Defend the Realm
The Authorized History of MI5
Introduction
The Origins of the Secret Service Bureau
The Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS orMI6) began operations in October 1909 as a single organization, the Secret Service Bureau, based in premises rented by a private detective, retired Chief Inspector Edward ‘Tricky’ Drew, at 64 Victoria Street, London SW1, opposite the Army and Navy Stores. The Bureau was staffed initially by only two officers, the fifty-year-old Commander Mansfield Cumming RN and an army captain fourteen years his junior, Vernon Kell, who met for the first time on 4 October when, according to Cumming’s diary, they ‘had a yarn over the future and agreed to work together for the success of the cause’. Cumming and Kell later parted company to become the first heads of, respectively, SIS and MI5. For several months, however, they were based in the same room, struggling, with minimal resources, ‘to deal both
with espionage in this country and with our foreign agents abroad’.
The Secret Service Bureau owed its foundation to the recomm ...
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