Still in the shadows, MI6's invisible man, A review by Craig Brown of: THE QUEST FOR 'C' By Alan Judd Were you to die tomorrow, how much information about yourself would you have left behind? We have grown so used to reading the day-to-day detail of 20th Century lives - politicians, pop stars, novelists, crooks - that we now take it for granted there is enough evidence for any life to be reconstructed in print. Fresh biographies of the Bloomsbury Group are still merrily rolling off the presses, detailing the tinkle of their every teacup, and jokes about printing their laundry lists abound. (In fact, I'd love to read a book of Eminent Laundry Lists. How many pairs of pants did Virginia Woolf have? What colour and design were they? How often did she have them cleaned? These questions are at least as interesting as how long it took her to get from A to B. or what she thought of her second cousin once removed.) Yet, as Alan Judd points out in "The Quest For C - Mansfield Cumming And The Founding of The Secret Service", for most of us oblivion is the norm. 'Time's maw, indiscriminate and unassuageable, consumes virtually everything about everyone,' he writes, 'so it is in fact unusual for any person to be written or spoken of, or even known about, a century after they lived.' When the person under examination was also the founder of the Secret Service, there are even more reasons why most of the evidence of his existence should have vanished. Small wonder that, in the struggle between biographer and subject, it is the biographer who emerges defeated. Sir Mansfield Cumming set up M16. As its chief, he played a crucial role in the First World War. He died in 1923 festooned with medals and ribbons. Yet he has continued to remain absent from history, like the outline of a figure cut from a group photograph. His importance to the world of espionage - coupled with the release by MI6 of his 'secret diary' - would seem to make him the perfect subject for a biography. Yet, for all his biographer's diligence, Cumming proves as shadowy in death as ever he was in life. The Quest For C is a biography whose subject has gone missing, leaving barely a footprint. At the end of it, we still don't know many basic facts. Why was this fairly undistinguished flag-lieutenant suddenly asked to set up the Secret Intelligence Service? Where and when did he meet his first wife? How did he react to her death? Where did he meet his second wife? Where did he live during the early years of his Secret Service work? How much did he see his family, if at all? How did he react to the death of his son? We will, quite simply, never know. So what do we know of 'C'? In 1909, aged 50 and living in semi-retirement on a houseboat near Southampton, he received a letter out of the blue from the Director of Naval Intelligence saying: 'I have something good I can offer you.' At the time, fears of a German invasion were at their height with the Government compelled to deny rumours that there were 66,000 German soldiers secretly established in England, awaiting the call to arm themselves from an arsenal hidden within a quarter of a mile of Charing Cross. Mansfield Cumming agreed to take on the job of setting up a centralised network of spies abroad. For the first few months, he was hampered by not being permitted to send or receive letters or to meet anyone in his office. But he persevered, working a 12-hour day, six-and-a-half days a week, and by force of character he succeeded. By halfway through the First World War he had more than 1,000 agents, spread all over the world. In the early days, he would go on spy-recruiting expeditions armed with wads of money (spies were then more mercenary and less ideological than they were later to become), often in disguise. 'Had on a rather peculiar costume,' he confides to his diary at one point - but then, typically and exasperatingly, fails to mention what the costume was. The 'secret diary' trumpeted by the book's publisher is, in fact, a bit of a dead duck. It is a desk-diary, written sporadically to remind Cumming of operational details, concealing the names and positions of those he meets in his professional life and offering virtually no details at all about his private life. His son, for instance, is mentioned only twice, once when he goes to war ('Alastair left for the front') and once when he dies in a car accident ('Poor old Ally died'). In fact, Alastair's death must have been central to Cumming's life, and Judd is surely right to suggest that the brevity of the references is testament to a strength of feeling rather than its lack. Cumming and his son were driving together in France in 1914 when their car crashed into a tree. Cumming was trapped beneath the car, his leg partially severed. Hearing Alastair moaning, he freed himself by taking out a penknife and cutting off his own leg. Alas, he found his son already dead. For the rest of his life, Cumming was to sport a wooden leg ('less a disablement than an affirmation of character', writes Judd). When interviewing candidates, he used to take out a sharp paperknife and jab it into his leg up to the hilt, rejecting the applicant if he winced. Exciting stuff - but these tales of the accident and the wooden leg take up only two or three pages out of 500. Most of Cumming's life is lost to oblivion. Judd is a writer of integrity so he has not papered over the cracks with a pasty mixture of conjecture and invention, as many biographers would have. Instead, he has done an admirable job of reconstructing what he can. But with such scant information about its subject, the book is barely a biography at all, more a slow trudge through one misty intelligence operation after another. What little of Cumming that emerges is decent, hardworking and surprisingly jolly, but how much of this, too, was a disguise? None of his close friends or family left their impressions of him, so the real Cumming is lost to us, his character insufficiently outlined even to amount to an enigma. In fact, The Quest For C is probably best read not as a biography at all, but as a specialist book for spy buffs, ideal for those who love reading about how L met Q to tell him that P. thought that J was seeing Z in X, just so long as they don't care who on earth these people may be. If I had to choose a typical sentence from the book, it would be this: 'Cumming's operations in Switzerland were complicated, and even with the help of the Swiss summary it is still not possible to say precisely who did what for whom and when.' The Quest For C becomes truly interesting whenever Judd abandons his increasingly fruitless quest and wanders down a side-track: the history of pigeons in warfare, for instance, or the use of semen in invisible ink. Judd is himself a shadowy figure in many ways more mysterious than his subject. His real name has never been published, but it is known that he was a soldier in Northern Ireland and that he worked for the Foreign Office, possibly for the intelligence services. 'The truthful feel of these stories,' he writes at one point of Somerset Maugham's "The Ashenden Papers", 'would be immediately recognisable to anyone who has spent time in a foreign country pretending to do one thing while actually doing another.' Such asides inevitably make one sit up, and lend authority to his insights into the nature of spying, among them his assessment of Cumming's legacy to MI6 as 'an ethical inheritance that, in a world popularly supposed to be one of ruthless double-crossing, manifests itself in loyalty, decency and a sense of purpose, as well as laughter in the corridors.' Certainly, laughter and loyalty are in short supply in Le Carr�. I suspect there is another book to be written by Judd on the Secret Service, a novel unrestrained by the straitjacket of available fact. Judd dedicates The Quest For C 'to all who have served and remained silent'. Sir Mansfield Cumming was obviously just such a man. Sadly, this book proves that though discretion may be the better part of valour, it is the worst part of biography.
