Mansfield tried to extricate himself from the wreckage and crawl over to him. Despite struggling, he couldn't free his leg.



And so, taking out his penknife, he began hacking through the tendons and bone until he had severed his lower leg and freed himself. He then crawled over to where Alastair lay and managed to spread his coat over his dying son. He was found, some time later, unconscious, by the body of his son.



This act of extraordinary bravery, sacrifice and a willingness to use whatever means necessary, however unpleasant, to achieve an end, was to become a secret service legend.



Indeed, to test the mettle of potential recruits, he would plunge a penknife or compass into his wooden leg as he interviewed them. If they flinched, he would dismiss them with a simple: 'Well, you won't do.'





'They would gather intelligence and promote Britain's interests by any means necessary, even murder.'

When Commander Mansfield Smith-Cumming received the summons from the Admiralty in 1909 to form the new 'Secret Service Bureau', he was testing sea boom defences at Southampton, having retired from active naval service because of severe sea-sickness.



Fifty years old, this short, stumpy figure - with his small, stern mouth, Mr Punch chin and an eagle eye that glared piercingly through a goldrimmed monocle - seemed at first an unlikely candidate for the job. He spoke no foreign languages and had spent the past ten years languishing in obscurity.



Yet as an extraordinary new book reveals, within a few years he had firmly established Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, spreading a network of officers and agents across the world.



They would gather intelligence and promote Britain's interests by any means necessary, even murder.



Mansfield Cumming, or 'C' as he became known - the initial with which he marked in his customary green ink any documents he had read - was initially given a modest budget and a tiny office.

Conflict: The Secret Intelligence Service conducted clandestine operations during the First World War against German and Russian figures

Nonetheless, he set about recruiting officers, including the writers Somerset Maugham and Compton Mackenzie.



His agents would sally forth in elaborate disguises, and were always armed with a swordstick - a walking stick that pulled apart to reveal a rapier.



And Cumming and his officers soon found that money and sex were usually the most effective inducements for information.



As war with Germany loomed, an agent code-named Walter Christmas watched the Germans' naval shipyards and reported on the trials of the new dreadnought battleships, the 'remarkable speed' reached by a new torpedo boat, and the continued construction of submarines.



Christmas always insisted that his reports should be collected by pretty young



'The partnership between the two oldest professions, spying and prostitution, would endure throughout the service's history.'

women, probably prostitutes paid for by the service, who would meet him in a hotel room to exchange intelligence.



The partnership between the two oldest professions, spying and prostitution, would endure throughout the service's history.



When the war broke out in August 1914, Cumming's service moved quickly to expand its network of agents across Europe and Russia.



It was imperative to know where the German troops were headed and what armaments they were developing.



Many civilians in Belgium and northern France risked their lives to provide details of enemy troop movements by watching the trains on which they travelled to the front.



One of Cumming's most successful agents was a French-Irish Jesuit priest named O'Caffrey.



In June 1915 he located two Zeppelin airships, housed in sheds near Brussels, that had days earlier dropped bombs on London, killing seven people and injuring 35.



The British wreaked their revenge, bombing and destroying the Zeppelins.



As the war dragged on, the British began to worry that Russia would withdraw from the fighting, freeing up 70 German divisions for the Western Front.



With the Tsar at the front, Russia was ruled by the Tsarina, who was in thrall to the 'holy-man' Grigori Rasputin, a promiscuous, power-crazed drunk.



It was feared that he would persuade her to make peace with Germany, her homeland.



Vladimir Lenin: One of Cumming's most dashing spies became lovers with a close female confidante of the Russian leader, a liaison which provided the service with good information

And so, in December 1916, three of Cumming's agents in Russia set out to eliminate Rasputin, in one of the most violent acts undertaken by the service to date.



One of the British agents, Oswald Rayner, together with some members of the Russian court who hated Rasputin, lured him to a palace in Petrograd with the promise of sex.



After plying him with drink, they began to torture him to reveal the truth about his links with Germany.

Whatever he told them, it was not enough. His body was discovered floating in a river.



The autopsy found that Rasputin had been violently beaten with a heavy rubber cosh and his testicles had been crushed flat. He was then shot several times, with Rayner probably firing the fatal round.



Less than a year later, the Bolsheviks took power. As Russia deliberated about continuing with the war, Cumming sent one of his experienced officers, the author Somerset Maugham, who had previously spied in Geneva, to head a mission to Russia.

'The long and the short of it,' the writer recalled, 'was that I should go to Russia and keep the Russians in the war. I was diffident of accepting the post, which seemed to demand capacities that I didn't think I possessed.



'It is not necessary for me to inform the reader that I failed in this lamentably. The new Bolshevik government agreed an armistice with Germany in mid-December 1917 and a week later began peace negotiations.'



But Cumming did not give up easily. As they deliberated about continuing with the war, he is alleged to have ordered one of his agents to assassinate Stalin, who was in favour of peace. The agent refused and was sacked. Russia pulled out of the war later that month.

Target: An agent was instructed to kill Josef Stalin during the First World War but he refused and was sacked. The plan was to eliminate the senior Communist who was in favour of making peace with Germany

One of Cumming's most dashing recruits was Paul dukes, described by a colleague as 'the answer to a spywriter's prayer . . . intelligent, courageous and good-looking'.



He became lovers with a close female confidante of Lenin, who proved a rich source of information on the Bolshevik government. Dukes also pioneered what was to become a standard trick of the trade: hiding incriminating evidence in a waterproof bag in a lavatory cistern.



He explained: 'I have seen pictures, carpets and bookshelves removed [by Bolshevik agents searching spies' home] but it never occurred to anybody to . . . thrust his hand into the water-closet cistern.'



Many of Cumming's officers were happy to indulge themselves in the line of duty.



Norman Dewhurst, who ran agents in Salonika, Greece, during the war, recalled that a favourite meeting place was the local brothel, Madame Fannie's.



'This was a very select house and the girls beautiful. Every time, it was a case of combining business with pleasure for I always came away with some useful information after my visit.'



Sometimes, however, agents overstepped the mark. One Russian agent became involved in a 'Murder League' in Sweden that used femme fatales to lure Bolsheviks to a lakeside villa renowned for orgies, before torturing and brutally murdering them.



When the agent was caught, the British swiftly washed their hands of him.



Indeed, an SIS training manual warned: 'Never confide in women...never give a photo to anyone, especially a female. Cultivate the impression that you are an ass, and have no brains.



Never get drunk . . . if you are obliged to drink heavily . . . take two large spoonfuls of olive oil beforehand; you will not get drunk but can pretend to be so.'



Cumming constantly had to fight for funds for his service. Again and again, his officers had to pay agents and expenses out of their own pockets until reimbursed, and the accounts were forensically combed over by Cumming's Paymaster, known simply as 'Pay'.



Pay seldom left the office and, according to Leslie Nicholson, the bureau chief in Prague: 'had the most exaggerated picture of the sort of life we led'.



This impression was hardly dispelled when, on one of Pay's rare visits to the field, Nicholson took him to a Prague nightclub where they were entertained by 'pretty Hungarian twins who, in unison, performed a rather sexy striptease.



Pay's monocle rose and fell with regularity as his eyebrows lifted in approval or astonishment.'





'Q invented methods of concealing reports to get them through enemy lines: in hollow keys, false bottoms of tins, the handles of baskets, on silk paper that was then sewn into the courier's clothes, in hollow teeth, and in boxes of chocolates.'

Another vital recruit of Cumming's organisation was the physicist Thomas Merton, the service's first 'Q', who shared Cumming's love of innovation.



One of his early triumphs was to create an invisible ink for writing secret reports.



Previously, agents had used semen for the purpose, which while effective, was not to everyone's liking.



Q also invented methods of concealing reports to get them through enemy lines: in hollow keys, false bottoms of tins, the handles of baskets, on silk paper that was then sewn into the courier's clothes, in hollow teeth, and in boxes of chocolates.



Swordsticks, pioneered by Cumming, also proved useful. One officer, George Hill, was attacked by two German agents in the Russian city of Mogilev during the war.



'I swung round and flourished my walking stick. As I expected, one of my assailants seized hold of it . . . I drew back the rapier-like blade with a jerk and with a forward lunge ran it through the gentleman's side.



'He gave a scream and collapsed on the pavement. His companion, seeing that I was not unarmed, took to his heels.'



In the autumn of 1916, Cumming had more than a thousand officers, with thousands more agents working for them, scattered across the world.



Although he longed to go on missions again himself - describing spying as 'capital sport' - he had become too important to risk. Nonetheless his shadowy presence permeated the service.



'The initial of C was invoked to justify everything,' noted one of his officers, the writer Compton Mackenzie. 'But who C was, and where C was, and what C was, and why C was, we were not told.'



By the end of the war, despite some failures, Cumming's fledgling service had scored some notable triumphs.



Two officers infiltrated and prevented an anarchist plot to kill a number of Allied leaders, including the British War Secretary, Lord Kitchener; the Foreign Secretary; the King of Italy and the French president.



And another of Cumming's men in America smashed a German spy ring that used Irish dockworkers to plant bombs in the holds of ships carrying vital munitions to Britain.



It was dangerous work: the body of a fellow agent who had been watching shipments was washed up in the New York docks riddled with bullets.



Cumming died in 1923, just months before he was due to retire. His spirit lives on, however, not only in the use of his trademark green ink throughout the service, and the habit of referring to its chief as 'C', which endures today, but in the ethos with which he imbued the service he built.



Its work is still carried out in strictest secrecy, the heroic deeds of its members left unsung and unrecorded.



A fitting tribute to a man for whom no sacrifice was too great and no pain too unendurable, so along as it served the greater good.



SIX: A History Of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, by Michael Smith (Dialogue, £19.99). To order a copy at £18 (p&p free), call 0845 155 0720.