Mansfield Smith-Cumming

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Sir George Mansfield Smith-Cumming , KCMG , CB (* 1. April 1859 in British India ; † 14. June 1923 in London ) was a British naval officer and the first director of that authority today, the British foreign intelligence service Secret Intelligence Service , better known as MI6 , is.

Life

Smith was born into a middle-class British family in 1859. After school he attended the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth and, after graduating in 1878, served in the rank of sub-lieutenant aboard the central battery ship HMS Bellerophon . After seven years of service on board, however , his chronic seasickness became so unbearable that he was transferred to Naval Intelligence. In 1889 he married the wealthy heiress Leslie Marian Cumming and adopted her name as a middle name. In 1914, Smith-Cumming lost his left leg in a car accident in France ; his son was killed in the process. He died in 1923 at the age of 64.

Intelligence career

In 1898 he began his service with the foreign department of the Naval Intelligence Division ; He went on missions in East Germany and the Balkans , where he pretended to be a wealthy German businessman, even though he didn't speak a word of German. Through his successful work as an agent, he became one of two heads of the newly founded Secret Service Bureau in 1909 . Smith-Cumming personally took over the foreign department, while the department headed by Vernon Kell , Secret Intelligence Bureau (SIB), was supposed to look especially for German spies in its own country. Two years later, the services were reorganized to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), whose international director Smith-Cumming was.

In the years before the First World War , the SIS had to contend with a small budget; Nevertheless, Smith-Cumming and his agents managed to arrest a number of spies and traitors and to develop the secret service into an efficient weapon of war. After the war ended, the domestic department was renamed Security Service or MI5 . The SIS, which soon became known as MI6 , was operated by Smith-Cumming until his death in 1923.

"C"

During his years as head of MI6, Smith-Cumming came to be known as C because he had a habit of marking documents and reports he read with this initial. Since that time, all leaders of the SIS are internally C respectively. Vernon Kell, the first head of MI5, and his successors proceeded identical to the initial K . This is where the historical templates for the figure M from the James Bond novels lie .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Personal entry Sir Mansfield George Smith-Cumming in The Peerage
personal data
SURNAME Smith-Cumming, Mansfield
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Smith-Cumming, Sir George Mansfield (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British officer and first director of the Secret Intelligence Service
DATE OF BIRTH April 1, 1859
PLACE OF BIRTH British India
DATE OF DEATH June 14, 1923
Place of death London